Professional Development: Today's Experiential Challenge

Abstract

Experiential learning has evolved through many different applications and changes over the last 50 years. Initially, John Dewey (1938), in Experience and Education, advocated creating experiences that were developmental, stimulating, and rewarding. He and other pioneers provided a foundation for injecting excitement into learning, creating a psychological focus and developing an appreciation that learning experiences have the potential to address change from a broader and deeper perspective (Walter and Marks, 1981). The evolution of experiential learning can be grouped into three waves or periods (Walter and Marks, 1985). This somewhat arbitrary wave metaphor borrowed from Toffler (1981) is helpful for understanding the development of the field of experiential learning.

Different types of learning or change have been the focus in each of these three periods. In the first period, the intellectual comprehension of complex social processes was pursued in depth. During the second wave came personal growth. The third and current emphasis seems, increasingly, to be professional development. The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, using the wave analogy and a typology of learning developed by Walter and Marks (1981), to explore the emphasis or depth of treatment of particular applications in the evolution of experiential learning to date; and second, to examine facets of professional development, which is the current emphasis.