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ENCHANTED FARM: A Classroom Without Walls
By Jp Villanueva, Brent International School Baguio
ing experience’’ (Kolb,1984 as cited by Gross & Rutland, 2017).
Much of what I learned from my formal education I learned from within the confines of a classroom. I grew up in one of the major cities in the Philippines and the elementary and high school I went to was located at the city’s center. Most of the campus, from the playground to the classrooms, is concrete.
The challenge in teaching three International Baccalaureate (IB) courses is to find a good combination of maximizing student learning based on an extensive course content, preparing the students toward achieving assessment objectives, and motivating them to maintain their sanity until they finish their senior year. For us to have an out-of-syllabus activity, we may have to forego several hours of class time, without guarantee that the learnings from this activity can suffice what were missed.
I claim to know how to garden, but the knowledge I have are from the books I read as a child, and from teacher demonstrations. I know that the best type of soil is loam. It is darker in color, as seen in a picture from the book I borrowed from the library. Until now, I have yet to be successful in keeping a plant alive. This kind of traditional teaching approach was proven in many studies to be not the most effective. For students to fully understand or demonstrate understanding on a certain topic, concept or subject, students need to be engaged and participate in their own learning (Hackett, 2016, Winsett, et. al., 2016). The concept of experiential learning was first developed by John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and Jean Piaget through their own experiential work, but was later on developed as a unique perspective on learning and development by David Kolb in 1984 (Sternberg & Zhang, 2000). The emphasis is on the word, “experiential” highlighting the significance of experience differentiating it from other learning approaches. Learning through experience is a ‘‘process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Knowledge results from the combination of grasping and transform14 EARCOS Triannual Journal
Since I started teaching IB, I have had plans for educational/exposure trips that may provide my students opportunities for experiential learning that are related to the courses I teach, and to advocacies on agricultural development, poverty & human dignity, and social responsibility. The new syllabus of IB Business Management introduced new concepts like for-profit and not-for-profit social enterprises, and old concepts that has more emphasis such as ethics and social responsibility. I also found support from our IB/CAS coordinator where links to the CAS Program made this trip more concrete. Our students, accompanied by several of us teachers, were able to visit the Gawad Kalinga Enchanted Farm (GKEF) some 200 kilometers away from where our school is, a 6-hour trip from Baguio City last September 2017. GKEF is the main flagship project of Gawad Kalinga (GK).They transformed this wide parcel of idle land in Bulacan, a province north of the capital, where insurgents used to linger, into a thriving self-
