Someone's URSA Experience 2022

Learning in today’s school systems is often one-sided. Usually, after someone passes kindergarten, play is seen as something that is distracting. It’s not used in classrooms anymore and it is almost demonized after that age. Why is that? Schools are so afraid of play and informal learning, and it’s an awful thing. Informal learning is one of the best ways that people and children retain information. This week I did research on informal and experiential learning in all ages. I found that learning through play and experiences is one of the best ways for learning, and not just in children.

As we know, children learn through their play. They learn through trying things and they learn to think creatively and interact with other people and other children. Play is extremely important for development in small children. Play is also important for adults, maybe not for learning necessarily, but for interacting socially and for relieving stress. So the question is, how can we shift learning for adults into this stress-free play? Experiential learning is by far the best answer. Experiential learning is learning through doing things. Much like children learn through playing house and chase, adults learn by doing. Some examples of experiential learning include hands-on experiments, fieldwork, research, internships, and more. (Experiential Learning Article)Experiential learning has a couple of things that it needs to accomplish to be the most useful and memorable for the people participating in it:

• Reflection, critical analysis and synthesis.
• Opportunities for students to take initiative, make decisions, and be accountable for the results.
• Opportunities for students to engage intellectually, creatively, emotionally, socially, or physically.
• A designed learning experience that includes the possibility to learn from natural consequences, mistakes, and successes.

This is what makes a successful experience for learning in adults. The most important of these are the opportunities to engage creatively and socially. Thinking back to how children play, they learn those same skills in their play. With that in mind, experiential learning is really just playing with skills that adults learn later in life such as analysis, initiative, and reflection.

What have we learned from this? Adults need play too. We need to be silly sometimes and we need to get rid of the stress that comes with daily adult life, but this doesn’t have to be swinging on a jungle gym or just purely playing. It can be through experiences. Anything that stimulates our brain to think creatively, to engage in a different way than we usually would. That is play for adults, and it is also learning for adults. We often forget that adults are just grown-up children, so maybe it’s time we find that again and start engaging with others in a new way.

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you next time.

-Chloe