Engaged Learning in the Academy

Challenges and Possibilities

D. Moore

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349438815, 9781137025180
• eBook ISBN: 9781137025197
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Moore asks the question of whether and under what conditions experience constitutes a legitimate source of knowledge and learning in higher education. Drawing on theory and research, the book addresses three types of challenges and opportunities facing experiential educators: the epistemological, the pedagogical, and the institutional.

CHAPTER 1

The Paradox of Experiential Learning in Higher Education

According to the conventional wisdom in higher education today, doing an internship in college boosts a student’s chances for landing a good job after graduation. At my own university, well over half the undergraduates do at least one and many do several. Another common belief is that students with serious social and political commitments do some sort of service-learning or civic engagement in college: volunteering in a battered women’s shelter, going on an Alternative Spring Break, canvassing for a favored cause. More and more students enroll in study-abroad programs, experiencing other cultures intensively and firsthand. Many conduct original research, sometimes in laboratories or libraries, sometimes in local or distant communities, sometimes in collaboration with a faculty member, sometimes on their own. Observers use a variety of terms to describe these kinds of educational activities: experiential, community-based, engaged. Whatever the label, experience-based, nonclassroom learning in its many forms has become more and more widespread in American colleges and universities, more and more a conventional, almost taken-for-granted element of students’ educations (cf. Qualters, 2010; Perlin, 2011).

But a nagging paradox plagues the use of experience as a source of learning in higher education: Although students clamor for it, most institutions offer it, and a vibrant professional community has grown up around it, experiential learning occupies a marginal and rather second-class status in mainstream schools. There are those in the academy who believe deeply in experiential education as a pedagogical practice, who claim great benefits from its use for students, faculty, colleges, and their broader communities alike (cf. Eyler, 2009). A batch of professional associations advocate the practice. But—here is the paradox that makes this phenomenon interesting and important—institutions tend to relegate those experiential programs to the margins of their academic operations, as if the learning were somehow suspect, as if “real” academics don’t do that sort of thing. Moreover, despite their apparent popularity, participation in forms like civic engagement appears not to be rising (Butin, 2012).

This paradox is interesting and important because it reveals a fundamental tension in the dominant conception of what a university is and does, raising challenges to the basic premises of higher education: about what qualifies as legitimate and creditable sources of knowledge and modes of learning, about the respective roles of teachers and students in the educational process, about the relationship between the academy and the rest of the world. This book addresses those tensions by describing, analyzing, and assessing the role that experience plays in the academy, and by identifying both the challenges and the opportunities in that role.

Many readers will be familiar with, and indeed advocates of, the practices of experiential education. But in order to establish the grounds for the key insight of this introduction, I will first describe some of the ways in which colleges and universities promote experience-based programs and practices—the basic formats include internships, service-learning, cooperative education, study-abroad, and student research (Qualters, 2010)—in their public pronouncements, their mission statements, and their advertising. I will provide evidence of the popularity of experience-based learning among students, both inside and outside the credit system. And I will outline some of the professional efforts—among scholars, student affairs officials, and administrators alike—to expand and improve experiential education as one element of teaching and learning in their institutions.

But I will also argue that these efforts do not represent the basic position and status of experiential learning in colleges, especially liberal arts schools. I will deconstruct some of the rhetoric pointing toward experience-based opportunities, showing that it often either rests on inflated claims and unexamined assumptions or damns with faint praise. I will explore the location of experiential programs in the structures of universities, and will maintain that they often sit outside the units that carry out the core missions of the schools and enjoy the greatest prestige inside and outside the institutions. Based on these observations, I will raise perplexing questions about the role of experiential learning in the academy. Finally, toward the end of the chapter, I will comment on the structure and content of the book: what sorts of research and theory inform it, and what issues will be addressed in the respective chapters. The point of the introduction, in other words, is not to demonstrate that a myriad of experiential programs exist or that they produce benefits—surely most readers will acknowledge those facts—but to highlight the paradox of the status of experience in the academy. I will begin with the positive side of the story, and move on to the more troubling issues.

Even the most elite colleges and universities offer students some form of experience-based learning. At Harvard, for instance, the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning sponsors the development of credit-bearing Activity-Based Learning (ABL) courses in which

students do public service, fieldwork, community-based research and internships in conjunction with in-class work. ABL aims to enrich students’ academic experience and learning outcomes by connecting theory with practice, and concepts with methods, using data and insight they gain through engagement with the larger world. (Bok Center, 2011)

According to the website, over 1600 students have enrolled in one or more of the 80 iterations of the more than 30 courses offered in this program since 2005. Some courses in Romance languages, for instance, have connected undergraduates with English as a Second language (ESL) children in local schools. In 2010–2011, the Division of Social Science piloted activity-based courses in anthropology, government, history of science, and sociology, giving students “credit for extra reading and for writing a paper that would require intellectual engagement with topics pertinent to an independent activity, while connecting the activity to relevant course work” (Bok Center, 2011).

Amherst College offers a mission statement typical of leading colleges when it says that its students learn to

seek, value and advance knowledge, engage the world around them, and lead principled lives of consequence . . . [U]ndergraduates assume substantial responsibility for undertaking inquiry and for shaping their education within and beyond the curriculum . . . Amherst College is committed to learning through close colloquy and to expanding the realm of knowledge through scholarly research and artistic creation at the highest level. Its graduates link learning with leadership—in service to the College, to their communities, and to the world beyond. (Amherst College, 2011a; emphasis added)

The implication of this statement is that learning is not simply an intellectual matter located inside the head, but that it changes the way one relates to the actual world. This concept finds expression in the college’s Center for Community Engagement (CCE), which

brings together Amherst students, faculty, alumni and community partners to engage the world around them. The Center designs opportunities that are linked to Amherst courses and co-curricular opportunities where students learn the skills and knowledge to be effective public problem-solvers. (Amherst College, 2011b)

The CCE offers consultations to faculty members who want to incorporate service-learning or other off-campus experience into their syllabi, as well as noncredit activities and placements for students at a variety of community-based organizations. In the Spring 2011 semester, the college offered five classes with community-based components. The activities included tutoring high school students in Holyoke, interacting with local musicians, and conducting research based on geographical information systems (GIS); one class met in an area prison, and included inmates as learners (Amherst College, 2011c).

On the public side, many universities offer opportunities for students to engage in experience-based learning. UCLA, like Amherst, has a special office dedicated to this mission: the Center for Community Learning (CCL). Housed in the Division of Undergraduate Education, the CCL promotes civic engagement by undergraduates and faculty through courses, research, and service alongside community partners. The service-learning courses sponsored by the CCL sometimes entail service, and sometimes community-based research. These classes are distinct from the “academic internships” (“195” courses, like History 195) offered through the various departments—not classes, but individual placements with school-based supervision, required journals, and research papers. These are aimed at connecting students with “experiences that manifest the content of the discipline”—not necessarily service-learning, but discipline-specific internships. Moreover, the center sponsors a Civic Engagement minor, which students complete by taking several lower- and upper-division courses, doing at least one internship, and writing a capstone research paper on a policy issue (UCLA, 2011).

In general, then, offering experiential learning opportunities appears to have become a standard practice among American colleges and universities. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) reported in 2010 that over 86 percent of its responding schools had formal internship and/or cooperative education programs (NACE, 2010). Sometimes these programs are located in the student affairs area; often they are run by career services offices, which place students in paid and unpaid internships, usually not for credit. Sometimes the programs are administered centrally by the office of the provost or some other academic official, and sometimes they are operated by the individual schools and academic departments. These programs and activities can be found on the websites of most colleges and universities. In any case, most institutions appear to have accepted the premise that experiential learning is a legitimate, valued element of their educational programs.

For their part, students have voted with their feet on the importance of experiential education. In many schools, it is the rare student who does not complete at least one internship or service-learning placement (Perlin, 2011). This is especially true of undergraduates in preprofessional programs like business and journalism, but it obtains even in liberal arts colleges, where the connection between a discipline-based major and a career is somewhat more tenuous. One survey by Aramark College Relations claims that “75% of all college seniors have had at least one internship before graduation” (Aramark, 2011). The highly respected National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) includes service-learning, internships, and practica as “high-impact practices” that “demand considerable time and effort, provide learning opportunities outside of the classroom, require meaningful interactions with faculty and students, encourage interaction with diverse others, and provide frequent and meaningful feedback”—that is, the survey’s sponsors clearly regard experiential learning as a beneficial practice. According to their 2010 results, between 37 percent and 49 percent of college seniors participated in at least one service-learning activity during the previous year, and between 47 percent and 59 percent did an internship or practicum (NSSE, 2010, 23).

To be sure, many students regard internships primarily as a smart career move, a networking tool, a foot in the door of a possible job after graduation. They are probably right: NACE conducted a student survey in 2010 that indicated that “new graduates who took part in an internship program are more likely to have received a job offer than their peers who decided to forgo the experience,” and that those graduates received higher salaries than noninterns (NACE, 2010). Showing undergraduates how to leverage internships into career success has spawned a cottage industry for consulting organizations and authors. Intern Bridge, a for-profit company, sponsors research on internships and employment, offers professional development opportunities for career services and human resources practitioners, and coaches students and graduates on job-hunting (Intern Bridge, 2012). Books such as The Intern Files: How to Get, Keep, and Make the Most of Your Internship (Fedorko, 2006) and Hello, Real World!: A Student’s Approach to Great Internships, Co-Ops and Entry-Level Positions (Liang, 2005) advise students on the transition from school to work—the list could go on. Clearly, internships are on the radar of American college students, particularly in a difficult economic time, when work experience becomes a competitive advantage for prospective employees as a distinctive item on the curriculum vitae.

A lively if curiously fragmented professional community has grown up around the various forms of experiential education. The National Society for Experiential Education (NSEE) pursues an inclusive strategy, trying to meet the needs of a broad array of practitioners: teachers, professors, principals, deans, directors of service-learning programs, professionals in career development and youth employment, counselors, directors of internships and cooperative education programs, school-to-work coordinators, superintendents, college presidents, researchers, and policymakers (NSEE, 2011).

Other organizations in the field are more specialized. The Cooperative Education and Internship Association (CEIA) bills itself as “the leader in work-integrated learning,” focusing on experiences that enhance workforce preparation and continuous learning. (Not long ago, by the way, CEIA did not include the word “internship” in its title; curiously, about 20 years ago NSEE removed the same word from its previous title: NSIEE. Organizational strategies too complex to review here lie behind those terminological choices.) Campus Compact, founded 20 years ago by a small group of college presidents, now includes over 1,100 member colleges and universities. Its mission is to “educate college students to become active citizens who are well-equipped to develop creative solutions to society’s most pressing issues” (Campus Compact, 2011). It sponsors research on service-learning, advocates the practice among educators and policymakers, and produces professional development materials for practitioners. The Association for Experiential Education (AEE), though it espouses a commitment to “experiential education” in broad terms, primarily attracts practitioners and scholars interested in outdoor and adventure programming—Outward Bound and Project Adventure are key examples.

What seems curious about this very partial list is that this very specialized educational practice has fragmented into so many professional organizations, each attracted to a very particular version of the pedagogy. During the 1980s, leaders of some of those groups tried to create an umbrella association called the Forum of Experiential Education Organizations (FEEO). It briefly included something like 22 member groups, but expired fairly quickly. Apparently, the practices of experiential learning are imagined in so many different ways by educators—the term experience, after all, does cover a lot of territory—that they see utility in finding others who specialize in very particular models. In any case, the point here is that there are in fact substantial numbers of professionals in higher education who advocate and practice one or another version of experiential learning, and legions of students eager to participate.

Despite this popularity among faculty, administrators, students, community leaders, and employers, I will argue that experiential education lies at the margins of the academy, that support for it is thin and spotty despite the passion its advocates display, and that many mainstream educators are either ignorant of or resistant to this form of learning. To be sure, the practice has grown substantially over the past few generations. Certainly when I went to college in the 1960s, almost nobody thought of internships as a valid form of education—indeed, the very term internship then applied primarily to recent medical school graduates. Instead, we thought of college-level learning as a matter of lectures, seminars, laboratories, and blue-book exams, of abstract theories and abstruse texts, of masterful scholars passing their wisdom on to thickheaded neophytes. Today, at least, schools pay lip service to experiential learning, and not-insubstantial resources are poured into civic engagement projects, community learning centers, alternative spring breaks, student research programs, work-related internships, and the like. Clearly, there is some momentum toward the use of experience as an educational resource—though that may be tailing off (Butin, 2012; National Task Force, 2012). But it could go in a number of directions, not all of them to my mind salutary; or it could wither under the pressures of the accountability and measurement movements, a sort of back-to-basics for higher education, or of a revanchist assertion by the advocates of classic texts and the traditional liberal arts. So I believe it is worth examining the extent, source, and quality of the current support.

Consider the commitments of colleges and universities as they are expressed in mission statements; to be sure, these are not declarations that most faculty and students fully grasp or even know about, but they give some indication of the priorities of the institutions. Harvard College, though it offers a range of experience-based learning opportunities, barely hinted at that form of education in its original mission statement; rather, it focused on “the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literatures, arts and sciences; [the college’s goal is to] create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities.” Good literatures, arts and sciences: These still seem to be the hallmark of the traditional academic institution. After advocating the spirit of free inquiry and open expression, the 1997 revision of the mission statement makes soft mention of an impact on students’ lives after college: “Harvard expects that the scholarship and collegiality it fosters in its students will lead them in their later lives to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society” (Harvard College, 2012b). That statement carries a whiff of civic engagement, and could be read as suggesting a deep institutional commitment to experiential learning. But on careful reading, one realizes that the means by which it “expects” to promote leadership and social service center on “scholarship and collegiality” rather than on direct experience in the larger world. That expectation, of course, stands as an article of faith rather than of empirical demonstration; no one, to my knowledge, has ever shown that students exposed to scholarship and collegiality in the u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1   The Paradox of Experiential Learning in Higher Education
• Chapter 2   A Theoretical Framework
• Chapter 3   Analyzing the Curriculum of Experience
• Chapter 4   Comparing Curricula—Academic and Experiential
• Chapter 5   Discovering the Pedagogy of Experience
• Chapter 6   Pedagogy in School and Field
• Chapter 7   Experiential Pedagogies in School
• Chapter 8   Institutional Mission(s) and Engaged Learning
• References
• Index