Benefits of Experiential Learning

Learning from experience, or simply experiential learning builds an opportunity to be involve and to execute applied learning through hands-on experience, while instantaneously understand and gather new useful information about the environment that surrounds them. With this kind of learning, students tend to express their ideas and experiences eagerly in classroom as well on different setting.

Experiential Learning invigorates schoolchildren to create useful findings and experiment with knowledge themselves, as a substitute of grasping the knowledge about different life encounters of other individual.  

And here are sensible viewpoints of three skilled educators in various fields of learning about the advantages of this approach.

Ann O. Koloski-Ostrow, Associate Professor of Classical Studies: "Experiential learning for me means bringing the students into the everyday lives of people who lived and died 2,500 years ago in the world of ancient Greece and Rome. Our collection of 800 ancient objects in the Classical Studies Artifact Research Center makes it possible for students actually to hold classical objects and try to feel what it would have been like in those days. The Romans, for example, did not just make high art, but they also had baby bottles, ordinary drinking cups, tongue depressors and a fantastic sewer system."

Scott Gravina, Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies: "Experiential Learning gives students the opportunity to take what they learn in class and apply it to real world situations. Taking their learning beyond the campus provides them with new perspectives and first-hand experience while allowing them to make personal contact with the community and give of themselves in ways they may never have thought possible. Through this practical approach to learning, students gain confidence in their own abilities, discover innovative ways to overcome obstacles and turn a class project into a life experience"

Vardit Ringvald, Professor of Hebrew and Director of the Hebrew and Arabic Languages Program: "Teaching an experiential learning course has required me to explore the issues which the students are curious about, in order to be able to mentor them better. It actually has affected my approach to my discipline. I have become more aware of the “real world” applications of teaching and learning foreign languages, and I incorporate my new understandings in my teaching and in my research."