Bear-watching teaches valuable lesson
Like most urban adults, I had learned, all my life, to fear grizzly bears. I had been educated to the notion that bears generally and grizzlies specifically were the stuff of nightmares.
I had seen pictures, read written accounts of attacks and even seen that horrendous scene in the recent movie
The Revenant with Leonardo Di Caprio being mauled by a grizzly.
But it only took a guided trip to the end of Knight Inlet last week to teach me two things: First, grizzly attacks are probably less than five per cent of the full grizzly story as told by our extremely knowledgeable guides, and, second, experiential education probably needs to play a much bigger role in the growth and development of young folks in their understanding of their environment.
Experiential education is a philosophy and practice through which educators engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection to increase knowledge, develop skills, clarify values and develop people’s capacity to contribute to their communities.
Experiential learning is practised alongside and as an alternative to classroom lectures.
To some extent, experiential learning is self-explanatory: It is learning that is based on students being directly involved in a learning experience rather than being recipients of ready-made content.
It was in 1974, when Maurice Gibbons, now a retired professor emeritus from Simon Fraser University, wrote his groundbreaking Phi Delta Kappan article: “Walkabout, Searching for the Right Passage from Childhood and School.”
At that time, the notion of including experiential learning in the publiceducation curriculum was regarded as little more than a novel idea.
Gibbons had been inspired by Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 classic coming-of-age film, Walkabout, a story of two Sydney, Australia, children about to die from exposure in the desert-like Australian outback. They are saved by a young aboriginal on his walkabout, a six-month coming-of-age challenge of survival that was a transition to adulthood the boy had been preparing for all his life.
Gibbons devised a proposed curriculum that, while not ignoring traditional content, also included activities that had to be challenging enough to develop skills and, more importantly, provide authentic experience in several fields: adventure, creativity, service, practical survival and logical inquiry.
And that’s what the Knight Inlet bear trip brought to mind, the educational implications of both the original Walkabout film and the influence of Gibbons’ article.
The notion of experiential learning had been explored earlier in the 20th century by educational psychologists such as John Dewey, Carl Rogers and David Kolb. Kolb asserted that: “Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience,” but it was Gibbons’ Phi Delta Kappan piece that caused so many educators to reconsider the role of concrete experience over virtual learning.
I could not help but think about the folly of the newly proposed but halfbaked NDP legislation prohibiting the “trophy hunting” of grizzlies in B.C., which does not prohibit “meat hunting” by anyone with a licence to kill.
We had watched in awe as the grizzlies and their cubs simply went about daily “bear business,” eating, napping and feeding their cubs as we floated quietly past.
Watching a dozen or so bears for several hours was, within advisable limitations, an authentic educational experience of making the familiar (our urban lives and assumptions) strange and the strange (those magnificent animals) a bit more familiar.
After all, that’s how developing minds, along with our own jaded adult preconceptions, can examine assumptions and practices with fresh eyes.
Thanks to our guides, there was no attempt to attribute human characteristics to the bears. Our newly consecrated NDP cabinet ministers would do well to take that trip up Knight Inlet for a little experiential bear education themselves.
That kind of experiential learning is probably what Benjamin Franklin had in mind in the 18th century when he wrote: “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I will learn.”