One of the great things about being an old fart is that we get to blow quantities of fragrant hot air about whatever we want.   So here is my first attempt to clear the room:

Last spring, I represented the Board of AEE at the opening of the Lenzate or Leadership and Challenge Center at the University of Monterrey in Mexico. (see video at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UjANXtaCGg> The Center is a wonderful facility which includes several high and low ropes courses,  a specifically designed support building with offices classrooms, equipment Center, and a wide ranging experiential program including international field courses,  adventure education and service learning.  I have never seen a facility in the US that compares.  The center is so accepted by the establishment that the opening ceremony included representatives from  about fifteen of the best known universities in the US, the Mayor of Monterrey,  numerous legislators , and business persons from Monterrey and Mexico. This is clearly an experiential education facility that  has been fully embraced by both the Mexican and the American mainstream. 

What I couldn't help asking myself is why experiential education has never achieved that level of acceptance in the US.  It is a question I and others have struggled with for a long time.  In a recent video interview Dan Garvey said “I cant' imagine that we are ever going to be embraced in main stream education because what we are essentially saying is that the dominant paradigm of educational instruction is less effective than what we are doing in experiential education, and I think we are offering an approach that is almost diametrically opposed to the orthodox consensus”. 

Dan could be right, but I cannot help thinking about a number of instances in which some pretty similar experiential approaches have achieved much greater degrees of acceptance in much shorter periods of time. These would begin with the No Child Left Inside/Children In Nature Network, which has attracted thousands of members and even passed legislation, all in less than four years.   Then there is Service Learning, which has become mainstream in about fifteen years,  and Environmental Education, which has taken maybe thirty years.  Similar cases can be made for International Education and Internships.  Like us each one of these approaches began well outside of the mainstream and unlike us, each is now fairly well on its way to being accepted as a mainstream methodology.  What accounts for the fact that experiential education seems to lag behind?

We have been told for many years that mainstream acceptance will come when we have sufficient supportive research, and we continue to expend significant resources towards that end.  In the same interview, Dan expressed doubt about this, and I must agree.  I have never felt that such decisions are that rational.  If they were, how does one explain the predominance of lecture in mainstream education, when every beginning education student is taught that it is just about the worst way to teach anything, and the existing research actually confirms this.  Certainly the economics of mass education are a significant factor here, but clearly research has not been a factor.

What is it then that accounts for the seemingly greater degree of acceptance of each of these experiential approaches, movements, or programs?   I believe that the one common factor is a compelling metaphoric title.  In each case the title metaphor creates an immediately favorable reaction, and also gives a fairly clear indication of what the program represents.  Since we previously established that decision makers in our field do not always  make decisions based on research or rationality, it would seem that an initially favorable emotional reaction might be extremely important.  Consider how many times you have been asked what the term experiential means, and how many times experiential has been confused with experimental.  I believe that this misperception, and the essentially negative connotation of experimental causes either an initial confusion or even a negative reaction, and that a more favorable initial perception to what we do would be much more likely to create “Decision-makers who value and support experiential education” as envisioned in AEE's new ends.

Our field has long known how important the emotional reaction to a well crafted metaphor is, but
Isn't it ironic that a field which prides itself on being able to frame sophisticated metaphorical therapeutic interventions has not applied the same sophisticated skill to its own most important metaphor.   Mike Gass said “A metaphor posses value when:

it is able to interpret the right experience
in a manner that provides the right picture
that produces the right words
that have deep meaning
for that particular person”

I submit that “Experiential education fails on every specification.


Experiential education” does have what might be called a large installed base of people who over time have come to understand its meaning, and for this reason it would not make sense to completely abandon the use of the term.  So I have struggled with the need for change and the simultaneous need for continuity.  So how might we replace an ineffective metaphor with one that passes the tests.

 I may have a solution.  I suggest that we follow the lead of our Mexican colleagues, and adopt  the terms “leadership” and “challenge”as our lead marketing metaphors.  It  seems to me that these terms pass Mike's test.  We might accomplish this by creating an Institute for Leadership and Challenge. (ILC)”  within AEE.  The institute could house all future outreach activities of the Association.  I believe that this would finally give us the compelling and instantly recognizable brand/metaphor while at the same time maintaining continuity with the original AEE brand.  The Institute would  become the marketing arm of the Association.  Using the terms leadership and challenge would give us two powerful positive metaphors that would finally provide us with an effective way both to market and seek funding for Association activities.

Regards,

Tom Lindblade
Rockford, Illinois