Think back to your most memorable learning experience. Odds
are it does not involve a pop quiz or standardized test. Nor does
it likely include even the most engaging lecture or seminar.
Instead, your mind is probably drawn to an exciting project or
an experiment that you developed for your school’s science
fair. Maybe you are thinking back to that frog you dissected to
explore basic anatomy, or even a field trip to a museum where
you had the chance to observe a work of art in person.
It is no surprise that the moments in our education we remember
most fondly are ones that involve hands-on or in-person
experiences. During experiential learning, the pedagogy rejects
the idea that students should primarily rely on the memorization
of facts disconnected from context. Instead, as psychologist
David Kolb explains, this technique creates knowledge “through
the transformation of experience.” Therefore, “knowledge
results from the combinations of grasping and transforming the
experience.”1