Full Program
Each day will run from approximately 8:00 AM – 5:30 PM; see program outline below for the complete day-by-day breakdown.
Step into a vibrant, living community of practice where wisdom meets new energy.
The main conference features over 40+ immersive workshops and facilitated spaces designed for experiential practitioners, educators, and leaders to actively co-create the future of learning.
These are generative, collaborative sessions where you will step out of a passive listener role. Together, we will engage in open discussions, experiment with practical frameworks, and share expertise through trial and error in a judgment-free environment.
A Day at AEE APAC 2026
- Panel Discussions
- Workshops (60/90/120min)
- Generative Discussions
- activatEE Storytelling
- Experience Booths
AEE APAC 2026 Bangkok at a Glance
SEPTEMBER 16 - 18
Pre-Conference:
Masterclasses, Technical Certifications (WFA), SEER-Asia Paper Presentation
SEPTEMBER 19 - 20
Main Conference:
40+ Workshops, Panel Discussion, Generative Discussions, activatEE Storytelling, Experience Booths
Venue
Main Conference: NIST International School
Pre-Conference: Movenpick, Bangkok
Program Highlights
PANEL DISCUSSION
Experiential Education is the Need of the Hour
Join thought leaders as they unpack this question live – real perspectives, real debate, real urgency.
Panelist
Dr. Maurie Lung
CEO of Life Adventures & Leading Adventure Therapy Expert
Panelist
d'Arcy Lunn
Founder, Teaspoons of Change
Panelist
Ai Chin Tan
Assistant Director (Student Development & Admin)
Moderator
Sherry Bagley
Executive Director, AEE
GENERATIVE DISCUSSIONS
Pick the rooms that speak to you - or follow your curiosity into something new.
Role of Coziness in Healing: Trauma-informed Facilitation
Dr. Maurie Lung
Design-Driven Experiential Game Theory: What Makes Play Purposeful?
Dr. Matthew Broda and Trevor Dunlap
Measuring Impact
Aaron Funnel
Experiential Learning for Persons with Disability and Neurodivergence
Shaloo Sharma and Sandy Sinn
From Connection to Collective Action: Building the APAC Experiential Education Ecosystem
Ping Liao Huang
Creative Community Model in Experiential Practice
Mutya Macatumpag
Integrating Experiential Learning in School Pedagogy
Shane Malone
Widening the Lens of Human Flourishing
Em Roblin
The Outdoor World through the Gender Lens
Manjul Prateeti and Kim Sacksteder
activatEE STORYTELLING
Day 1: Children & Youth | Day 2: Adults
Hear real stories from real changemakers – handpicked through a competitive audition process and mentored by AEE storytelling experts.
These storytellers will take the stage during the activatEE session at the conference. Come witness the next generation of voices in experiential education.
EXPERIENCE BOOTHS
wander, play, and connect
- Explore the experiential library
- Browse the book & tool shops
- Get hands-on at the ‘innovatEE Corner’
- Play at ‘Play with Play’
- Give & receive at ‘Make a Gift Take a Gift’
- or sit down for real conversation at the ‘Human Library’
- Musecurio, and more surprises
WORKSHOPS
40+ Workshops across 7 strands
Experiential Design, Practice & Science
Wisdom of the Past Indigenous Experiential Practices
Experiential Pedagogy for Schools
Play: Advocacy, Principles & Practice
Child Safety & Risk Management
Experiential Education for Disability & Neurodivergence
Innovation in Experiential Education
Innovation in Experiential Education
Reimagining how learning unfolds in a rapidly changing world through emerging practices and creative program design.
Shared Capacity: Transforming Slide into a Simulation of Systems Thinking and Collective Leadership
What happens when a simple card game becomes a mirror for team dynamics? Transform off-the-shelf games into powerful simulations of shared leadership.
The Hypothesis and the Noodle Shop: Leave the Classroom
Case studies aren’t enough. Venture onto Bangkok streets with five strategic questions to confront the undeniable gap between classroom theory and real-world practice.
Reflection and Debriefing on the Move: Point A to B
Tired of forced circle debriefs? Master lightweight, mobile reflection strategies that keep groups engaged while staying on the move.
Designing Scalable and Incentivized Experiential Education Pathways
How do you scale experiential learning to 50,000+ students without losing impact? Discover the field-tested model turning passive learners into accountable leaders.
Syntegrative Learning: Teaching Judgement in Complexity
4 decades of military and leadership experience distilled into one framework. Discover how to teach high-stakes, collective judgment when there is no right answer.
Leading Lasting Change through Place-Based Ecoliteracy
The ultimate antidote to student apathy and eco-anxiety. Discover the 4-stage framework that transforms your campus into a playground for transdisciplinary learning.
Redesigning Business: An Experiential Learning Lab
What is hiding inside your “Invisible Backpack”? Uncover the hidden mental baggage shaping how you define business, success, and personal value.
From Pedagogy to Pitch: Framing Your Impact for Customers and Funders
Stop pitching “fun activities” to people holding the budget. Learn the framework that translates complex pedagogical theory into irresistible stakeholder value.
Designing for Others, Growing Yourself: The Educator as Learner
What if designing learning for others is actually the ultimate tool for your own personal development? Discover how to deliberately scaffold growth for both.
Child Safety and Risk Management
How we create brave, ethical, and developmentally appropriate learning environments while honoring the inherent value of challenge.
Don't Wait (for Incidents to Occur) Learn from Everyday Programs
Stop waiting for accidents to learn. Discover how analyzing everyday program successes not just rare incidents, creates proactive, continuous safety capacities.
Building Influence as a Safety Leader
Accountable for safety, but lack the positional power to make changes? Master five executive tools to influence leaders and manage up effectively.
When Staff are the Casualty
What happens when the rescuer becomes the victim? Examine real-world staff casualty case studies and learn proven frameworks to protect your leaders.
Spot. Ask. Connect. Turning Outdoor Programs into Lifelines
Nature unmasks youth distress long before the classroom does. Learn the 3-step, non-clinical formula to spot hidden signals and confidently save a life.
ISO31031 Managing Risks Youth & School Trips
There is only one worldwide risk management standard for school trips. Are your programs actually in conformity with ISO 31031?
Understanding Judgement in the Outdoor Adventure Activity Context: From Risk Systems to Real-World Decisions
Written safety protocols look great on paper, but how do your leaders actually handle a crisis under pressure? Master true field-based judgment.
Program Accreditation with the Association for Experiential Education
Want to stack your program against the absolute gold standard? Discover the proven roadmap to achieve elite, globally recognized AEE accreditation.
Play: Advocacy, Principles & Practice
Exploring play as a powerful pathway to connection, creativity, and meaning-making across the human lifespan.
Play for Peace: Practice Peace Session
Discover how purposeful play breaks down social barriers, heals division, and builds compassionate, resilient communities across cultural boundaries in high-conflict environments.
Pedagogy of Play for Authentic Learning
Play isn’t a break from learning, it’s how deep learning begins. Discover Harvard and LEGO Foundation research to design purposeful, rigorous, play-based classrooms.
Unlocking the Power of Fun in Experiential Learning
Fun isn’t optional in education—it’s a serious pedagogical powerhouse. Discover how to stop fighting for engagement and let play drive retention.
The INTERMINGLE: Circles of Curiosity, Creativity, Care, and Connection
Carry joy, creative energy, and intentional care into the fast-paced contemporary world by turning curiosity into action and imagination into shared experience.
From Values to Action: Delivering High-Impact International Service Learning
Are your international service-learning projects actually helping, or are they just glorified voluntourism? Discover how to design for genuine community impact and completely avoid tokenism.
Experiential Design, Practice & Science
Grounding the art of facilitation in the science of learning to design intentional, research-informed experiences
Permaculture Design & Systems Thinking for Outdoor Classrooms
Turn concrete corners into vibrant food forests. Discover permaculture design ethics to transform unused campus spaces into student-led, living climate action labs.
Wet, Dry & Pridivation: A Hands-On Playbook
Every piece of trash left someone’s hand. Learn simple, high-impact strategies to bridge awareness and real-world behavior change.
What I Learned from Hornbills
What can hornbill observation teach us about human perception? Reconnect with natural systems using multi-sensory techniques that restore attention and ecological awareness.
The Experiential Practitioner's Design Deck: Designing with Intention and Constraint
Tired of running the same generic activities? Master a practical design deck framework to build intentional, highly custom experiences using smart pedagogical constraints.
Developing Ecological Intelligence Through Collaborative Mapping for Youth-Led Sustainable Citizenship
Move beyond passive environmental education. Master collaborative mapping and digital storytelling tools that empower youth to investigate and solve local ecological challenges.
Scaffolding an Experience
Experience without structure is just noise. Learn to scaffold experiential learning to bridge initial engagement with deep, emergent participant insights.
From Instruction to Facilitation: Teaching Technical Skills in Outdoor Education
Technically competent, but struggling to teach effectively? Learn to bridge instructional delivery with facilitation so students truly own their skill development.
Human Flourishing Lab
Everyone talks about “human flourishing,” but what does it actually mean? Step into a framework-free lab to stop defining it and start practicing it.
Activity Progression Framework for Students of All Age
Why do great activities randomly fail? Learn how to turn a single game into an abstract problem-solving powerhouse by hacking variables of autonomy.
Designing for Depth: Engineering Knowledge-Rich, Experiential Learning
Is your experiential program prioritising “fun activities” over long-term memory? Master the cognitive science framework that aligns deep knowledge with lived experience.
Beyond the Activity: Expanding the Facilitation Toolbox
What do you do when your perfectly planned activity completely falls apart? Shift from collecting games to mastering unscripted, real-time facilitation.
Experiential Education as a Democratizing Process: The ASL Framework in Asia Pacific
What if experiential education isn’t just a teaching method, but a tool to rebuild democracy? Discover the framework fighting global polarization.
What You Think You Saw: Exploring the Gaps in How We Think
Smart leaders make the same avoidable mistakes with remarkable consistency. Discover the exact cognitive blind spots warping your decision-making and your facilitation.
Achievement Orientation
We all struggle between the hope of success and the fear of failure. Watch how your subconscious mind quietly negotiates down your true ambition.
Comfortable Being Uncomfortable: How Teams Navigate Change
Zero presentations. Just a physical, escalating team challenge that exposes how your group actually responds when uncertainty and discomfort become unavoidable.
Founder Owner
How do you build a thriving outdoor education enterprise from scratch? Discover the business models, SOPs, and values behind 30 years of impact.
What did they learn, and who decided?
Stop steering participants toward predetermined lessons. Learn to design productive ambiguity that develops real judgment, adaptability, and learner ownership.
Before the Summit: How Educators Design Transformative Adventure Experiences
We Know What They Learned. Don't We?
Why do expensive flagship trips often produce the emptiest student reflections? Match real quotes to journeys and uncover where learning quietly leaks away.
Experiential Pedagogy for Schools
Exploring how experiential approaches enrich curriculum, assessment, and school culture within formal education systems.
The Story of Khao Sok
Most experiential models are copy-pasted. Here is how to build deep, long-term programs rooted in authentic local relationships.
From Outcome to Experience: Prototyping New Pedagogy
Declining birth rates are forcing schools to fight for survival. Discover the prototyping framework that re-engineers your classroom pedagogy to make your school irreplaceable.
From Doomscrollers to World Builders: Transforming Anxiety into Agency
Youth eco-anxiety and apathy are skyrocketing. Discover how an animation producer uses futuristic time-travel storytelling to make your students completely immune to doom.
Experiential Cultures: From Engagement to Deep Learning
Are your experiential activities leaving real learning behind? Step into an interdisciplinary case-study workshop to master true student-driven inquiry.
The Power of SPEC to Make a Difference in Your Teaching
Want to make any lesson instantly clear and long-lasting? Master the 4-part SPEC framework used to train world-class wilderness and outdoor leaders.
Wisdom of the Past - the Gift of Indigenous Experiential Practices
Honoring deep experiential wisdom embedded within Indigenous knowledge systems and land-based traditions
Balinese Canang Making
Decode the sacred philosophy behind Balinese Canang Sari. Discover how step-by-step traditional craft techniques seamlessly bridge indigenous values with modern experiential design.
Soap, Colours and Compost
Learning shouldn’t be expensive or complicated. Reconnect with local wisdom by turning domestic kitchen waste and native leaves into a sustainable masterclass.
Listening to the Land: Teachers and Experiential Learning
What can a remote Pacific island atoll teach us about modern education? Discover how to ground your classroom in powerful, land-based Indigenous knowledge.
Highlands to High Seas: The Karen Journey of Adaptive Resilience
How do displaced mountain highlanders transform into elite ocean free-divers? Master a stunning indigenous framework for extreme ecological and climate resilience.
Experiential Education for Disability & Neurodivergence
Designing strengths-based, accessible, and affirming learning experiences for diverse ways of sensing and engaging with the world.
From exposure to empowerment: Learning beyond the classroom
Many neurodivergent young adults don’t struggle with academic content—they struggle with life. Master an experiential blueprint that builds true real-world independence.
When Words Aren't Enough: Arts and Play Therapies
Are your students or clients struggling to express complex feelings? Discover how raw play and creative symbolism out-perform traditional talk.