Can Experiential Learning Work in the Liberal Arts?

A few years ago I worked at a university in the Middle East whose English department was going through accreditation. From what I heard, the university or the accreditors demanded that the literature and linguistics units demonstrate how experiential learning could be applied in their courses. Faculty in the liberal arts faced a real challenge.

An intruding paradigm

Experiential learning usually lives in the sciences and in professionally oriented programmes such as engineering and medicine. Bringing this 'intruding' paradigm into the unfamiliar terrain of the liberal arts was not easy. Courses that could not integrate an experiential dimension were prone to extinction, and possibly to the closure of the unit itself, whether literature, poetry or drama.

I had a broad idea of how experiential learning could be applied in translation, interpreting, business studies, engineering and medicine. Beyond my own experience in applied languages, I had worked alongside peers in my doctoral research lab who were studying those very disciplines. In educational development, that is how it works: we bring the tools and techniques, then collaborate with subject-specific experts to get the job done.

Learning beyond the fixed room

In a classroom or lecture theatre, the context is confined to a fixed space and a limited time. Beyond it, learning can come from a visit to a heritage site or museum, from immersion in a good book, or from the workplace itself. My colleagues teaching drama, poetry and literature were bewildered about how to build experiential learning into their courses, since what the university wanted was proof of the economic and social relevance of the programme.

So I made some enquiries internationally, and found a professor at a Canadian university who had published three articles on this innovative model of teaching.