Final thoughts

In Higher Education the need to embrace diversity and inclusivity remains important, yet many of the capacities for learning available to students are neglected. Learning is no longer focused solely on knowledge and its transmission. In experiential learning the focus is on the design of the student learning ‘experience’: the word experience is significant because how humans experience the world has direct correspondence with how humans learn. This book argues that in order to understand how students learn, a wider body of multi-disciplinary research should be embraced. Few teachers are exposed to such disciplinary complexity in their training. With a new focus on the experience of learning, the gap between work and learning, and the gap between learning and assessment, can be collapsed: learning, as opposed to knowledge acquisition, is made visible. Learning should be also understood as connected to, embedded in, and influencing a complex lifewide and lifelong experiential ecology that consists of community, corporates, NGOs, public bodies, and governments, within a human socio-cultural, and other-than-human natural and material world.