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Quoted from Wikipedia “Learning by Doing” or “Experiential Learning”: Experiential learningis the process of making meaning from direct experience.[1] Simply put, Experiential Learning is learning from experience. 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. Staged experiential learning is often called a Dynamic Learning Experience (DLE) in certain high hazard industries. Experiential learning is most easily compared with academic learning, the process of acquiring information through the study of a subject without the necessity for direct experience. While the dimensions of experiential learning are analysis, initiative, and immersion, the dimensions of academic learning are constructive learning and reproductive learning.[9] Though both methods aim at instilling new knowledge in the learner, academic learning does so through more abstract, classroom based techniques, whereas experiential learning actively involves the learner in a concrete experience. |
The Foundation recognises that farmers in general have obtained their knowledge from experience, but also need to be educated regarding the more formal aspects of agricultural science. It is important to be able to distinguish “facts” from “fiction”, when, for example, new almost magical biological products are being offered for sale.
The Foundation hopes to make reliable information available to farmers so they can make educated decisions about what methods are the most appropriate for them. Many farmers in our region have received almost no formal education but, even so, they are much more “educated” than we are about some aspects of agriculture, in spite of our relatively high academic level. On the other hand, we have experience in industrial processing and marketing of the products, which might be useful to those farmers who are accustomed to selling their unprocessed products “at the farm gate”. We hope to combine these two ways of focussing on agricultural education: experience, and the scientific basis of agriculture and new technologies. For this reason we have called our CCC a “communication centre” rather than a “training centre”, because we will be using two-way “participatory” methods rather than “training” methods, using Appreciative Inquiry as a basis.
02/07/2013
