by Gary Green
Master’s student, University of Florida

As teachers, we are all competing with unlimited distractions to keep and hold our students’ attention. One way to accomplish this is to create a learning environment that physically, mentally, and emotionally engages the students.

Many universities are looking to employ these strategies, particularly in their journalism schools as the University of Florida is doing with the Innovation News Center or Arizona State is doing with the News21 laboratory. However, journalism isn’t the only discipline that can benefit from experiential teaching methods.

McKeachie’s Teaching Tips (Marilla Svinicki & Wilbert J. McKeachie, 2014) says that if you want students to transfer knowledge into the real world, it helps if the learning takes place in a real world environment.

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