Kinesiology professor wins award for experiential education

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Henderson edited.jpg” caption=”Bob Henderson, associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology, won the Association for Experiential Education’s Michael Stratton Practitioner of the Year Award on Nov. 3. Photo courtesy of the Faculty of Social Sciences.”]In 450 BC, Confucius is reputed to have said, “Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will understand.” This proverb is an accurate reflection of Bob Henderson's approach to the practice of experiential education.

Henderson, associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology, recently won the Association for Experiential Education's (AEE) Michael Stratton Practitioner of the Year Award.

At the Awards and Recognition Ceremony in St Paul, Minnesota on Nov. 3, Henderson was presented with a plaque, $500 and a one-year paid membership to AEE.

The award “honours an experiential practitioner who works with high ethical standards to demonstrate passion, commitment and knowledge of quality standards; demonstrates that an individual practitioner can bring about significant change for impact in the lives of students, participants or clients.”

Henderson's idea to create the “Mock Classroom” is just one example of an individual practitioner doing just that. As part of Refining Directions: Undergraduate Education, Henderson and Erika Kustra of the Centre for Leadership in Learning organized eight 20-minute Mock Classroom sessions.

Created as an initiative to promote and share active participation of teaching and learning strategies for the classroom, these lively presentations were designed to be fun, informal and with more of a “show and tell” feel.

The Mock Classrooms were intentionally held in a public location on campus, bringing the activity to the attention of people who may not normally participate, including students, instructors and staff. The goal was to make the private act of teaching more public by sharing good active learning strategies in a public forum.

Held in the front lobby of Mills Memorial Library in March and April of this year, four faculty members (of which Henderson was one) from four different departments volunteered to run a Mock Classroom. Between eight and 15 people, including undergraduate and graduate students, instructors, librarians, support staff and administrators, actively participated in each session as additional people watched from the sidelines.

The impact from these sessions? Participants indicated they intended to incorporate variations of the activities into their courses the following term. The Mock Classroom concept has been passed on at meetings of Education Developers at the University of Toronto and it is also being explored as a possible model by Mick Healy, a National Teaching Fellow in England.

Henderson is dedicated to his students as individuals and to using teaching methods that help them learn. Since much of our real learning actually happens outside the classroom, he has incorporated that theory into his teaching, for example, by taking his students out of the classroom and into the woods. Additionally, Henderson teaches an Inquiry course on Environmental Education and is running an Experiential Learning Study.

A member of AEE off and on since first attending a conference in 1981, Henderson said, “Without membership to AEE, I wouldn't have connected to experiential education educators nationally or internationally quite as easily.”

The AEE produces the number one journal on experiential education in North America, is a major forum for yearly international events and supports the work of a growing experiential education community, which includes members living in the United States, Canada and approximately 28 countries in Asia, Europe, and South and Central America.