John Dewey

Experiential learning is the process of making meaning from direct experience, i.e., "learning from experience".^[1]

The experience can be staged or left open. Aristotle once said, "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them".^[2]David A. Kolb helped to popularize the idea of experiential learning drawing heavily on the work of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and Jean Piaget. His work on experiential learning has contributed greatly to expanding the philosophy of experiential education.

Experiential learning is learning through reflection on doing, which is often contrasted with rote or didactic learning. Experiential learning is related to, but not synonymous with, experiential education, action learning, adventure learning, free choice learning, cooperative learning, and service learning. While there are relationships and connections between all these theories of education, importantly they are also separate terms with separate meanings.^[1]

Experience & Education is a short book written in 1938 by John Dewey, a pre-eminent educational theorist of the 20th century. It provides a concise and powerful analysis of education.^[1] In this and his other writings on education, Dewey continually emphasizes experience, experiment, purposeful learning, freedom, and other concepts of progressive education. Dewey argues that the quality of an educational experience is critical and stresses the importance of the social and interactive processes of learning.

Dewey was critical of both traditional and progressive education; that is he saw challenges within both educational approaches because they lacked a carefully developed philosophy of experience. Dewey's progressive learning theory is based on the idea that people, even young people, are not just blank slates waiting to be filled with knowledge from kinder through college. Instead, Dewey suggested that students organize fact based comprehension through meta-cognition, or by building onto prior experiences, preconceptions, and knowledge and therefore, educator's role is in creating an educative experience.

Experience and Education opens by saying that humans organize thoughts and ideas as "either-ors" and argues that this is mirrored in educational philosophy, namely in what Dewey labels as traditional vs. progressive education.^[2] Dewey conceptualizes education as being focused on bodies of information and skills that are passed from one generation to another. Dewey does not pivot traditional vs. progressive education against each other, instead, he is critical of teaching methods that are "static"^[3] and not incorporating enough experiential learning, which he notes that young learners are more accustomed to. In addition, Dewey is critical of the old structure and its organization of educational philosophy.