Experiential Education in the College Context

What it is, How it Works, and Why it Matters

Jay W. Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317686095
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Experiential Education in the College Context provides college and university faculty with pedagogical approaches that engage students and support high-impact learning. Organized around four essential categories—active learning, integrated learning, project-based learning, and community-based learning—this resource offers examples from across disciplines to illustrate principles and best practices for designing and implementing experiential curriculum in the college and university setting. Framed by theory, this book provides practical guidance on a range of experiential teaching and learning approaches, including internships, civic engagement, project-based research, service learning, game-based learning, and inquiry learning. At a time when rising tuition, consumer-driven models, and e-learning have challenged the idea of traditional liberal education, this book provides a compelling discussion of the purposes of higher education and the role experiential education plays in sustaining and broadening notions of democratic citizenship.

PART 1

The Landscape of Experiential Education

Chapter 1

Introduction

And Max’s room grew and grew until the walls became the world all around.

(Maurice Sendak, from Where the Wild Things Are)

THE GREAT DISRUPTION

On February 22, 2011, my wife and I had just arrived back at our apartment in Christchurch, New Zealand, after picking up our youngest daughter from daycare. We were in New Zealand leading a semester study abroad program for the college where I worked as a professor of education and environmental studies. On this particular Tuesday, our students were out at their assigned internship sites spread all across the city so we had the day mostly “off” (although anyone who has ever led an off-campus semester program knows that there is no such thing as a “day off”). It was a calm, clear, and beautiful late summer afternoon in New Zealand—one of those rare days with little wind, comfortable temperatures, and sunny skies on the South Island where you truly feel blessed to be alive.

It happened so fast and so violently that I can’t really remember what I was thinking or doing. One moment I was standing near the door looking at my wife in the kitchen and the next moment the entire apartment began to shake as if a giant had just picked up the building and rattled it around to see if anything would fall out of it. This was no gentle, swaying earthquake but rather a short, sharp, shock that lasted less than 15 seconds. But in that short period of time, everything changed.

We later found out that this event was technically an aftershock of the September 4, 2010 7.1 magnitude earthquake that struck the region. While this aftershock only measured 6.3 on the Richter scale, comparing the two events with this metric can be very misleading. The February 22 event had the highest Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) in New Zealand’s history and was one of the greatest ever recorded in the world. This acceleration, had it happened in other cities in the world, would have had devastating consequences—flattening most buildings. New Zealand’s strict building codes minimized the destruction as much as possible, but the tremor still caused 185 fatalities and reduced the city center to rubble.

In the shock of such moments, you begin to take in the enormity in isolated chunks and snapshots from the senses. First came simple visuals—our daughter, terrified, in my wife’s arms. The refrigerator contents smashed and spilled all over the kitchen floor. The television, broken, lying on the carpet. Then came sounds. Car alarms, sounding off somewhere in the distance. A dog barking. An eery silence where there was once bird song and traffic. But eventually, you return to the integrated whole of it and begin to take stock. The enormity of the situation floods in the way water breaks through a failed levy. What about our oldest daughter who was in school? Are we safe remaining in this building? What about all our students? The water was off, the electricity was out, the landline was cut, and cell service was non-existent. In an instant, we went from a calm, relaxing, sunny afternoon to a disaster zone the magnitude of which was only just settling in. We felt isolated, out of contact, unprepared, and vulnerable.

In a very real sense, those of us who work in higher education are experiencing a similar predicament. Living through our own “Great Disruption,” colleges and universities in the United States and across the world are attempting to come to grips with several seismic shocks that have left many in the academy feeling isolated, vulnerable, and unprepared. It is not within the scope of this particular book to go into great detail about the present sociocultural context of higher education of which much has been written. Derek Bok’s (2009) Our Underachieving Colleges, Vince Ferrall’s (2011) Liberal Arts on the Brink, Arum and Roksa’s (2011), Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, and Andrew Delbanco’s (2014) College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, all reveal a host of issues and challenges with the current state of the academy. And, it should be noted, this particular period may not be as unique as we think. A cursory glance at the history of higher education would reveal other time periods of turmoil and existential questioning. Heeding this, some have come to the defense of the traditional liberal arts as noted in recent works by Michael Roth (2014) Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters and Fareed Zakaria (2015) In Defense of a Liberal Education. None theless, it is hard to argue that this particular time period, just following the turn of the century, feels particularly disruptive in terms of its affects. As Delbanco states:

The role of faculty is changing everywhere, and no college is impervious to the larger forces that, depending on one’s point of view, promise to transform, or threaten to undermine, it. As these forces bear down on us, neither lamentation nor celebration will do. Instead, they seem to me to compel us to confront some basic questions about the purposes and possibilities of college education.

(2012, p. 6)

As Delbanco argues, the current disruption is not a simple “good:bad” binary. But stating this does not suggest, in my view, that those of us working in higher education should just sit back and wait for the dust to settle. Every crisis brings along with it opportunity.

I recently returned to Christchurch and spent the better part of an afternoon wandering the city center, almost three years after the earthquake. Driving downtown was disorienting to the extreme. City streets were unrecognizable as I looked in vain for familiar landmarks and buildings to help feel my way into town. After several wrong turns, I finally parked the car in one of the many gravel lots that now take the place of where office buildings used to stand. The contrast to what I remember was shocking. Cashel Street, the Bus Exchange, Victoria Park—all of these landmarks were fundamentally altered. Some locations were in the midst of construction and rebuilding. Others seemed to exist in a kind of time capsule—shattered glass, store front signs, and barricades remained just as they were on that February day three years ago. One memorable block had a chain link fence surrounding a closed series of storefronts seemingly open and ready for business. A “keep out” sign hung half-off its hinges on the fence.

Walking past yet another empty gravel lot where a building once stood, I paused. Instead of a weed-choked and depressingly empty space, this lot had what appeared to be an amphitheater and art installation made out of pallets. The pallets formed a kind of temporary building with space for live music, a café with free wifi, and a place for people to gather and socialize. A sign nearby explained this was one of many such “gap-filler” art installations and projects spread throughout the city center in response to the many empty gravel lots I had been seeing. These projects were dreamed up and installed by artists and citizens coming together and, as Maxine Greene (1988) once wrote, “imagining things otherwise” amidst tragedy, devastation, and loss. Moving through the city, my mood changed from sorrow and pity to a sense of admiration for the grit, resilience, and determination of the citizens of Christchurch. Cashel Mall—once the pulsing center of the city—had been completed destroyed by the earthquake. In its place, a “container mall” has sprung up lined with stores operating out of shipping containers to create a funky, and quite effective, retail zone.

As I got back in my car and drove away, it struck me that the city was an illustrative example of the choices we make in the midst of disruption. We can, like some of the abandoned buildings and cordoned-off areas of a city, simply pretend the disruption never occurred in the first place, posting metaphorical “keep out” signs and cordoning off our college campuses from critique and calls for reform. Clinging to what we remember of the past, there is a certain relief and comfort knowing that, even if damaged, things still look familiar. We can also, like the gap-filler projects, use the disruption as an open-space of creative expression. Although some new installations will likely fail, or will last only for a short period of time, the acts of collaboration and expression will likely yield new ideas, long-term benefits, and even structural change. And all this disruption and innovation is happening at a compressed pace. As Bass (2012) noted:

Our understanding of learning has expanded at a rate that has far outpaced our conceptions of teaching. A growing appreciation for the porous boundaries between the classroom and life experience, along with the power of social learning, authentic audiences, and integrative contexts, has created not only promising changes in learning but also disruptive moments in teaching.

(p. 24)

Of course, higher education is not comparable to a devastated city. Across our campuses we could all point to both hopeful and dismaying “city blocks” and we might not even agree on which is which. The future ahead of us is not a simple choice between stasis and transformation. But, it is important to recognize, as Bass states above, that the changes being experienced are simultaneously promising and threatening, and provoke us to ask hard questions about the nature of teaching and learning in the 21st century.

And, in this particular disruptive moment in higher education, these questions can invite us to consider the role of experiential education in generating potential answers. There are a variety of ways that colleges and universities are attempting to exhibit both adaptation and resilience given these disruptive forces. This book explores one particular phenomenon—the rise of experiential learning initiatives across higher education. As someone who has spent a good deal of time practicing experiential teaching and learning in higher education, I am convinced that it can serve as not only a “gap-filler” but as an essential creative force during this time of disruption. However, as a student and scholar on curriculum theory and the philosophy of education, I am keenly aware (and skeptical) of panacea pedagogical pronouncements. I highlight this particular curricular response not because I believe it is the only response but because I firmly believe it is a good response and a useful one. Any philosopher of education will rightly shy away from universalistic claims of pedagogical purity. It has never been my stance to claim that experiential approaches are, by definition, the best in a given educational context. But, given this particular historical moment, and this particular generation of students, and this particular time of societal need, I do believe experiential education is worth paying more attention to. And, that higher education has been slow to pick up on the pedagogical power of experience (something the K-12 world has been much quicker to incorporate). As Moore (2013) wrote:

[M]any faculty members, if they think about experiential education at all, regard it with disdain, or they grudgingly tolerate it because it generates enrollments. Moreover … programs tend to be located at the institutional margins, not in the core academic units.

So, this is not a book about how experiential education will save the academy. It is not a book claiming that the only effective way to teach and learn is through experiential approaches. There is too much history that demonstrates the folly of any grand, universalizing declarations of this-or-that “new method.” John Dewey himself, the so-called “father” of experiential education, was known to lecture quite frequently as a professor in college. This is also not a book about applying experiential education as the one and only effective method available to a teacher. In fact, seeing experiential education as method is a large part of the problem (which we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 2). Rather, this book approaches the current disruption as an opportunity to, as Delbanco (2012) states, “question the purposes and possibilities of a college education” and to give some practical tools for enacting experiential curricula that I have learned along the way.

SEISMIC SHIFTS

When Thomas Friedman described the world as “flat” in 2005, it was a clarifying moment in how we viewed the intersecting dynamics of globalization and digital technology. Regardless of one’s theoretical stance on globalization, it is difficult to argue against the notion that the Internet and subsequent rapid rise in technological innovation has been nothing short of a new “Gutenburg Press” moment for humankind. And, just as during Johannes Gutenberg’s time, this new era challenges existing structures to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape. As Friedman noted in 2006:

To put it another way, the experiences of the high-tech companies in the last few decades that failed to navigate the rapid changes brought about in their marketplace by these types of forces may be a warning to all business, institutions, and nation-states that are now facing these inevitable, even predictable, changes but lack the leadership, flexibility, and imagination to adapt—not because they are not smart or aware, but because the speed of change is simply overwhelming them.

(p. 49, emphasis added)

We are more global, connected, and interdependent than ever before. Distance learning, video conferencing, crowd sourcing, social media, and the extreme individualization and portability of learning continue to send aftershocks throughout K-12 and higher e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1 The Landscape of Experiential Education
• PART 2 Principles and Practices of Experiential Education
• Afterword
• Appendix: Reference List of Experiential Projects and Programs
• Index