Equine Facilitated Interactions are by their nature experiential.
There is much emotion shared online about the importance of
I am commenting here directly, as well as responding to one the conversation threads here. Experience has taught me how important it is to respect the learner’s needs, not just my own style and preference.
The idea of online courses can raise a lot of emotion and completely sympathise with this. So in context, I wanted to share my personal experience of helping the Athena Herd Foundation to create theirs.
As someone who has done this work for 15 years now, i used to have a very fixed opinion that online learning would simply not work, however…..
The key word to this as you point out is experiential. However, in the year before COVID as a professional workplace trainer (training various practices which included coaching skills) i realised that the tools available to support online delivery provided an opportunity to engage people in activity, not just discussion, or reading books, which is no way to learn anything. Learning is an action which engages the person.
I soon realised that my objection was a mindset thing, it could not be done because i believed that it could not.
When i let go of that position, i was able to see how we could create something comparable in experience for our learners. Something which enabled them to build a foundation of personal resources from which to build a practice. And i might add with some pride, this is something that has been confirmed in feedback many times since.
I would suggest it is an issue of preference. A lot of us prefer to be face to face when learning, and i get that. But having a personal preference does not make everything else impossible. We live in a tech shaped world and it is important to acknowledge that And we live in a world which is much more EDI sensitive, such sensitivity should also be open to individual learning preferences and styles, being inclusive and open to that diversity.
Effective teaching means allowing people to learn in ways that work for them. Which means hearing their needs, not telling them how to do it. If we just tell them how to do it then we are no better than mainstream education, and we know how that is failing so many young people now.