Presentation Schedule
Who Experiences Experiential Learning? Enhancing Inclusion in Experiential Education (108069)
Session Chair: David Geiringer
Tuesday, 16 June 2026 14:45
Session: Session 2
Room: Room 109 (1F)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
Experiential learning has become a major agenda in higher education over the last ten years. This paper examines who the agents of change are here: who experiences experiential learning, who benefits and what agency do students have in shaping these experiences? Experiential learning has been heavily theorised (Bhajantri et al. 2016; Jonathon and Laik 2024), but there remain multiple approaches to the design and delivery of such programmes in practice. Moreover, we continue to know very little about the (in many cases hidden) barriers to participation in experiential learning and attendant issues of inclusion. This paper draws on a recent study of inclusive experiential learning led by a multi-disciplinary team across UK universities. Our mixed-methods project generated quantitative and qualitative data through online surveys and focus-groups with a stratified sample of key stakeholders – students, educators, and partners organisations – across different geographical, socio-economic, and disciplinary contexts. Through a phenomenological analysis, we found that some barriers are currently known to educators and built into activity-design (e.g. financial concerns around travel costs and time commitment) but other more ‘cultural’ exclusions remain obscured (e.g. incompatibility with religious observation, anxieties based on ‘social capital’). Ultimately, the paper provides an evidence-led road map, relevant to educators beyond the UK context, for how universities can empower students (through practices including co-creation, flipped learning and student knowledge exchange) to play a formative role in co-designing inclusive experiential learning activities that overcome rather than reproduce educational inequalities and meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world.
Authors:
David Geiringer, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
About the Presenter(s)
Dr David Geiringer is Senior Lecturer in Public History and Heritage at Queen Mary University of London.
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