Experiential Learning
entry by Julie M. Marx, Global Family Expert at Expat Valley
A pedagogical approach in which learning arises from direct engagement with experience, followed by reflection, conceptualization, and active experimentation. In internationally mobile educational contexts, the students’ lived cross-cultural experiences constitute an unusually rich and authentic substrate for experiential learning, and effective international educators leverage this asset deliberately rather than treating mobility as an educational disruption.
Comparable terms
Learning by doing (education — informal equivalent) · Reflective practice (education, professional development — emphasizes the reflection stage) · Situated learning (educational research — emphasizes the social and contextual embeddedness of learning) · Action learning (organizational development — applied equivalent in professional contexts)
Why this matters
Experiential learning turns the realities of mobile life into a resource rather than a disruption. It helps students and families make meaning from moves, not just “get through” them. It is powerful for building intercultural competence and resilience.
Cross-references
Cross-Cultural Training (Cultural Adaptation); International Mindedness (Education); Strengths-Based Learning (Education); Intercultural Competence (Cultural Adaptation); Transition Program (Education). Strengths-based learning is the pedagogical philosophy most aligned with experiential learning methodology — both position the learner’s existing experience as the primary resource for learning. Intercultural competence is the outcome that experiential learning approaches are most effectively designed to develop in internationally mobile educational contexts. Transition programs that incorporate experiential learning methodology — using the transition experience itself as a learning substrate — produce better wellbeing and social outcomes than those that treat transition as purely logistical.
Sources
Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice-Hall. The foundational text establishing the four-stage experiential learning cycle (concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, active experimentation) most widely applied in international education and intercultural training.
The application of Kolb’s model to international and intercultural education is well-established in practitioner literature. See: Kolb, A.Y. & Kolb, D.A. (2005). Learning styles and learning spaces: Enhancing experiential learning in higher education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4(2), 193–212.
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