This past week, I submerged myself in the world of experiential learning, visiting Our Dream School and attending the 4 day training with Kaospilots. While observing students learning through projects, discussions about immersive education and especially while roaming the streets of Barcelona on an urban safari, one thought repeated in my head — formal education can imprison learning.
School taught me to be taught, setting up a clear dichotomy — school was a place to learn and the world was a place to act. I went through school, onto university and left expecting to be set with the knowledge for life. When I fell down, as I inevitably did when I faced a challenge at work, I realised I had not learnt all I needed to. So I went back to school, ignoring the lessons that were right in front of me in life. I know I am alone in this approach.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the knowledge that the world is our school, that we are our best teachers and that there are more lessons to be learnt outside of the classroom than inside. By breaking down the world into subjects, we were unprepared to continue to learn in the interdisciplinary, connected chaos that is the world. By focusing on text books as sources of information, we forgot to look at our own experiences and the outside world for knowledge. By hanging off the grades of our teacher, we lost the ability to tap into our own intuition about what is right or wrong.
At a professional level, I am keen to ensure that students who enter the innovation space I am creating at school walk into a space that sets and lands the learning that they do outside. They will engage in sessions that prepare them to form the right question and find the answers in themselves and the world around. They will spend more time learning outside of the space than they do inside.
One of the most important lesson we can teach our students is to look around them and become their own teacher, using life’s experiences as the content of their classes.
At a personal level, I am working hard to break the lessons I learnt at school and begin to teach myself new ones. I am going back to school each day by identifying the lessons I have learnt that day. Since starting in my role I have attempted to take time at the end of each work day and review, extract what I have learnt and consider how to use that lesson effectively to move forward the next day.
With the right mindset you will never stop learning, growing at the same time as acting…Or rather as a result of acting.
