What a Learning Experience Is
What a Learning Experience Is
The definition
- The interaction between a learner and the external conditions in the environment they can react to.
- It is not the content of a course, nor the activities the teacher performs.
How learning happens
- Through the active behaviour of the learner.
- What the learner does is what they learn, not what the teacher does.
Why it matters
- Two learners in the same class can have two different experiences.
- The learner is an active participant, reacting to features of the environment.
With clear objectives in hand, the second of Tyler’s questions arrives: what educational experiences can be provided to attain these purposes? The answer rests on getting one term exactly right. A learning experience is not what most people assume, and the whole work of selecting experiences depends on the definition.
The definition
A learning experience is the interaction between the learner and the external conditions in the environment to which the learner can react. It lives in the meeting between a person and their surroundings, not in either one alone.
Two things a learning experience is not:
- It is not the content of a course.
- It is not the activities performed by the teacher.
This is a sharp departure from everyday usage. People often say the “experience” was the lecture, or the topic, or what the teacher did. None of those is the learning experience. The experience is the learner’s own interaction with the situation.
The interaction between a learner and the environment they can react to
It is not the content of the course, nor the teacher’s activities. The experience lives in the learner’s own engagement with the situation, not in the material or the teacher.
How learning actually happens
The definition follows from a claim about how learning works. Learning takes place through the active behaviour of the learner. Put as a principle: it is what the learner does that they learn, not what the teacher does. The teacher can be brilliant, but if the learner is not actively engaged, the brilliance does not become learning.
A simple example makes this concrete. Two learners can sit in the same class, with the same teacher and the same lesson, and have two completely different experiences. An interested and attentive learner is engaged with the situation and learns from it; an uninterested and inattentive learner, in the same seat, is having a different experience entirely. The external environment was identical; the learning experiences were not.
This is because a learning experience involves the interaction of the learner and their environment, which implies that the learner is an active participant. Some features of the environment attract the learner’s attention, and it is to those features that they react. The learning grows out of that reaction, which is the learner’s own.
Learning happens through the learner’s own active behaviour, not the teacher’s
A brilliant lesson does not become learning unless the learner engages. This is why the same class yields different experiences for an attentive learner and an inattentive one.
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