Research On Experience Learning From The Perspective Of Process Philosophy

With the development of curriculum reform, how to make students better learn becomes one of the most important studies. This curriculum reform places emphasis on how to change the way students learn. The new curriculum reform lays emphasis on the process and experience in curriculum goals, which also requires teachers to guide the student to participate in class teaching actively, act with hands-on and think independently, and also to develop students’s abilities of collecting and processing information, acquiring new knowledge, analyzing and solving problems, exchanging and cooperating with others. Experiential learning conform to this trend of the new curriculum reform and in line with the new curriculum ideas. However, tracing its source, the essence of experiential learning is very rich. Many scholars have been studying it from different angles no matter in theory or in practice.The author starts this paper with Whitehead’s process philosophy and process educational thoughts and sort it out first. Whitehead’s process philosophy covers philosophy, religion and science and many other fields, and showing strong vitality gradually. Process educational thoughts mainly includes three aspects:the process is reality, all things are closely linked and everything is generated in the process of continuous creation. In addition, according to the book The Aims Of Education, the author summarizes the four basic aspects of the process educational thoughts. That is the process education is organic, for the whole, it’s creative and it emphasize practice.Then, author expound the experiential learning theory which includes the content of learning, the meaning of experience, finally the experiential learning mentioned in Kolb’s book and it most famous experiential learning circle. Besides, the author describes the status of experiential learning through questionnaires, interviews with students and teachers, and documentary analysis of the classroom in the perspective of experiential learning implementation. Then the problems of experiential learning are presented and causes are analyzed.According to the problems discussed above, the author reconstructs the concept of experiential learning from the perspective of Whitehead’s process educational thoughts and modifies Kolb’s experiential learning circle boldly. The author maintains that experiential learning refers to a kind of multi-angled learning to foster creativity as the ultimate objective mainly based on students’experience and reflection and supplemented by the guidance of teachers. It includes five stages:arouse curiosity, concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, active experience. However, this five stages are not in static order to cycle. There are inherent association between each other. In addition, author also reconstructs the practical modes of experiential learning, which contains six steps:arouse curiosity, percept and experience, observe and reflect, discuss in groups, abstract conceptualization and practical applications.Finally, the author make a experiential learning design of a reading part in Oxford Primary English based on the reconstructed learning modes. After that, the author makes a reflection of this instructional design and an outlook to go on further study.