Transformative Learning Through Engagement

Student Affairs Practice as Experiential Pedagogy

Jane Fried

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781579227616
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Jane Fried's overarching message is that higher education is based on a profoundly outdated industrial model of the purpose and delivery of learning and needs urgently to be changed. Student affairs professionals and academic faculty have become frustrated with the alienation of so many students from academic learning because they cannot see its connection to their lives. This book – addressed to everyone involved in helping college students learn – presents what we now know about the learning process, particularly those elements that promote behavioral change and the ability to place information in a broader context of personal meaning and long term impact. Central to its argument is that learning must be experiential and engage students holistically; that it must be grounded in brain science and an understanding of the cultural drivers of knowledge construction; that academic faculty and student affairs professionals must cooperate to help students make connections and see the implications of their learning for their lives; and that the entire learning environment needs to be integrated to reflect the organic nature of the process.A second purpose of this book is to enable student affairs professionals to articulate their own role in helping students learn. Student affairs, as a profession, has had difficulty describing its work with students as teaching because the dominant paradigm of teaching continues to suggest a classroom, an academic expert and a model of learning that is basically verbal and cognitive. Student affairs professionals who read this book will be able to understand and articulate the processes of experiential, transformative education to their academic colleagues and to help collegially design integrated learning experiences as partners with academic faculty. The book concludes with a number of brief invited chapters that describe a few emerging models and programs that illustrate Jane Fried's vision of transformative learning experiences that integrate experience, study, and reflection.This book was written with contributions from:
Craig Alimo
Julie Beth Elkins
Scott Hazan
Elsa M. Núñez
Vernon Percy
Christopher Pudlinski
Sarah Stookey

PART ONE
SHIFTING PARADIGMS IN EDUCATION

1
INSIGHT

Perspectives on Learning

The Universe is a self-organizing system engaged in the discovery of its possibilities through a continuing process of transcendence toward ever higher levels of order and self-definition.

(Korten, 1999, p. 12)

Question: What would universities look like if they consisted of groups of people with training in specific areas of inquiry who came together to explore areas of ongoing human concern? What if these groups included more-advanced and less-advanced scholars? What if problems were posed, and searching for solutions informed pedagogy? What if all people involved formulated the problems and then collaborated on developing answers? How would that translate into an organizational structure? Would inexperienced people who have not learned to structure their work be allowed to participate? Would people have to be located in the same physical place? Could a virtual seminar replace one that occurred in a physical location? Would anything be lost? What might we discover if we started by asking questions about the ways we organize learning rather than looking for answers about the best way to organize teaching?

Image from War and Peace (Tolstoy, 1869)

This globe was alive—a vibrating ball without fixed dimensions. Its whole surface consisted of drops closely pressed together, and all these drops moved and changed places, sometimes several of them merging into one, sometimes one dividing into many. Each drop tried to spread out and occupy as much space as possible, but others striving to do the same compressed it, sometimes destroyed it, and sometimes merged with it. “That is life,” said the old teacher. “How simple and clear it is,” thought Pierre. “How is it I did not know it before?” God is in the midst, and each drop tries to expand so as to reflect Him to the greatest extent. And it grows, merges, disappears from the surface, sinks to the depths, and again emerges. (Tolstoy, 1869/2011, p. 2595)

Pierre attributed this process to God. Today modern physicists might substitute other terms such as field, energy pattern, coherent system, or holon (Laszlo, 2006) to signify an organically coherent system, which is “integrated and dynamic, its myriad activities self-motivated, self-organizing and spontaneous, engaging all levels simultaneously from the microscopic and molecular all the way to the macroscopic” (p. 93). The notion of coherence can be applied to all kinds of systems, biological, social, and organizational, and is often described as ecology.

The current image of a university is neither coherent nor organic. It seems to combine medieval processes with industrial age content. Our image of learning is medieval—auditory, reified knowledge being transmitted via the spoken and written word to listeners who transcribe or summarize. Lecturing precludes interaction among learners over questions and reifies knowledge in static form for emission and transmission. The organizational structure is a combination of Julius Caesar’s legionary bureaucracy and Ford’s automobile assembly line, accumulating credits via linear progress in order to produce an “educated” person at the end. The notion of getting an education makes this image reified. Our industrial-era institutions are actually modeled on a proposal made by Immanuel Kant (1798/1979) in The Conflict of the Faculties. Kant identified two key purposes for modern universities: to produce well-educated bureaucrats to manage the emerging nation-states, and to create knowledge for emerging industry that was based on the application of scientific information to industrial problems. Pedagogy was emphatically reserved for the gymnasia, or high schools. Teaching was not a concern of universities. The historical purpose of liberal education—liberating minds to explore multiple perspectives on the human condition and human projects—was ignored. Students were prepared for management roles in state bureaucracies, not for leadership in communities. In this process, helping students understand and critique the Grand Narrative of their own civilization was minimized or lost, and students were left on their own to place themselves in a meaningful cultural context (Readings, 1996).

The postcorporate, postindustrial, postmodern world is organized very differently from the industrial world. The world of factories, bureaucracies, and assembly lines is rigid, linear, slow, and fragmented. The postmodern environment is fluid, flexible, networked, and responds to change rapidly. Our current society is facing an entirely new set of problems, and students in this world have a very different set of skills and needs from those of Kant’s era. Our educational institutions also have access to teaching/learning technologies that were never dreamed of in the early industrial era. We are now in a position to assume that oral transmission of information is rarely necessary, and that new knowledge generated to address all kinds of issues can be produced in a variety of locations and communicated among researchers in real time. This society needs to generate knowledge that addresses current problems, to apply that knowledge to problems, and to use the results of the solutions to create subsequent solutions in an endless loop. We have little need to transmit knowledge that may be out of date before students have an opportunity to use it. The form, the process, and the fundamental assumptions of most of our modern universities are profoundly out of date. They are also extremely expensive and may become unsustainable in the near future (Taylor, 2010). Widely used teaching/learning processes (i.e., lecturing/listening, test taking, and reading paper texts) almost guarantee the obsolescence of what is learned before the learning is assessed. Some of the most demanding and complex problems of our times cannot be studied in the isolation of university learning environments because addressing these problems demands learning from their complexity in real time and using well-informed intelligence to generate possible approaches and solutions. From economics to ecosystems, from cross-cultural communication to the management of global business, we must develop approaches to learning that integrate theoretical knowledge, empirical data, and personal experience.

The current learning model separates theory, data, and personal experience, and emphasizes theory and data while generally ignoring personal experience. More and more exceptions to this model are being developed in North America (O’Sullivan, 1999), but the historical model of teaching and learning conforms to these outlines. The notion that teaching involves speaking to students about knowledge that has already been developed remains the dominant methodology in universities. The set of questions raised by Korten’s (1999) analysis of the postcorporate world can be applied to universities with illuminating results. Korten’s vision evokes learning communities, not colleges or universities as we have created them for the past millennium. These kinds of learning communities can be compared to Tolstoy’s. They are holons, systems that are complete within themselves and also part of larger systems. Holons interact with other holons, merge to address salient problems, and share intellectual and physical resources. They are organized via networks, electronic, organic, interpersonal, or mechanical. They fragment when creating applied solutions to particular problems in particular places. Their members’ lives include academic work but also other dimensions of life and do not include adolescent ghettos generally referred to as residence halls. In a college designed as a learning community, the almost universal distinction between academic affairs (learning) and student affairs (living) would diminish or disappear; the community would focus on learning as a coherent process.

Transformative Learning as the Educational Role of Student Affairs

Since the publication of Shifting Paradigms in Student Affairs (Fried & Associates, 1995), a work that discussed learning as an integrated process and the role of student affairs as one experiential component of that process, much has been discovered about human learning (Zull, 2002). Student affairs professionals have attempted to shift their focus to include student learning in their mission and purpose (Keeling, 2004) but seem to have emphasized the assessment of learning outcomes without developing a similar emphasis on the creation and design of learning experiences or inputs. Student affairs professionals have a long history of attempting to understand and explain the educational role of student affairs yet have not been able to shift the focus from student services, which colleges assign to student affairs staff, to student learning, which colleges tend to assign solely to academic faculty. The earliest articulation of this shift appeared in 1938 (Lloyd-Jones & Smith), although the first description of the idea appeared in The Student Personnel Point of View (SPPV; American Council on Education, 1937). Lloyd-Jones was one of the primary authors of that document and expanded her ideas in her 1938 book. A Student Personnel Program for Higher Education (Lloyd-Jones & Smith) appeared in 1938. Since the publication of the SPPV, the educational mission of the student affairs profession has embraced training students for their role as effective citizens in an increasingly complex democracy. That role has not changed, although the demands have become more complicated. The notion of national citizenship has been expanded to include planetary citizenship and ecological responsibility or sustainability as well. A review of the Lloyd-Jones and Smith writings raises a powerful question. If these writings are universally revered by student affairs professionals, why has so little been done to shift the governing paradigm of student affairs work since the 1930s when these ideas began to appear in our literature? Why does the student affairs profession frame its work primarily in terms of services and only secondarily in terms of education for citizenship? What is the barrier that keeps student affairs as a profession from presenting itself to the academy as the experiential component of higher education, the component that contributes profoundly to the mission of almost every college in the United States, to educate citizens for effective participation in democracy (Fried, 2011)? Transformative Learning Through Engagement is an attempt to address that question.

Since the publication of Shifting Paradigms in Student Affairs (Fried & Associates, 1995), I have benefitted from the enormous insights into learning that have been developed over the past decades. Zull (2002) has discussed the correspondence between the neurology of learning and Kolb’s (1984) description of the action/reflection learning cycle. Jensen (2000) has described the learning process and the process of designing brain-based learning. Mezirow and Associates (2000) and O’Sullivan (1999) have described transformative learning as the process by which individuals become aware of their phenomenological assumptions and then learn to explore their own processes of knowledge construction. In The Mindful Brain Siegel (2007) described in great detail “top-down . . . engrained brain states” (p. 135) that shape our perception of experience and information. He uses the word “enslavement” (p. 137) to describe our own preconceived ideas and asserts that this mental incarceration often keeps us from learning or changing our minds. Siegel also described the role that fear plays in keeping people entrapped in their own unexamined ideas and has seen the physiology of stereotyping in action on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the brain.

Dismantling mental architecture is difficult whether we are asking White American students to explore their culturally inculcated racism or asking heterosexual people to explore their prejudices about gay people. How much more difficult a task is it when we ask students who have never thought of themselves as anything other than Americans to begin expanding their idea of we to include people in other countries they may never meet, whose beliefs seem strange to them, and who live under circumstances in families that bear little resemblance to what traditional Americans think of as normal. This learning process becomes even more complex if our typical American students see people from some other part of the world as potential enemies because fear inhibits learning and empathy.

The philosophical and biological foundations have been laid for us to create a coherent approach to learning in higher education. What Lloyd-Jones and Smith (1954) described in fairly imprecise terms decades ago can now be described in very detailed terminology. These approaches can be implemented wherever educators are willing to redesign their work so that it is grounded in organic learning processes. We may divide our institutions into academic affairs and student affairs, but students learn as whole human beings. What is needed in the 21st century is a new approach to learning in higher education that is grounded in the science of learning. This gives students the opportunities to critique the inherited knowledge of previous generations so they can perceive new problems accurately and generate new solutions to the issues of their own lives. Our students have access to more information than any other generation in the history of our species. However, for information to be transformed into knowledge and possibly to wisdom, students must develop “a meaningful degree of understanding” (Glisczinski, 2007, p. 317) that allows them to critique what they are learning and dismantle their top-down mental architecture.

The only way to open minds in the fashion that so many educators value is to integrate our approaches to learning. Preconceived ideas and their accompanying neural architecture must be challenged in as many contexts as necessary, involving as many areas of the brain as possible. Burns Crookston (1975) suggested an approach to integrating the entire learning environment to reflect the organic nature of learning. He described three sets of interrelated competencies: instruction, consultation, and milieu management. He defined instruction as including teaching and research, and assigned that competency to academic faculty. Consultation involved all the elements of group process, helping people and groups clarify goals and learn to work together to achieve mutually determined goals, which is generally the kind of work that most student affairs professionals do on a daily basis. Milieu management, a role he assigned to chief student affairs officers, involves understanding all aspects of the organization that contribute to student learning. This understanding leads to the coordination and integration of the total campus environment to support the development of a democratic community in which all participants have the skills to act as contributing members of that community. Crookston asserted that all people who are professionally involved in higher education should have all these competencies, although each group has a specific area of responsibility in which its level of skill is presumed to be higher. This is an early description of a collaborative approach to supporting student learning throughout the campus for the purposes of helping students see themselves as contributing members of a democratic society.

This volume uses an analysis of culture, power, prejudice, and justice to illustrate the processes of organic brain-based learning. Diversity education or social justice training is typically the responsibility of the student affairs staff on most campuses. Had effective methods been in use for helping people replace their closed systems of thinking about people in predefined categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability status, there would probably be less need for continuing education about diversity and justice. However, the need remains great, and there is no consistent understanding of the kind of learning that contributes to the dismantling of top-down, enslaving mental architecture (Siegel, 2007) that translates into prejudicial ideas and harassing or condescending behavior. The incidents of intergroup conflict and misunderstanding on campuses continue, and microaggressions have increased, even if outright hostility seems to have diminished (Sue et al., 2007). Keeling’s (2004) Learning Reconsidered provided the latest element in this conversation for student affairs professionals. Learning and transformation in higher education is intended to provide the next stage in this dialogue.

Purposes of This Volume

The overarching purpose of this book is to introduce all people who are professionally involved in helping college students learn to develop a basic understanding of the learning process, particularly those elements that include behavioral changes and the ability to place information in a broader context of personal meaning and long-term consequences. The ideas in this book speak to people who realize how profoundly out of date the industrial model of higher education has become. These professionals, who may be either student affairs professionals or academic faculty, have become frustrated with the alienation of so many students from their own academic learning because they do not understand the reasons they are required to study certain subjects. This problem is often described as “getting the gen ed requirements out of the way so students can get into their major,” which is presumably the subject students are interested in.

A second purpose of this book is to provide information for student affairs professionals so they can articulate their own roles in helping students learn. Student affairs as a profession has had difficulty describing its work with students as teaching because the dominant paradigm of teaching continues to suggest a classroom, an academic expert, and a model of learning that is basically verbal and cognitive. After reading this book, student affairs professionals will be able to understand and describe the processes of experiential transformative education to their academic colleagues and help design integrated learning experiences as partners with academic faculty. This knowledge and experience will support ongoing efforts to create authentic assessment of learning in all domains of higher education. People who want to use off-the-shelf training programs will probably not be motivated to understand the complexity of the learning process or to create experiential education activities for specific learning needs on particular campuses. This is not a cookbook. It is a brief explanation of the science of experiential learning, coupled with an analysis of cultural norms. All this information can be combined to produce transformative learning experiences in the domain of civic engagement, particularly processes involved with community leadership and service.

Finally, the information contained in this book can serve as a stimulus for conversation among faculty and staff members who are beginning to design integrated, transformative learning programs for their own campuses. These collaborative conversations must occur, whether programs are divided into separate but coordinated academic and experiential components, or whether they are integrated, team-taught courses that involve experiences that bring classroom-based concepts to life. Collaboration is vital to the development of the integrated transformative approach described in this book. “Collaboration forms a network of ideas and resources that not only supports student learning, but also creates a collegial infrastructure . . . [as well as] the development of mutual language and shared assumptions about the value, importance and support of student learning” (Steffes & Keeling, 2006, p. 69). Implementation of such collaborative processes has the potential to transform campus culture and our common understanding of learning, thus revitalizing our experiences in higher education.

Organization of the Book

Part One includes a summary of the key elements of learning from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. It also includes an analysis of American culture and the enculturation process, which leads to an inquiry about methods dismantling these beliefs when they are destructive. Part Two moves from the author’s analysis of American culture and learning processes to the reader’s experience of both phenomena. Readers are requested to cocreate an understanding and learning experience so they can begin to use what they know.

The chapters in Part Three by contributing authors describe a number of emerging models and programs that integrate experience, study, and reflection to produce powerful, engaged, and transformative learning experiences for students.

2
LABELS AND VIEWPOINTS

Lenses That Shape Learning

Student Affairs and Services, as professional nomenclature, reflects a long-standing split in the responsibilities of the field. The domain and responsibilities of student service areas are fairly clear. That segment of our work offers the services students need to access a wide range of institutional resources from admissions and financial aid to housing, food service, and registration. Student affairs, on the other hand, is much less clear in either its definition or its range of responsibilities (Fried, 2010). What is student affairs and how is it different from student development or student development education? Student affairs seems to cover everything that is associated with student needs, student behavior, and student activities. The term generally refers to all kinds of advising, training for peer advisers and student leaders, student conduct, and training in the career selection and job search process. I was once r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• FOREWORD
• PART ONE SHIFTING PARADIGMS IN EDUCATION
• PART TWO SHIFTING INDIVIDUAL PARADIGMS TO EFFECT CHANGE
• PART THREE APPLICATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
• APPENDIX
• REFERENCES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX