Meaning Over Information: The Anchored Experiential Meaning-Making (AEMM) Framework for Inclusive Experiential Learning

Abstract

Experiential learning is widely used and, when well designed, it raises engagement and improves outcomes. Two problems limit its value for special and inclusive education. Studies often report that an activity worked without explaining why, so the finding does not travel, and strong practice tends to stay inside the institutions that build it. Learners with disabilities are affected most by both problems, because they gain more from hands on science than from text-based science yet are the least likely to be offered it. This paper proposes the Anchored Experiential Meaning-Making (AEMM) framework, developed as a conceptual synthesis of established learning theories. A learner layer names five ordered processes, engaged immersion, enabling safety, epistemic curiosity, conceptual meaning-making, and continued commitment, with conceptual meaning-making as the pivot that separates meaning from information. Each process is required to be reachable by more than one route, which is the design rule that universal design and inclusive pedagogy impose. An institutional layer describes how a higher education institution can anchor practice and diffuse it to ordinary and special schools through a train the trainer cascade. The learner layer is operationalized as a proposed nineteen item instrument, the Experience Survey, offered for future validation with appropriate ethical approval. The framework is presented as an explanation to be tested and a blueprint to be adapted.