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INTEREST IN LEARNING STYLES and their application in the classroom has skyrocketed in the past two decades. Both divergent and complementary theories abound. One concept describes visual, aural, or kinesthetic/tactile learners; another, the model of multiple intelligences, describes no fewer than seven categories of intelligence.1 Differences in learning have even been described as having generational tendencies. In his book Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (1984), David A. Kolb theorized that people develop preferences for learning in the same way they develop preferences for management, leadership, and negotiation. This article explores Kolb's research and its practical application for teachers of singing and voice-related subjects.
My interest in Kolb Learning Styles was a result of my work with the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The GTP was founded in part because a significant percentage of undergraduate lecture courses at CU are taught by graduate students, many of whom are teaching for the first time. One of the tools used in the GTP is the Videotape Consultation, which is offered to graduate assistants campus-wide as a tool to improve their teaching.2 David Kolb and Roger Fry's Theory of Experiential Learning, which was introduced in the mid-1970s and gained prominence in 1980s, was a key factor in the development of the Video Consultation program and served as a foundation for the GTP.
Kolb and Fry asserted that the heart of all learning lies in how we process experience. Kolb further refined this concept by dividing it into two separate learning activities, both of which must occur for effective learning to take place: perceiving and processing. Although the activities can be viewed separately, these two modes occur simultaneously. As Kolb describes it:
. . . there are two primary dimensions to the learning process. The first dimension represents the concrete experiencing of events at one end and abstract conceptualization at the other. The other dimension has active experimentation at one extreme and reflective observation at the other. Thus, in the process of learning one moves in varying degrees from actor to observer, from specific involvement to general analytic detachment.3
To reflect these extremes, Kolb plotted these two activities on two axes, because "the modes of active experimentation and...