Experiential
Learning
‘Experiential Learning is the process of actively engaging students in an
experience that will have real consequences. Students make discoveries and experiment with knowledge themselves instead of just learning or reading about the experiences of others. Students also reflect on their experiences thus developing new skills, new attitudes and new theories or ways of thinking.’
Krafte and Sakof
The Waldorf College programme is designed to develop an active and inspired questioning relationship to the world. The Waldorf College science tutors see the mainstream scientific perspective as characterised by mechanism, reductionism, specialisation and value defined in terms of the power to harness nature. How then does one cultivate the necessary attitudes of awe, reverence and wonder with respect to science?
The Waldorf College philosophy is illustrated by a quote of Albert Einstein, “Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.” The College seeks understanding and learning in contextual experience. This experience is guided by active practitioners for whom the phenomena under consideration are living and evolving, thus banishing the contrivances often necessitated by traditional classroom environments.
This overall contextual experience is fundamental to all aspects of the programme, of which the science programme is an element of the integrated whole. The science programme in particular focuses on methods of engaging in the world scientifically. The questions arising naturally out of students’ experience determine the actual content of study, and therefore that content is always grounded in phenomena. When contemplating these phenomena, we seek to shift the emphasis of scientific activity from product toward process, asking “How does it become,” rather than “What is it?”
‘Experiential Learning is the process of actively engaging students in an
experience that will have real consequences. Students make discoveries and experiment with knowledge themselves instead of just learning or reading about the experiences of others. Students also reflect on their experiences thus developing new skills, new attitudes and new theories or ways of thinking.’
Krafte and Sakof
The Waldorf College programme is designed to develop an active and inspired questioning relationship to the world. The Waldorf College science tutors see the mainstream scientific perspective as characterised by mechanism, reductionism, specialisation and value defined in terms of the power to harness nature. How then does one cultivate the necessary attitudes of awe, reverence and wonder with respect to science?
The Waldorf College philosophy is illustrated by a quote of Albert Einstein, “Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.” The College seeks understanding and learning in contextual experience. This experience is guided by active practitioners for whom the phenomena under consideration are living and evolving, thus banishing the contrivances often necessitated by traditional classroom environments.
This overall contextual experience is fundamental to all aspects of the programme, of which the science programme is an element of the integrated whole. The science programme in particular focuses on methods of engaging in the world scientifically. The questions arising naturally out of students’ experience determine the actual content of study, and therefore that content is always grounded in phenomena. When contemplating these phenomena, we seek to shift the emphasis of scientific activity from product toward process, asking “How does it become,” rather than “What is it?”
