There’s no substitute for experience.
Paul “Hutch” Hutchinson of Jaffrey knows that very well, and it’s what he uses to teach his organizational behavior course at Boston University’s business school.
“The key word to look at is experiential. Experiential learning,” said Hutchinson. “You are creating an experience though which the student draws the learning. The student decides what the lessons are.”
Hutchinson knows the value of outdoor and experiential learning well, he said. He originally went to school to become a history teacher, and when he started to learn about experiential learning, he instantly knew it was something that he wanted to do. He worked for charter schools, at a youth detention facilities and with at-risk youth where he was able to put his belief in experiential learning to the test.
His interest even sparked his graduate dissertation on the role of the White Mountains and New Hampshire in the early development of the summer camp, a topic he expounded upon in a recent talk at the Harris Center for Conservation’s annual meeting.
“That’s what the camp experience is all about,” said Hutchinson. “You take these kids and you immerse them in a community, and they have to learn to work as a community. They do it through arts and crafts and archery and sharing a cabin, but what they’re really learning about is how to cooperate.”
The same theory applies to the exercises he does with his students at BU. Hutchinson said he pairs up students on projects, whether it’s an urban adventure through the city of Boston, or a cooperative effort within the classroom.
“People play together the same way they work together,” said Hutchinson. “Those same group dynamics show through. Are you so excited that you’re not thinking the project through? Are you so meek that you spend all your time discussing and nothing actually gets done?”
The point, said Hutchinson, is to work through those problems and examine them afterward. “So you fail when you’re playing with a barrel of monkeys in the classroom, and not when you are presenting a project to a CEO of a company,” said Hutchinson.
And, he added, he has seen these kinds of projects result in a student’s sudden evolution – a change in their way of thinking. “I realized I could do more on a ropes course, or in a cave or on a river in one day than I could in a semester in terms of transformational experiences,” said Hutchinson. “And I saw it every day.”