Our education model

Why Experiential Learning?

What is it?

Experiential learning, which takes place through direct experience outside of traditional academic settings, is now recognized as one of the most effective ways to stimulate the development and integration of new knowledge and skills as well as greater critical reflexivity creativity, and cultural awareness among participants.

How do we use it?

Through experiential learning, participants are brought outside their existing comfort zones to be challenged and engaged not only intellectually, but also physically, socially, and emotionally and sensorially. At the same time, they are empowered to take an active role in their own education by taking on accountable leadership roles and being involved as collaborative decision makers and co-teachers alongside their fellow learners.

What is the impact?

By providing ongoing opportunities for participants to engage in cross-cultural exchange and conversations across lines of diversity and difference with local actors and their fellow co-learners, experiential learning can help to build greater levels of empathy and understanding and strengthen capacities for active and compassionate listening and narrative appreciation.

Through this deeper engagement of experience, truly transformative learning is made possible, allowing participants to critically reflect on their own existing assumptions and to challenge any pre-existing perspectives and biases they may hold.

What is the long-term benefit?

As a result of engaging in this kind of deep experiential learning, participants are empowered with new knowledge and new transferable skill sets that they can carry forwards into future leadership roles in their own career development and civic engagement. Crucially, participants also become part of a society of lifelong learners and change-makers who together have emerged from their experience activated and better equipped to address complex issues of division at global and local levels.

Why Conflict-Affected Regions?

As a key component of CIEL’s experiential learning model, participants engage in immersive on-the-ground educational travel in conflict-affected regions. These contexts offer participants a singular learning opportunity where they are able to learn directly form the lived knowledge and experience of local actors and see for themselves how other societies have navigated divisive issues of conflict and polarization.

How does it work?

During their travel, participant’s existing understandings, assumptions and perceptions are challenged through the experience of hearing a broad spectrum of narratives from all sides of a conflict through direct human-to-human exchanges with politicians, community leaders, non-governmental organizations, faith leaders and academic experts as well as victims and survivors. Each day, participants are also invited into a unique learning space by experiencing the dissonance and disruption of crossing physical, psychological and cultural borders while transiting between the difficult and contested geographies of conflict spaces. Each evening, the travel cohort is given the opportunity to gather together in a space of mutual support with their guides to discuss, debate, and critically reflect on their individual experiences and process what they’ve learned together that day.

What is the impact?

Through these exchanges, participants acquire invaluable first-hand knowledge of the deep complexities of conflict as well as a direct sensorial experience of the divergent and often-difficult realities experienced by people living in the region. By engaging intellectually and empathetically with the human stories of those who have experienced the costs and consequences of conflict and polarization, participants are also offered the transformative opportunity to rethink and recalibrate their own existing identities, perspectives and preconceptions.

What is the long-term benefit?

Through this learning, participants also gain new insights into best practices gained from observing real-world successes and failures in peace-building and conflict resolution as well as the critical ability to compare and contrast these vital lessons learning with the experiences of other conflict-affected regions. They are better equipped to understand and navigate contours of difference with their own lives, having learned new models of active and empathetic listening, how to reach cooperative and mutually beneficial resolution to disputes and how to diplomatically engage in constructive conversations across difficult divides. Ultimately, through their experience in conflict-affected regions, CIEL participants emerge with the transferable skills needed to take on roles as future leaders in addressing issues of division and polarization in their own local contexts.