Experience This¡ The Experiential Approach to Teaching Environmental Issues

Experiential education has been promoted by John Dewey and Paulo Freire since the first half of the twentieth century. Freire called the type of teaching where students are passive "banking education." In this first person account I describe my shift from teaching environmental issues in the traditional style to teaching in an experiential style. As a result of this shift, which involves no lecturing or "banking" on my part, students have rated me as a more outstanding instructor. Notes 1For basic information about John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Martin Buber, and links to their works, see The Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, 2005. www.infed.org (4/23/2005). 2State of the World has been published each year, beginning in 1984, by Worldwatch Institute (W. W. Norton & Company: New York). 3Readers who wish to see more of the questions I ask are invited to visit the website for the course, http://faculty.salisbury.edu/∼jemaloof 4After writing this article I volunteered to help rewrite the evaluation forms. All references to presentations and lecturing have been removed.