By Aaliya Samuel

Aaliya is a recent high-school graduate, currently on a gap year before she starts university next year. 

Sitting in a classroom listening to the monotonous drone of a lecturer isn’t appealing to most of us. Unfortunately, that’s the image we often have in mind when it comes to learning. But, it doesn’t have to be this way. Experiential learning (also referred to as hands-on learning) takes learning away from this traditional environment and into one where students are fully immersed and practically explore topics.

One of the main benefits of experiential learning is that it helps participants to contextualise the content being taught. Learning about concepts in a classroom may seem abstract and drawing connections to real-world issues can be challenging. Framing concepts in a real-world environment provides a more meaningful, interesting, and deeper educational experience for participants. 

Skillseed’s Food for Future experiential learning course embodies this by getting our participants to actively investigate and participate in various dimensions of food cultures, examining and understanding food as an asset to sustainable community development in Northern Thailand. Participants also explore how culinary ideas and skills can be harnessed to address social needs in their respective home communities. Such experiential learning enables them to explore and experience the complexities of the topic and how it fits into our society and the world.

Food for Futures at Chiang Mai

Food for Futures at Chiang Mai

Learning content in a real-world context also helps participants to cultivate and strengthen useful life skills, such as adapting to evolving situations. Often when learning outside the classroom, we are subjected to changes in the environment which we don’t have control over. Participants will therefore need to modify plans or ideas in order to promptly adapt to their circumstances. This cultivates a more holistic education and requires participants to use a greater variety of skills such as problem solving, team work, and decision making. At Skillseed, we see our experiential learning programmes (ELPs) and training suite as complements - where we apply these skills on the ground when we work with our communities, and in turn our work with communities on the ground influences our training curriculum.

Another benefit of experiential learning is how effective it is. A study conducted in 2006 showed that the participants who participated in experiential learning were able to recall knowledge learnt a month prior without having to review it first. Another study conducted in 2011, concluded that hands-on learning results in knowledge being retained for longer periods of time in comparison to learning from demonstration. 

We all have different learning styles; experiential learning also caters to these different learning styles. Some of us are visual, auditory, while others are tactile learners. Whilst sitting in a classroom and taking notes from a lecturer may work for some, it may not be the most ideal learning environment for everyone. Experiential learning opens up opportunities for learning to take place through various modalities, which makes learning more accessible and effective for everyone.

Our training workshops at Skillseed are highly experiential in nature, where we engage visual, audio and tactile components to engage our participants. For example, as part of our Design Thinking workshop, participants use lego blocks to prototype their product or service.

Skillseed Design Thinking Workshop

Skillseed Design Thinking Workshop