Educational Value Related to Learning Through Integrated, Experiential Activities
Integrated Learning: Work that builds on students’ prior knowledge and experiences and actively engages them in rich, engaging tasks that help them achieve conceptual understanding and transferable knowledge and skills. Inquiry as a major learning strategy, thoughtfully interwoven with explicit instruction and well-scaffolded opportunities to practice and apply learning. Educative and restorative approaches to class management and discipline, so that children learn responsibility for themselves and their community.
Dewey makes the case that achieving community involved ensuring the existence of an engaged, enriching public sphere of life fit for the conduct of democracy. The ability to constitute a community meant that one had the skills and habits needed to do many specific things: articulate one's values and interests in the context of broader public interests and values; act on behalf of groups larger than one's self, one's family, and one's kinship groups; engage individuals and groups very different from one's self and holding interests very different from one's own; argue, communicate, compromise, and find common purpose with others; and, quite importantly, engage with some of these diverse others in learning more about how to achieve common interests and improve life conditions and prospects together.
Such academic studies and practice point the value of integrated experiential approaches to education and more specifically to place-based activities. Field studies, by their very nature, extend beyond the bounds of single course descriptions into citizenship.