Experiential Learning

Assessment and Accreditation

Norman Evans

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000369304
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

First published in 1992, Experiential Learning was written to explore in detail the ways in which the assessment and accreditation of prior and current experiential learning (APEL) was being practised in higher education, further education, community and voluntary provision, training organisations and employment, in provision for the unemployed, youth training schemes, and for updating and retraining.

The book argues that individuals can be encouraged and motivated to learn if they are enabled to develop a due sense of their own capacity to learn. It looks at the background of APEL in Britain, and explores its progression into a day-to-day concern for policy-makers and providers of formal courses and training and development programmes in many sectors. It also considers how APEL can be used alongside other economic and social developments to improve the organisation and the provision of opportunities for learning at the post-secondary stage.

Experiential Learning will appeal to those with an interest in the history and theory of the assessment and accreditation of experiential learning.

Part I Beginnings: a personal story

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160908-1

1 The American dimension

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160908-2

It all began in 1977 – or so it seemed. On reflection it all began in 1948. That year as an ex-service new graduate at Cambridge, I attended a tutor’s training course for the Workers’ Educational Association and then began a regular part-time teaching stint in the WEA Eastern Region which lasted until 1956. Although no-one then talked about experiential learning, the methodology propounded by John Hampden Jackson, Tutor at the Board of Extra Mural Studies in Cambridge and Frank Jacques, District Secretary to the WEA’s Eastern Region, was based on the self-evident truth that adults attending extra-mural or WEA classes brought with them knowledge, experience and insights which were different from and just as important as those of the visiting tutor whatever the discipline or topic. Again although no-one referred to things in psychological terms, the message was that adult education is based on respect of persons. Nor did they refer to a negotiated curriculum, which was clearly the way in which syllabuses were drawn up. That tutor’s training course proved to be a profoundly significant beginning to a professional career, an induction into the liberal tradition of adult education and with it the affective aspects of what came to be called later experiential learning. But most certainly there was no thought of experiential learning and academic credit.

But in 1977 the explicit interest in experiential learning with direct connections with the notion of academic credit did begin. And it began with the American dimension. It can read like a chapter of accidents. Retrospectively it seems that the American dimension was an integrating tool for a whole series of interests, hopes and frustrations, and as it has turned out, satisfactions.

In April 1977 a tutor in the college where I was principal, was due to accompany a group of students on exchange with Keene State College, New Hampshire. He fell sick. This exchange programme had been running for several years and frequently Keene State College had pressed me to go. I had never been able to because of complicated and protracted negotiations concerning the future of the college in the post-James reorganisation period of teacher education. By April 1977 the reorganisation were plans were secured and agreed; the tutor fell sick; I took his place.

So it was that waiting for a faculty member of Keene State College I noticed a series of buff coloured A4 size publications without any name on the spines. I took one or two off the shelf and idly thumbing the papers, realised that I was reading some of the results of a research project funded by the Carnegie Foundation, entitled ‘The Cooperative Assessment of Experiential Learning”. As the words and ideas fell into place, I understood that I was reading about ways in which adult learners could have their informally acquired knowledge and skills assessed and used for academic credit towards a baccalaureate degree. A little later that week I was in another American institution and discovered an external degree which was an individually negotiated learning programme based on the assessment of the prior experiential learning which the adult students brought with them.

All this happened at the same time as I was beginning to try to think out what I had let myself in for by agreeing to conduct what came to be known as ‘The Preliminary Evaluation of the In-Service Bachelor of Education Degree’ for serving teachers, a project funded by the Department of Education and Science (DES) which was due to start in October 1977 and went on until May 1980. The coincidence of reading these CAEL documents and my early musings about the research project on the in-service B.Ed. brought me up sharp. Throughout all the exhaustive and exhausting consultative meetings in the college with serving teachers to try to work out what was the best content for the inservice B.Ed. degree, and the negotiations with the University of Nottingham which validated it, and during all those validation meetings of in-service degree proposals from other institutions, at no time had I or anyone else thought to include provision in the degree regulations for giving academic recognition to the knowledge and skills which teachers have acquired through their professional experience.

That was a shattering realisation. As I thought about it whilst visiting other American universities during that month of April 1977, it began to dawn on me that there is an axiom for all post-experience courses, whether or not they lead to qualifications. It is that any post-experience course for experienced practitioners will be successful to the extent that it begins where practitioners actually are. The point of the axiom is that it is no good course designers making assumptions about where the experienced practitioners actually are at the beginning of any course, no matter how thorough and extensive have been their consultations beforehand with representative groups of experienced practitioners, and thinking they have arrived at a satisfactory course. At one leap this led me to realise that what the CAEL project on the assessment of experiential learning was about when applied to the in-service B.Ed. degree for experienced teachers was that the very first thing that ought to be happening at the beginning of any such course was an assessment of the experiential learning of the teachers enrolled on the course. The only way to know where they were as learners was to find out. Interest was fired. Now the shaming thing about this realisation was that during all the time I was doing the preliminary evaluation project it was clear that there was no possibility of any regulations either of the Council for National Academic Awards or of universities accommodating such a provision for the assessment of experiential learning. This frustration over the potential significance of the assessment of experiential learning for adult learners went spinning on in my mind as an idea which needed working out in practice somewhere somehow in Britain.

In part this firing of interest came from what happened to teacher education. One educational justification for creating a third group of institutions out of the reorganisation of teacher education following the James report (in 1972, on the education and training of teachers), was to extend the curriculum available to students beyond what was already on offer in universities and polytechnics. In other words there was little point in offering more of the same. It would be far better to try to offer something different. It was and is relatively easy to find young men and women who are completing their second year as undergraduates who think they have had enough of the courses they are currently following. Frequently they will complain that there is so much desk and book study of abstractions whatever the subject and not enough practical action. One way of providing a curriculum which would incorporate both theory and practice and meet that criticism would be to offer periods of fieldwork experience as learning opportunities so arranged as to result in assessable knowledge and skill within degree programmes but not necessarily related to a particular occupation.

The head of the teachers branch in the DES said it was an interesting idea. He rejected it out of hand, it was much too difficult a proposition to see developed. What I had suggested was that a pilot project or two along those lines could be a very valuable means of extending the overall offering of higher education. Instead he presented me with the in-service B.Ed. preliminary evaluation project, hence the continuing interest.

This interest in the assessment of experiential learning had been further fuelled by demography. In 1977 the figures were already demonstrating that in the 1980s and 1990s whether it liked it or not, higher education would have to be taking account of adult learners in a way which it hadn’t been required to up to that date. During the month in the United States in 1977, quite by chance I happened to attend a conference which was addressed by Peter Smith, President of Vermont Community College. (Later he became deputy governor.) With almost evangelical fervour his theme was that because of demography and changes in the patterns of employment in a technological age, academic institutions had to come to terms with their need to provide adequate service for adult learners if they were not going to find themselves in acute recruitment difficulties. He used the analogy of the tide going out, saying that institutions would be left high and dry if they didn’t look at the demographic tidal tables very carefully.

The curricular development idea for higher education seemed equally appropriate to a considerable proportion of the 18+ as well as some older learners. It appealed so strongly that I found ways and means of returning to the United States in 1978. Peter Smith suggested people I could call on. One of them was Dr John Strange, Founding Dean of the College of Public and Community Service in the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Sometime in July 1978 I found myself talking to Dr Strange, almost totally bemused by his description of the competence-based curriculum which was the basis for degrees being awarded to older learners through his institution. What I did understand was the significance of the assessment of prior experiential learning within his programme.

Months later on the same trail I presented myself again at the Dean’s office and found myself facing a similar beard but a different face. This was the Acting Dean, John Strange having been seconded as the Vice-President of CAEL.¹ Clark Taylor surprised me by saying that John Strange had been trying to get in contact with me. I phoned him in Columbia, Maryland; we met the next morning in Boston when he returned. From that meeting the American dimension strengthened.

It strengthened the American dimension for particular reasons. There was a warm steady encouragement of friends who gave a home base for explorations, and John Strange’s entrepreneurial spirit. As Vice-President of CAEL, John Strange’s particular task was to develop a network of regional managers in the US. These regional managers were to be frontline developers of the theory and practice of APEL in an attempt to encourage universities and colleges to adopt it as part of their provision for adult learners. This work was being undertaken by CAEL under a W.K.Kellogg Foundation Institutional Development Program. As our Saturday morning conversation went on, eyes gleamed as we began to discuss the various possibilities of opening up a transatlantic strand to this regional manager notion, as a means of pursuing the possibilities for APEL development in Britain. I did not know it at the time but retrospectively it is clear that John Strange’s entrepreneurial spirit was working overtime.

All that was in April 1979. As a first shot at the transatlantic connection, in the summer of 1979 he arranged an individual study tour for me taking in Peter Smith’s institution, Vermont Community College, his own College of Community and Public Service, Delaware Community College, Thomas Edison State College, and La Guardia Community College in New York City. The object of the exercise was to enable me to examine the assessment procedures being used in each of these institutions so that I might come to some conclusions about the possibilities of developing procedures for APEL in Britain.

The next strengthening of the American dimension was that I was invited to lead a seminar for the New England Regional Meeting of CAEL in December 1979. My brief was to give a foreigner’s view of the assessment procedures in institutions as I had observed them during the previous summer. It aroused some interest, the room was crowded. What I did not know was that sitting in the front row was Morris Keeton, the President of CAEL. As I realised subsequently, he had come to look me over.

In February 1980 I found myself summoned to a regional managers’ meeting in Florida. It was being held in Florida because at that time of the year the climate is warmly inviting. In fact it was so cold that Morris Keeton put on more and more clothing. The air conditioning, for some reason best known to the hotel management, refused to take note of the temperature and insisted on treating us to summertime air conditioning. The point of this regional managers’ meeting was to take the first steps towards putting APEL on to an interactive computer program, which subsequently emerged as ‘Encore’. That meeting was attended by Dr Arlon Elser, who was the W.K.Kellogg Foundation Project Officer who had funded the institutional development project for CAEL. Morris Keeton invited Arlon Elser and me to a private dinner at which the possibilities of a transatlantic connection were explored. Arlon Elser was enthusiastic and invited me to prepare a grant proposal for submission through CAEL. All seemed to be going swimmingly.

Subsequently Morris Keeton gave me a grilling at Logan Airport, Boston with John Strange in attendance, really trying to work out whether the gleam in our respective eyes was just an excited enthusiasm, or whether it looked like a gleam green for action. Apparently he decided the latter.

Whilst all these stimulating possibilities about a Kellogg grant were emerging, there was the problem of finding an appropriate base in Britain for mounting exploratory stages for activities based on APEL for higher education. The Cambridge Institute of Education which was my base for the in-Service B.Ed. study would not do. One or two universities and polytechnics were interested. It seemed however that there were two compelling objections to being based in an existing educational institution. Either the institution would in effect be underwriting the general proposition about the desirability of developing the assessment of prior experiential learning, giving it in effect an institutional imprimatur. Or the notion of the assessment of prior experiential learning would take on the colour of the public reputation of the institution that provided the working base, and therefore serve general notice on the academic community of its provenance. Where then were other possibilities?

2 The British dimension

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160908-3

At this point in the story the British cast of actors appear: the Right Honourable Shirley Williams, the Secretary of State for Education and Science in the 1974–79 Labour Government; Sir Charles Carter, first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lancaster 1963–79; and Dr Edwin Kerr, Chief Officer of the Council for National Academic Awards 1974–87.

I had noticed that Sir Charles Carter had taken early retirement and was Chairman of the Research Committee for the Policy Studies Institute (PSI). I had never met him. I had admired his writings about teacher education during the post-James Report period. People told me he was approachable, so with nothing to lose I made an appointment to see him. Simultaneously I telephoned Shirley Williams, who was at that time a senior fellow at PSI, and simply tried out the idea. Did she think that it made sense to attempt to introduce the ideas of the assessment of prior experiential learning to higher education? Yes, she did. Boosted with that response I found myself talking to Sir Charles Carter and F.C.R. Ruffitt who had recently joined PSI, having retired from being the Divisional Her Majesty’s Inspector for the London Region. I put the case. They listened. Sir Charles was interested. The interview ended with him saying something to the effect, ‘Well what are we going to do about it?’

What PSI did about it was to offer me a four-month appointment as a senior fellow during which time I would have to arrange for funding to enable the appointment to continue. That was all in April 1980.

By that time I was already in close contact with CAEL and the next move was to attempt to convince Dr Arlon Elser of the Kellogg Foundation that funding a project through CAEL for Britain made sense. To this end we set up a meeting in Washington to be attended by Sir Charles Carter, Morris Keeton, Pamela Tate, an editorial associate of CAEL and now its President, Dr Edwin Kerr and myself.

Edwin Kerr had taken a close interest in these possibilities when I had discussed them with him earlier in 1980. It so happened that at Easter time in 1980 both he and I attended the first International Meeting for Cooperative Education, in Boston. He agreed to travel to Washington after that meeting and that gave me the opportunity to take him to American University outside Washington as well as a meeting set up with Arlon Eisen, Charles Carter, Morris Keeton and Pamela Tate. Our visit to American University produced a most remarkable result. Having had a thorough briefing on the APEL project there where we had learned how the portfolio preparation for the assessment of prior experiential learning was based on two taught classes for older learners, we found ourselves reading specimen portfolios. By good chance the portfolios that Edwin read included sections on computer studies. He was a computer studies man. Sitting on the grass afterwards in the sun, he said quite simply, ‘This university is awarding academic credit in computer studies for years 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the basis of portfolios. If they can do it why can’t we?’

At this point disaster struck. A strike at Heathrow Airport meant that Sir Charles Carter was unable to fly to Washington. As the Chairman of the Northern Ireland Economic Development Committee he had a meeting which he could not risk missing. Delayed flights would make that tricky. So at the round-table conversation with Arlon Elser a vital component was missing. Nevertheless it all resulted in a small grant being awarded to Morris Keeton as President of CAEL to enable me to undertake a twelvemonth exploration as a first effort at developments in Britain.

This meant that from October 1980 until December 1981 I was able to spend half my time in the United States visiting scores of universities and colleges. The central purpose was to try to find assessment procedures which were sufficiently rigorous to suggest ways in which assessment procedures could be developed in Britain which would be consistent with the requirements of examining boards and external examiners. That proved difficult. Many American procedures were not sufficiently rigorous. The second half of the time was spent taking soundings in this country to work out where developments might fit in.

At this point it is important to say that the Americans divide the assessment of experiential learning into two categories. There is prior experiential learning, which means taking a dipstick reading of the uncertificated learning and skills that the men and women bring with them at the point when they are assessed. The Americans tended to call that unsponsored experiential learning. They used the phrase sponsored experiential learning to refer to the assessment of learning acquired experientially from fieldwork components of a degree programme. Unsponsored then because no institution had any control or influence over what was learned. Sponsored because the institution was responsible for providing those opportunities for learning.

It will be immediately obvious that sponsored learning translated across the Atlantic refers to the field-work components of sandwich courses. It is also obvious that it refers to the fieldwork and practical experience component of the curriculum development I had proposed to the DES for higher education in the third group of institutions which were being created. Sponsored programmes of experiential learning were generally referred to as co-operative education in the US, though in some cases internships got included....