To Learn is To Experience: How Our Daily Interactions with Objects, Events, the Environment, and People can be a Classroom

Testing a premise put forth by Nathan Shedroff (2001) that there is always an experience created by an object, an event, the environment, and people, this paper is a report for an experimental course at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information in Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Using experience as a form of pedagogical technique in bridging our experience to what could be learned and shared, 144 students are presented with five predetermined categories to choose from, followed by an individual assignment derived from their interpretations of Shedroff’s six dimensions of experience. The course is an attempt to add novelty to problem-based learning, which engages students in contextualized and authentic problems with realistic real-world expectations. By adding our common sensorial and cognitive experiences that we come across everyday as a catalyst for learning and discoveries, the students are also exposed to other learning outcomes — creativity, collaboration, team spirit, artistic appreciation, photography, and crafting.