Gleaning

• What it is
  • the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers fields after they have been harvested
• History
  • practiced since biblical times as an act of charity, where it was required that farmers leave the corners of their fields unharvested so those less fortunate would have something
  • a legal right for cottagers in England until the 18th Century
  • nowadays predominantly practiced by humanitarian groups
• Food Waste
  • 100 billion pounds of food are thrown away each year in the United States
  • other estimates say 20% of America’s food supply is wasted
  • amount wasted is increasing as time passes
• Why does food get left behind?
  • missed by mechanical harvesters
  • deemed to be too ugly for people to want to buy

Gleaning utilizes the following design principles: Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services, Obtain a Yield, Produce no Waste, and Integrate rather than Segregate. Obtain a Yield and Produce no Waste are intertwined because in producing no waste by gathering rejected produce, one is also obtaining a yield. The act of doing so also puts value on the entire crop, not just ones deemed sellable or missed by the machines, so gleaning is also falls under the category of Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services.

Experiential Learning

• What is it?
  • learning through experience, or literally learning by doing
  • David Kolb: “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience”
  • different from rote or didactic learning, where the learner is passive; here, the learner is actively engaged in the material
• History
  • attributed to quotes from Confucius and Socrates
  • started to gain attention around the 1970s based on the work of David A. Kolb, who was influenced by the works of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and Jean Piaget
  • can be seen in mainstream education today, such as shadowing a student or taking an internship
• Examples
  • Think Global School – traveling 4 year high school that has classes in a new country each year
  • heavily used in business education and business schools
  • most vocational education programs, or any educational program that involves extensive hands-on activity with whatever is being taught (i.e., plumbing, carpentry, pilot training, etc.)

Experiential Learning most obviously falls under the Observe and Interact design principle because that’s what it is: learning by doing, observing by interacting. It also falls under the Integrate Rather than Segregate design principle because traditional methods of learning involve learning and then doing; an example of this would be learning how to write computer code in a classroom environment, and then writing a program after you’ve learned everything. If that same concept was being taught in an experiential learning environment, the students would write the program as they learned how to write code. The two concepts of learning and doing are combined, are integrated as opposed to segregated.