Whoop, we have been successful with a Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme (PTAS) funding bid for 2025.

Title: Experiencing the Past: Interdisciplinary Experiential Learning through Heritage-Based Workshops

As work progresses on the Curriculum Transformation Project at Edinburgh University, which will make major interventions in many traditional degree programmes, many key challenges and new modes of teaching have yet to be trialled and explored with students, such as experiential learning. This PTAS project aims to better understand the challenges and opportunities of delivering experiential education by running four experiential-learning workshops for students across several complimentary disciplines.

Project aims:

The central aim of this project is to better understand the opportunities and challenges of delivering authentic, interdisciplinary, experiential education. Several research questions will be explored, based on five key themes:

1. Engagement: How do we bring learning to life, and what can we learn by doing that cannot be taught in the traditional classroom? How does interdisciplinarity help with this? How might experiential learning equip students for real-world challenges in the workplace?

2. Scalability: With nearly 50,000 students, how can we make experiential learning scalable? It is established that tutorials are scalable, so when we demonstrate that experiential education workshops of 20 students can also work, we will have a model for scalability.

3. Capacity: What local resources are available, and how can we utilise them? How can we best convince staff that experiential education should and can be part of their classroom practice?

4. Impact on student experience: Does experiential learning lead to positive student experiences of learning in comparison to classroom settings, e.g. enhanced concentration, improved retention of skills and information? Is there a link with student well-being in fostering these experiences?

Find out more here: https://experiencingthepast.wordpress.com/

More to come on this soon.