Experiential Education: The Flood

So what is "experiential education?"

The Association for Experiential Education offers this definition:

"Experiential education is a philosophy that informs many methodologies in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills, clarify values, and develop people's capacity to contribute to their communities."

The Association also presents a list of criteria for practitioners:

"Am I an Experiential Educator? 
Experiential educators include teachers, camp counselors, corporate team builders, therapists, challenge course practitioners, environmental educators, guides, instructors, coaches, mental health professionals . . . and the list goes on.  An experiential educator is anyone who teaches through direct experience.

Experiential education is often utilized in many other disciplines:

• Non-formal education
• Place-based education
• Project-based education
• Hands-on
• Global education
• Environmental education
• Student-centered education
• Informal education
• Active learning
• Service learning
• Cooperative learning
• Expeditionary learning"

And here are the principles of experiential education detailed by the AEE:
 "The principles¹ of experiential education practice are:

• Experiential learning occurs when carefully chosen experiences are supported by reflection, critical analysis and synthesis.
• Experiences are structured to require the learner² to take initiative, make decisions and be accountable for results.
• Throughout the experiential learning process, the learner is actively engaged in posing questions, investigating, experimenting, being curious, solving problems, assuming responsibility, being creative, and constructing meaning.
• Learners are engaged intellectually, emotionally, socially, soulfully and/or physically. This involvement produces a perception that the learning task is authentic.
• The results of the learning are personal and form the basis for future experience and learning.
• Relationships are developed and nurtured: learner to self, learner to others and learner to the world at large.
• The educator³ and learner may experience success, failure, adventure, risk-taking and uncertainty, because the outcomes of experience cannot totally be predicted.
• Opportunities are nurtured for learners and educators to explore and examine their own values.
• The educator's primary roles include setting suitable experiences, posing problems, setting boundaries, supporting learners, insuring physical and emotional safety, and facilitating the learning process.
• The educator recognizes and encourages spontaneous opportunities for learning.
• Educators strive to be aware of their biases, judgments and pre-conceptions, and how these influence the learner.
• The design of the learning experience includes the possibility to learn from natural consequences, mistakes and successes."

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know where I'm going with this, right?  Here at Dodge Nature Center and at Dodge Nature Preschool we practice experiential education and I would surely say that we share those principles listed above.  Our experiences at the Preschool today, provide a great illustration of how we practice and support experiential education:

Today, we find ourselves in the midst of a flood.  The creeks here at the Nature Center are swollen and overflowing.  Each pond is much bigger than it was yesterday.  Trails and bridges are underwater and the big dock on the prairie pond has floated off its moorings and headed south.  The rain is unrelenting and it turns to sleet and snow as the temperature hovers on the brink of freezing.  By most measures, this is not a good day to be outside (even the White Egrets have stopped hunting and hunker in the woods in protest).  Most people would choose to stay inside, perhaps by a fire with a steaming cup of tea, a warm blankie and a good book.  But here at Dodge we are called to go out there and experience the flood with our students; "outside every day" is part of our mission and it is a fundamental principle of how we support experiential education.

So today, we suit up in the best gear we can find and we go out.  It is hard to get ourselves and the entire class of young experiencers ready for this experience.  No matter how much gortex you throw at a situation like today, you are going to get wet.  It is challenging to layer up and suit up.  Young bodies (and perhaps old) are happier when they are freer.  Children balk at binding and lumping and buttoning and zipping.  They must try to do it for themselves and then, if they need assistance, they must cope with an adult "doing it wrong."  Big physical and emotional challenges, and we aren't even out the door yet. 

When we are finally out the door, in the weather, there is much to enjoy:  puddles, mud, drops, drips.  Children splash water, jump in it, run through it, cast stones into it, riffle it with sticks, measure it with sticks (and legs), pour it (out of boots) and taste it.  We hike through the pleasures of puddles and rivulets and then we push on toward the drama of the flood, seeking the locations we teachers know or guess are altered nearly beyond recognition.  Hiking farther afield requires stamina and fortitude in our students.  Blowing wind, sleet, snow and wetness all conspire to stymie our progress.  Children have to cope; adults have to cope with kids trying to cope.  The weather situation is stimulating and exciting and, at first, even invigorating, but, as time passes, it also has the potential to derail our trek with discomfort.  But we see that a familiar woods is full of water and ducks are swimming around tree trunks.  This is astonishing!  Here we played just yesterday.  Now we are up to our knees in water.  The world is transformed.  

Next, we happen upon a favorite culvert, usually host to a gentle trickle of water from our Farm Pond.  But now!  Whoa!  Now we see a raging torrent!  It is so arresting, it stops the kids in their tracks and they gape at the white water now coursing and plunging, cutting a new path through the forest, making an entirely new stream.  And we find that our Troll Bridge, the one that passes over Bridge Bottom, our quaint little foot bridge, is now Huck Finn's raft.  What to do?  We decide to ferry ourselves across Bridge Bottom on this new raft.  This means a small, pretty calculated, but very exciting risk.  Kids risk a little fear and perhaps getting even more wet.  But they get to figure out how to do something entirely new.  They learn how to problem-solve.  They adapt.

Huck Finn?

Around another bend, we discover that our prairie path is underwater, too deep to traverse, and then, Wow!  Our beloved dock is nowhere to be seen!  Our year round stage for pond exploration has floated away.  This was the scene of many happy moments spent dipping for water critters, "fishing," throwing rocks, cracking ice, bird watching, picnicking, reading stories and sun bathing.  And now that special spot has floated away!  But nobody mourns,; it is too interesting to investigate, to circumnavigate the pond and finally find the dock...on the other side!  And the pond itself is bursting its banks, making a new stream, flooding an area where we climbed trees just last week.

The flood was a big, exciting experience.  It was an experience that does not translate well into a story or a movie.  You had to be there.  You had to troupe through the sleet, wade through the stream, float across the torrent and get soaked to the skin.  And then you had to come back and get out of all that soggy gear, organize it, stow it and change into an entirely new set of dry clothes.  When you are three, four or five-years-old, this transition out of the world of water and into dry clothing is another peak to summit (especially if you are a kid with sensory issues!).  Wet, slimy clothes are hard to wriggle out of and dry clothes are tough for a damp body to wriggle into.  You might have to ask for help.  You might have to wait for help.  And you might not like help!

And then we reflected on that big, exciting Spring-with-a-capital-S experience as kids answered the question:  "What did you do today?"  Here is today's List (visitors to this blog will remember that the daily List is a tenant of experiential education here at the Preschool):

Today we...

-went in water; puddles

-played in the big muddy creek

-goeded to see a big pond-- the bridge floated to the other side

-went up in the big deep thing-- when you step on the edge, it sunk a little bit

-saw the flood

-saw a white bird

-the dock floated away-- big dock floated to the other side

-saw some geese

-found some teeth

-found a little tunnel that goes underneath the road

-big tube with a little waterfall coming out of it

-got really wet!

-walking in the river was the best!

-jumped in puddles!

-saw a waterfall!

-loved getting wet feet!

-went on a hike

-saw a deer, over and over again!

-walked in mud

Floating dock

So why do we support and practice experiential education?  Read the AEE's list of principles again and then read our List. 

No dock!

Experiential education is the best, most appropriate way to support inquiry, creativity, skill acquisition and character development in children.  Land-based, experiential learning develops not only cognitive development and reflection (just look at the observations and tasks recorded, in the child's words, on that List), it also develops flexibility, collaboration, resilience and general coping skills.  Pre-frontal cortex development comes much later in life for human beings, and so parents and teachers and life itself provide the experiences that help develop the connection between those frontal lobes.  Land-based, experiential learning is likely good for all of us, even beyond childhood and the development of the connections in our brains.  After we accrue experience and acquire judgement, we adults need to remember that our brains also counsel us against risk way more than they used to.  The brains of children and adolescents do not inhibit risk-taking.  The myelin, that fatty protective coating on the nerve cells connecting the lobes of the brain, is much thinner in young people.  As we live through experiences, and develop critical thinking skills, the myelin strengthens the connectivity in our brains; we can reflect, reason, consider and also resist risk.  Experience tells adults to resist risk.  This resistance to risk becomes a habit-- one of the best there is-- and yet, if we aren't willing to walk in the rain, to risk a bit of discomfort, we might just risk missing out on some of the most interesting experiences out there.  And if we don't get out there and support those important experiences for children, how are they going to develop all those skills and all that reasoning?  Experience tells us that a bit of risk goes a very long way; experience tells us that experience is necessary!

This Earth Day, Consider Time And Space

Teachers of all stripes have small goals and big goals.  

Teachers strive to get through each day with a measure of success; usually there are a series of smaller tasks they need to move their students through, and that likely adds up to a series of benchmarks for any given day that then propel everyone forward.  We typically call this "progress" or "growth."  By whatever measure, or whatever definitions, progress and growth are hallmarks of teaching, I think-- regardless of whether you are working with the very young, the very experienced or anything in between.  Progress and growth are things that adults wish for ourselves too.  If we don't feel like we are making adequate progress or growth as we move through life, we might feel bummed out, or we might find ourselves in the midst of a midlife crisis...but young kids mostly live in the here and the now.  Progress?  That might not be a concept for kids until we give it to them.  Growth certainly is inherent in a child's actions and expressed desires.  Kids are desperate to grow up into something bigger, to get a little closer to the stratosphere that is being a "big kid," or being a "grown up."  Kids seem to have the ability to hurtle forward, through each day, making huge strides, taking huge leaps.  They sometimes seem to jump whole epochs of development.  Einstein, famously, did not speak for the first three years of life, and then, suddenly, he communicated in paragraphs.  

We adults, teachers especially, think in terms of goals.  While teaching, we lean forward to peek around the corner, to see if the kid in question is going to get where we think she should go.  Land-based learning, emergent curricula and seasonally-informed, experience-based approaches do not escape this forward lean.  A classroom can be de-centralized (most of my lit classes in grad school where), but the teacher is still there, lurking, listening, contributing, and grading!  And the teacher is some kind of authority, usually some adult with aspirations.  There is no getting around this.  At Dodge, we have mixed-age classrooms in order to temper this teacher/authority thing, this adult tendency toward the didactic.  Mixed-age classrooms allow kids to share the responsibility of instruction, of course.  The more experienced kids provide the models for behavior and action, teaching their peers what to do and how to do it.  Teaching comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but it all involves sharing knowledge and I think inherent in this is an understanding that to acquire knowledge is to be capable, to be better at doing the things you want to do.  Capability seems to mean progress.  

Kids care a lot about capability, but if life is fun enough, they care about it because it meets an immediate desire or need.  Later on in life, a kid might do a worksheet well because he desires an "A," but doing a worksheet isn't going to get him any higher in a tree, for instance.  Finding the correct foothold and having the arm strength to leverage your own weight will indeed get you up the tree, though.  If you are capable of meeting those challenges, you can make the desired progress and be higher in the tree than anyone else.  Then you can laugh like a pirate and enjoy life in the crow's nest, until your buddy figures out how to get up there too (she was watching, of course).  Kids have goals and make progress, certainly, but theirs are generally short term, here-and-now kinds of goals that serve to deepen the joy of the moment.  With enough time and enough space, pursuing joy through play together, kids travel far.  And they go farther than we adults do, and probably faster, because they are not always stumbling over their long-range goals.  Teachers, especially those charged with working in a land-based school environment, constantly have to step away from their own on-behalf-of-my-students aspirations and support joy in the moment.  I firmly believe we are in constant danger of taking ourselves too seriously; early childhood teachers (maybe teachers beyond early childhood too), especially come spring, after an entire year with their students, need to think of themselves as life guards, rather than instructors.  After at least a year in the pool, most of the kids already know how to swim, you see.

To ruminate a little more on this topic, whatever it is, I include an excerpt from an e-mail I sent out to our afternoon class last Friday:

...Amanda and I grabbed some ropes and pulleys and headed out with the goal of locating our campsite.

Well, we got to the farm and checked out the babies, then we mosied down the farm road and had to stop to play in the creek/culvert area.  We stayed there a good, long time-- longer than ever perhaps.  We stayed through the Oak Room kids playing in and around the creek with us.  We stayed so long that we then adjourned to another part of the creek and decided to sit down and eat (Amanda had a Mary Poppins bag of tricks with her today, including marshmallows, grahams and coconut).  We snacked and chatted and told funny stories and then the kids posed for even funnier photos, and this is where we started to really see the beauty of this day:

First, we were struck by how the kids functioned as a group.  When the Oak Room kids shared the creek with us, our kids continued to pursue the games they had developed, undisturbed or distracted-- knock-knock jokes through the culvert, sending objects down the swollen creek, wetting and/or cleaning found stuff in the creek.  Every single child was communicating with friends in all the ways we would like them to.  They developed games and ideas with words and gestures and there was virtually no conflict (this is unusual for preschool, of course).
...we realized that everyone in the group knows their peers really well, and we know them pretty well now too.  This familiarity has become collegiality and watching them pose for pictures—-“Make the face you most want to make”—-we saw each of these personalities distinctly, and they were so delighted to reveal who they were!  Each of the kids seemed very comfortable in their own skin at that moment, and happy to be together; this is a big lesson, for adults especially, right?  Accept the differences, and when you can, rejoice in them.  This, for me, seems to be the definition of peace, which can seem so hard to come by on this earth.

...Amanda, in her infinite wisdom, pointed out that today provided us with a big lesson in intervention, as in when to intervene and step in and be "the teacher” and when to hang back, and step out, and be “the life guard.”  What the children benefited the most from today, was interaction with each other and calculated and sparing interaction with us...we saw how capable each kid is (a good thing to see after nearly a year of growth), and also how capable they are of challenging themselves, making connections and getting what they need.  

Today we saw a panorama of “firsts” in terms of physical, social/emotional risk-taking and in terms of cognitive leaps...these were the result of kids playing with each other in a stimulating setting with very minimal hand-holding from us.  They had the TIME to play and keep developing play and interaction and they had the SPACE to do so.  Amanda and I were there to support and offer help only when needed.  Kids need time and space and here, in the spring, after many hours of experiences together, we can easily give it to them. 

Time and space, in a land-based environment, may be the most precious gifts we can offer here at Dodge. 

...At the end of the day, we asked, “Did you do anything you’ve never done before today?”  Kids had something to say about this:  “Today, I made a new friend”  “I chatted with someone for the first time."  Behind these comments are big stories about social risk-taking and the joy of reaching out to and connecting with another person.

A lot of big things happened in one small afternoon.

No doubt, time and space are the luxuries of kids playing at Dodge Nature Center.  I would hazard that everyone who works at Dodge or supports the Nature Center knows that time and space in nature are too often luxuries, and nature experiences are not the fundamental birth rights they should be.  This Earth Day, and for all time, perhaps we adults can model our children and try to afford a few more moments out there, in the present, resisting the urge to peek around the next corner...