Experience at the Heart of Education Dan Campbell shares his journey of discovering and helping define experiential education By Ashley Mains M.A. ’11 ure, the shortest distance between point A and point B is a straight line. But straight lines don’t always provide the enriching and truly enlightening moments that lead to self-discovery, a well-rounded world view, and the opportunity to make one’s passion a profession. Like many people with ties to Prescott College, early adjunct faculty member and current Board of Trustees member Dan Campbell views life, and education, as a journey where the experiences along the way suffice as standard enough to measure one’s accomplishments. Dan wandered his way from a degree in Transcendentalist literature to adventure education (as an instructor and resident naturalist for Colorado Outward Bound) to teaching field ecology at the College of Marin in California, then to opening an environmental education field school in Marin, and on to experiential education, where he helped found the Association for Experiential Education and received one of the first graduate degrees in the field. Eventually he established a career devoted to conservation. Dan has worked with The Nature Conservancy for 27 years in Belize, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Arizona, where he currently manages the Verde River Program from Prescott. Dan Campbell by B. Drummond
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“This won’t make any sense when I tell you, but by the time I got to the fourth grade I couldn’t read. My third grade teacher told my mother I was retarded,” Dan says. “It was way early in terms of the diagnostics that are available today. I was actually hyperactive and wouldn’t sit for reading about Dick and Spot jumping, but I was made to feel so insecure and so self conscious.” His mother knew better and took it upon herself to institute a reward system where for every 100 pages of assigned reading, Dan got to choose a book of his own to read. “I ended up reading all the Golden Guides on fish and birds and trees and Indians of the Southwest. They were mostly pictures. I’d polish off one and get another and then all of a sudden I realized, huh, reading is how you learn. Reading is interesting.” Still, it was only the books about real-life topics and people that interested Dan, the things with a concrete connection to the world of experience around him. By the time he got to Oberlin College, Dan began reading about learning deficits and realized that the best way for him and others like him to learn was to tie education to the person where they physically are. This realization led to jobs writing field guides for Outward Bound and several educational institutions in Colorado and California with an interest in tying academic subjects like geology and history to experiences in the outdoors. When Rick Medrick, Dan’s then boss and current Prescott College faculty member in Sustainability Education, told him about the very first Master of Education in Experiential Education program in the country that he’d helped develop, Dan jumped at the chance. “It was in this master’s degree program that I discovered experienced based learning works in everything – in anthropology and math and whatever. I met just an incredible number of people
AEE founding group. From left to right: Maria Weber (Colorado Outward Bound Secretary), John Rhoades, Tracy Leiweke, Ron Gager (back), and Rick Medrick, Boulder Colo., 1972, photo by Dan Campbell
The Connection
Transitions Spring 2012
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