Understanding contextualized learning

Anyone who works in a team will understand the social stigma associated with people whispering when they are in a
group setting. It’s often considered rude and impolite. However, when considered in another context – of say, a
hospital, or a gathering like a funeral – then whispering may be deemed acceptable.
Contextualized teaching and learning builds upon a similar concept of putting academic activities into perspective to
achieve the best teaching and learning outcomes.
So, what exactly are contextualized learning activities, and how do they impact learning outcomes?
Researchers and academics Berns, Robert G. and Erickson, Patricia M.
published a paper that defines contextualized learning as a practice that endeavors to link theoretical constructs that are
taught during learning, to practical, real-world context.
The underlying theme behind the use of contextual learning activities is simple. It recognizes that by embedding
instructions in contexts that adult learners are familiar with, learners more readily understand and assimilate those
instructions.

This realization is grounded in constructionist learning theory, which holds that people learn better when encouraged to
construct relevance between the instructions they receive, and interpretations of those instructions within the context of
their own environments.
Why use a contextual learning approach?
For any teaching and learning approach to be adopted as an acceptable pedagogy, it must demonstrate that its core
principles are in keeping with the broader body of pedagogical findings. Contextualized teaching and learning approaches
have been proven to be grounded in:
1) Pedagogical theory: Contextual learning activities are aligned with the mainstream pedagogical body of knowledge,
including Motivation Theories, Social Learning Theories, Problem-centered Learning and modern psychological and
physiological research around how human brains learn.
2) “Real world” application: Rather than teach for the abstract or theoretical world, using contextual learning strategies
helps companies prepare their employees to take on real-world challenges that their staff faces in the workplace.
3) Specificity: Because the contextual learning approach to training a workforce relies on “context”, trainers can offer
content built to deal with company-specific context in mind.
4) Speed: By focusing on the “big picture first” (more on this later), this training approach trains employees much
quicker than the traditional “crawl…toddle…walk…run” approach.
While other training approaches might also work well, the inclusion of contextual learning examples as part of corporate
training will help produce a workforce that is more adept at real-world problem solving.
Contextual learning strategies in practice
The following best practices should be considered when designing your contextualized approach to learning and training
your corporate staff:
1) Design with the most relevant approach in mind
There are a number of contextual learning strategies that you can implement, including Knowledge-based, Skills-based
and cognitive approaches. Make sure that you choose the strategy that is most appropriate to the learning you wish to
impart to your audience.
For example, while a skills-based approach might work in one context, in another it might ignore the practical application
required to effectively transfer knowledge regarding a specific learning objective.
2) Design for effectiveness
For a contextualized approach to learning to be effective, it’s not sufficient to just impart the knowledge or skills
required to achieve a learning objective. You need to design activities that also teach the procedurs, processes and
discipline on how and when to apply those skills and that knowledge in a given context.
3) Design for transference
Often, when an employee moves from one position to another (horizontally, laterally or even externally, to another
organization), they need to be able to transfer their skills, knowledge and experiences to that new environment.
A research-based publication of the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education National Research
Council found that much greater transfer of knowledge takes place when information is organized in a conceptual
framework. When that happens, learners were found to be more adept at applying what they learned to newer situations in
the workplace.
Therefore, it is important that you
design your contextualized learning activities in a way that learners are able to adapt and transfer them to newer contexts,
as opposed to relating them to just one specific context.
4) Design with social consciousness
The typical workforce today is highly multicultural, with employees coming from different ethnicities, cultural and social
backgrounds. Therefore, it is imperative that when pulling together contextualized learning activities as part of a course,
you also factor in those social “nuances”.
In some cultures, for instance, it may not be appropriate for male and female colleagues to participate in two-person
activities. As a result, learners with specific cultural backgrounds might be resistant to absorbing new information/skills
using a contextual learning approach that challenges their ingrained social norms.
In such a situation, slightly changing the makeup of the learning team, perhaps into a small group configuration (as
opposed to one male and one female), might create a better context for learning to be transferred more effectively.
5) Design iteratively
Compared to traditional approaches, contextual learning involves a slightly different approach to designing learning
activities. You need to be more iterative in designing learning content, by starting with an immediate focus on broad
contextualized learning activities that learners need to perform as part of their daily work routine first.
You can then build supporting contextual learning activities that focus on the basic skills and knowledge required to
effectively carry out those broad activities. This approach is repeated in several iterations, enabling learners to get a better
appreciation of the “big picture” first; and therefore subsequently grasp the “smaller” nuances that make up that
broader view.
6) Design for groups
The most successful contextual learning strategies are those that are designed with groups of learners in mind – as
opposed to focusing on individual learners. That’s because in the real world, learners must interact with fellow workers,
supervisors, management teams, and a host of other individuals and groups.
By designing your contextual learning activities with groups of interdependent learners in mind, you stand a better chance
that learning will mimic the real world where these individuals will subsequently interact. In designing group learning,
you’ll also leverage the power of individuals learning from other individuals – something that routinely occurs in the
workforce today.
7) Design assessments appropriately
When designing your contextualized approach to learning, you should evaluate learners based on authentic assessments ,
instead of measuring their command of remembering or blindly performing specific activities.
Jon Mueller, Professor of Psychology, defines authentic assessment as assessments where learners are required to show
their command of what they learned, by applying that knowledge and those skills to real-world tasks.
Assessing the outcomes of contextualized learning activities based on authentic assessment will ensure that transfer of
learning has actually occurred and that employees are well equipped to put the skills and knowledge learned to effective
use in their workplaces.
The takeaways
Contextualized learning is real, and it works! By including contextualized learning activities in your corporate training
initiatives, you’ll not only produce workforce-ready teams more quickly but will also ensure that your teams absorb the
information being taught more effectively.

Experiential Learning
Where Learning Comes to Life
Experiential learning at Cascades Academy is implemented at all levels of our curriculum and revolves around the central
idea of learning by doing. The central tenets of this methodology include engaging students in a cycle of (1)
activity/experience, (2) reflection, (3) conceptualization, and (4) application of desired learning outcomes. While the
classroom affords many opportunities fo students to engage in experiential education, the school also employs this
learning methodology outside the traditional classroom. Learning by doing has been a tenet of the Cascades Academy
program since the school’s inception in 2003. Cascades Academy has since put a great deal of effort into refining its
approach to experiential education. Through practice, training, research, and the addition of like-minded teachers and
administrators, the school’s vision and practice have evolved into a more conscious and thoughtful approach that has
resulted in the adoption and employment of the hybrid model shown above. At the center of this teaching technique is the
experience. These experiences must have true meaning and value for the students. Some are related to the curriculum and
others are related to the development of the individual - socially, emotionally, andor physically.
Research shows that this kind of active, experiential learning supports creativity, problem solving and a deeper
understanding that endures beyond test day. As such, many of the experiential learning opportunities support the academic
curriculum. But, just as many support other important programmatic elements such as service learning, leadership,
outdoor education, travel, or perhaps just exploring beyond one’s comfort zone. The school has adopted experiential
learning as a cornerstone of its mission and recognizes the inherent value in teaching within this model. Not every lesson
on every day employs the entire model, but the quality and depth o learning, not to mention student engagement, is clearly
enhanced by the practice.
There are many different examples of experiential education found in all of the divisions in the school. Through endeavors
such as the Outdoor Education Program, Storyline Program, Mastery Program, Legacy Project, Traveling School Program
, Service Learning Program, and in the day-to-day implementation of the academic program the commitment to
experiential education is evident

Experiential education (or "learning by doing") is the process of actively engaging students in an authentic experience that
will have benefits and consequences. Students make discoveries and experiment with knowledge themselves instead of
only hearing 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. Experiential education is related to the constructivist learning
theory.
Experiential education changes schools because it requires new roles of students, teachers, and administrators. It can
provide a different, more engaging way of treating academic content through the combination of action and reflection.
Experiential education empowers students to take responsibility for their own learning. It can also provide a process for
helping all those involved in schooling become more comfortable with the unfamiliar roles commonly proposed for
restructured schools.

While experiential education has proved itself of value in many situations, it cannot replace all forms of education.
Human beings are able to learn from others, without having to repeat every discovery on their own. Equally, applying
experiential learning without a clear understanding of the conceptual basis, for example by simply having students be
physically active without ensuring that they are cognitively processing the information has little benefit in learning. For
some types of learners, and some types of material, the active learning experience may be the optimal teaching method;
for other types of learners and other types of material, however, the more traditional academic methods still have their
place. A balance between different methodologies is needed to ensure the best learning opportunity for all.
Historical development
Experiential education is a philosophy of education that focuses on the transactive process between teacher and student
involved in direct experience with the learning environment and content. The term is mistakenly used interchangeably
with experiential learning . The Association for Experiential Education regards experiential education "as a philosophy
and methodology in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in
order to increase knowledge, develop skills and clarify values."
John Dewey was the most famous proponent of experiential education, perhaps paving the course for all future activities
in his seminal Experience and Education, first published in 1938. Dewey's fame during that period rested on relentlessly
critiquing public education and pointing out that the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained knowledge approach of modern
traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough with understanding students' actual
experiences. Experiential education differs from much traditional education in that teachers first immerse students in
action and then ask them to reflect on the experience. In traditional education, teachers set the knowledge to be learned
(including analysis and synthesis) before students. They hope students will subsequently find ways to apply the
knowledge. Dewey's work went on to influence dozens of other influential experiential education models and advocates,
including Foxfire , service learning , Kurt Hahn and Outward Bound , among others.
Paulo Freire , a Brazilian educator and the father of modern critical pedagogy, is often cited in relationship to experiential
education. Freire was largely focused on the active involvement in students in real experience, radical democracy, and the
creation of praxis among learners.
Despite the efforts of many efforts at progressive educational reform, reports by researchers such as Goodlad (1984) and
Sizer (1984) suggest that most teaching, particularly at the high school level, still involves the teacher as purveyor of
knowledge and the student as passive recipient.
Theoretical underpinnings
In Democracy and Education, John Dewey attempted to synthesize, criticize, and expand upon the democratic or proto-
democratic educational philosophies of Rousseau and Plato. He saw Rousseau as overemphasizing the individual and
Plato as overemphasizing the society in which the individual lived. For Dewey, this distinction was, by and large, a false
one; like Lev Vygotsky, he viewed the mind and its formation as communal process. Thus, the individual is only a
meaningful concept when regarded as an inextricable part of his or her society, and the society has no meaning apart from
its realization in the lives of its individual members. However, as evidenced in his later
Experience and Nature, Dewey recognizes the importance of the subjective experience of individual people in introducing
revolutionary new ideas.
As a pragmatist, Dewey felt it was vitally important that education not be the teaching of mere dead fact but that the skills
and knowledge that students learn be integrated fully into their lives as persons, citizens, and human beings. At the
Laboratory Schools that Dewey and his wife Alice ran at the University of Chicago, children learned much of their early
chemistry, physics, and biology by investigating the natural processes that went into cooking breakfast—an activity they
did in their classes. Dewey firmly held that one does not learn solely through memorization of theories and facts, but
through experience. Thus he coined the term “learning by doing.”
His ideas were quite popular but were never really integrated into the practices of American public schools, though some
of his values and terms were widespread. Progressive education (both as espoused by Dewey, and in the more popular and
inept forms of which Dewey was critical) was essentially scrapped during the Cold War , when the dominant concern in
education was creating and sustaining a scientific and technological elite for military purposes. In the post-Cold War
period, however, progressive education has reemerged in many school reform and education theory circles as a thriving
field of inquiry.
Carl Rogers made significant contributions to the field of education with his theory of experiential learning . He
maintained that all human beings have a natural desire to learn. Therefore, failure to learn is not due to the person's
inability to learn, but rather to problems with the learning situation.
Rogers defined two categories of learning: cognitive (meaningless) learning, which involves academic knowledge, such as
multiplication tables, and experiential (significant) learning, which is applied knowledge, such as how to repair a car. The
key distinction is that experiential learning addresses the needs and wants of the learner, and thus has the qualities of
personal involvement, self-initiation, self-evaluation, and long-lasting effects.
To Rogers, experiential learning is equivalent to personal development. In his view, all human beings posses the natural
propensity to learn, and it is the teacher's role to facilitate that learning by encouraging, clarifying, and organizing learning
resources, but not to impose their own view of knowledge on their students. Rogers suggested that learning is facilitated
1. when the student participates in the learning process, having control over its nature and direction
2. when learning is primarily based on confrontation with real problems, whether they be social, personal, scientific, or
practical
3. when students are required to use self-evaluation to assess their progress.
Experiential education, or "learning by doing," is the process of actively engaging students in an authentic experience that
has benefits and consequences. Students make discoveries and experiment with knowledge themselves, instead of hearing
or reading about the experiences of others. Students also reflect on their experiences, thus developing new skills,
attitudes , and ways of thinking.
Experiential education empowers students to take responsibility for their own learning. Whether teachers employ
experiential education in service learning , environmental education, or more traditional school subjects, it involves
engaging student "voice" in active roles for the purpose of learning.
The caveat in the experiential learning situation is that while the content of much of what we need to learn is desirable and
amenable to the experiential approach, there are many things that people, especially children, may not want to learn, but
are necessary in order to function fully as adults in human society. Allowing children to decide that certain "meaningless"
knowledge need not be learned, reduces the job of teachers to mere supports in their students' learning process, taking
away their role in guiding education to fulfill the larger purpose determined by society.

Experiential learning: learning by doing (2)

In fact, there are a number of different approaches or terms within this broad heading, such as experiential learning, co-
operative learning, adventure learning and apprenticeship. I will use the term ‘experiential learning’ as a broad
umbrella term to cover this wide variety of approaches to learning by doing.
3.6.1. What is experiential learning?
There are many different theorists in this area, such as John Dewey (1938) and more recently David Kolb (1984).
Simon Fraser University defines experiential learning as:
“ the strategic, active engagement of students in opportunities to learn through doing, and reflection on those activities,
which empowers them to apply their theoretical knowledge to practical endeavours in a multitude of settings inside and
outside of the classroom.”
There is a wide range of design models that aim to embed learning within real world contexts, including:
laboratory, workshop or studio work;
apprenticeship;
problem-based learning;
case-based learning;
project-based learning;
inquiry-based learning;
cooperative (work- or community-based) learning.
The focus here is on some of the main ways in which experiential learning can be designed and delivered, with particular
respect to the use of technology, and in ways that help develop the knowledge and skills needed in a digital age. (For a
more detailed analysis of experiential learning, see Moon, 2004).
3.6.2 Core design principles
Experiential learning focuses on learners reflecting on their experience of doing something, so as to gain conceptual
insight as well as practical expertise. Kolb’s experiential learning model suggest four stages in this process:
active experimentation;
concrete experience;
reflective observation;
abstract conceptualization.
Experiential learning is a major form of teaching at the University of Waterloo. Its web site lists the conditions needed to
ensure that experiential learning is effective, as identified by the Association for Experiential Education.
Ryerson University in Toronto is another institution with extensive use of experiential learning, and also has an extensive
web site on the topic, also directed at instructors. The next section examines different ways in which these principles have
been applied.
3.6.3 Experiential design models
There are many different design models for experiential learning, but they also have many features in common Today, we
take almost for granted that laboratory classes are an essential part of teaching science and engineering. Workshops and
studios are considered critical for many forms of trades training or the development of creative arts. Labs, workshops and
studios serve a number of important functions or goals, which include:
to give students hands-on experience in choosing and using common scientific, engineering or trades equipment
appropriately;
to develop motor skills in using scientific, engineering or industrial tools or creative media;
to give students an understanding of the advantages and limitations of laboratory experiments;
to enable students to see science, engineering or trade work ‘in action’;
to enable students to test hypotheses or to see how well concepts, theories, procedures actually work when tested under
laboratory conditions;
to teach students how to design and/or conduct experiments;
to enable students to design and create objects or equipment in different physical media.
An important pedagogical value of laboratory classes is that they enable students to move from the concrete (observing
phenomena) to the abstract (understanding the principles or theories that are derived from the observation of phenomena).
Another is that the laboratory introduces students to a critical cultural aspect of science and engineering, that all ideas
need to be tested in a rigorous and particular manner for them to be considered ‘true’.
One major criticism of traditional educational labs or workshops is that they are limited in the kinds of equipment and
experiences that scientists, engineers and trades people need today. As scientific, engineering and trades equipment
becomes more sophisticated and expensive, it becomes increasingly difficult to provide students in schools especially but
increasingly now in colleges and universities direct access to such equipment. Furthermore traditional teaching labs or
workshops are capital and labour intensive and hence do not scale easily, a critical disadvantage in rapidly expanding
educational opportunities.
Because laboratory work is such an accepted part of science teaching, it is worth remembering that teaching science
through laboratory work is in historical terms a fairly recent development. In the 1860s neither Oxford nor Cambridge
University were willing to teach empirical science. Thomas Huxley therefore developed a program at the Royal School of
Mines (a constituent college of what is now Imperial College, of the University of London) to teach school-teachers how
to teach science, including how to design laboratories for teaching experimental science to school children, a method that
is still the most commonly used today, both in schools and universities.
At the same time, scientific and engineering progress since the nineteenth century has resulted in other forms of scientific
testing and validation that take place outside at least the kind of ‘wet labs’ so common in schools and universities.
Examples are nuclear accelerators, nanotechnology, quantum mechanics and space exploration. Often the only way to
observe or record phenomena in such contexts is remotely or digitally. It is also important to be clear about the objectives
of lab, workshop and studio work. There may now be other, more practical, more economic, or more powerful ways of
achieving these objectives through the use of new technology, such as remote labs, simulations, and experiential learning.
These will be examined in more detail later in this book.