Once upon a time, experiential education was the pedagogy. Many high-ranking nations for education today heavily center primary education around experience and play. Once academia became established in the U.S. as the primary method of learning for young people, however, desire arose to offer alternative means for learning skills inadequately covered in memorization-based classrooms. Some of the most enduring and well-known of these experiential schools are the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and Outward Bound.
The latter has a surprisingly prestigious history. Outward Bound was founded by Lawrence Holt and Kurt Hahn in 1941, based on Hahn’s pedagogy from the Gordonstoun School. You may recognize Gordonstoun as the academy where both Prince Phillip and King Charles did their secondary education. Outward Bound’s basic pedagogy entails putting young people open to learning in a set but unfamiliar environment and tasking them with increasingly difficult problem-solving scenarios.
The Colorado Outward Bound School (COBS) was started in 1962. Physically rigorous, its program emphasizes teamwork, communication and problem-solving. COBS implements what it calls design principles: Challenge and Adventure, Supportive Environment, Learning to Lead, Success and Failure, Reflection and Transference. The school of thought demonstrates the relationship between these categories with a model it calls Domains of Thriving.
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NOLS articulates a similar vision in slightly different terms. NOLS was founded in 1965 by Paul Petzoldt, after he spent a few years as an instructor with Outward Bound. Petzoldt developed his outdoor knowledge from a mountaineering career and as leader of some of the earliest Teton guiding services. He served in the famous 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army in Italy at the end of World War II. Given Petzoldt’s roots in Wyoming, he founded NOLs there and its headquarters remain in Lander, Wyoming, though the nonprofit now runs experiential education programs on six continents.
NOLS puts more focus on outdoor leadership skills than general communication and resilience and claims subtly different learning models and principles than Outward Bound. Programs emphasize environmental education and naturalist study and assign rotational practice of explicit styles of leadership: designated, peer, self and active followership. The curriculum teaches various group decision-making styles and the pros and cons associated. Throughout the pedagogy, NOLS reiterates its Seven Pillar Leadership Skills: Expedition Behavior, Competence, Communication, Judgement and Decision-Making, Tolerance for Adversity and Uncertainty, Self-Awareness, Vision and Action.
Both Outward Bound and NOLS programs have expanded beyond offerings for adolescents to long and short courses for young adults and even professionals. Each organization offers corporate teambuilding and leadership training from as short as one day or a long weekend to an entire month. As two of the most well-known brands of experiential education, many smaller programs implement the terminology and techniques of one or both organizations.
Another common thread in experiential education pedagogy is the zones of learning theory and model. Three concentric circles represent the comfort zone, challenge zone and panic zone. In experiential ed facilitation, the idea is to empower participants to choose to challenge themselves, ideally to the furthest degree of discomfort they are willing to explore without panicking. This is based on the theory that when people are comfortable, they learn very slowly, if at all. Yet when people are overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of a situation, they are likely to freeze, panic, quit or otherwise disengage. Other psychological theories back up the notion that challenge and stimulation engage our brains and that there is a frame of optimal learning. “Flow state” is the experience of total presence in an activity; most people have felt it during creative pursuits or sports.
Experiential ed, by engaging the physical body and social and creative impulses, aims to establish an optimal setting for growth. A new environment stimulates both discomfort and curiosity. Activity, whether athletic or a skill like cooking, reading a map, or setting up a tent, offers spatial learning opportunities and space for communication and awareness of different ways of thinking. Experiential ed programs for elementary school ages through teen years aim to create a formalized and adult-facilitated learning-through-play experience. That can involve experiences of tension or fear, but is meant to build confidence and allow opportunities for practicing physical learning, decision-making and communication. Good experiential ed programs use clear terms, so young participants have a consistent way to define what they are learning and what they discover about how they learn as an individual.
The next installment of this series dives into the history of experiential ed in the Roaring Fork Valley.
This will include an overview of both in-school programs and externally-facilitated operations and the changes and evolution within those programs over the decades.