The Role of Experiential Education in Re-Thinking The Modern University: Classrooms, Communities, and Collaborations

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The Role of Experiential Education in Re-Thinking The Modern University Jay W. Roberts, Ph.D. Assoc. Prof., Education and Environmental Studies Earlham College

Re-Thinking Pedagogy in The Modern University

New Modes of Teaching and Learning

If facts are readily available, if lectures put be can be instantly on-line and available to hundred's of thousands all over the world- what are teachers for?

With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it," Redish says. "Get 'em to do it once, put it on the web, and fire the faculty." from: http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/rethinking-teaching.html

Teachers as Curators of Experience

Sitting at the center of much of this is Experiential Education

Requires not just content mastery but process mastery

Design

Facilitation

Anyone can access the raw information and experience- teachers meaningfully organize it.

To curate: Organizing, framing, designing, and making meaning

Facebook Story: if someone from the 1950's suddenly appeared, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them about life today?

I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to humankind.

Problem and Project Oriented

Public demonstrations of learning

Development of knowledge, skills, and values

Civic Engagement

Community Research

Active

Integrative

Theory-Practice

Mind-Body-Spirit (no more brain on a stick)

Curriculum-Co-Curriculum

School World- Real World

Collaborative

Campus-Community

Faculty-Faculty

Faculty-Student

Student-Student

What is Experiential Education?

So what is it?

Curriculum Projects

Cooperative Learning

Active Learning

Expeditionary Learning

Project Based Education

Community Education

Education for Sustainability

Place Based Education

Outdoor Education

Service Learning

Many things!

Transformationalists

Critical

Social/Democratic

Individual/Romantic

EE in Practice

Primary vs Secondary Experience

Experience before Label- Loose Parts Play

EELDRC: A Design Framework

Connect

Review

Demonstrate

Label

Experience

Enroll

A Quick Definition

Experiential education is a philosophical approach to teaching and learning that places paramount importance on the role of direct experience in the educational process.

Common Misconceptions

It's not rigorous

It only can apply to certain disciplines and fields

It's "hands on" learning

It has to be outside the classroom

Etymology of Experience

To be experienced, to have an experience

Latin: Expereri- -to test but also to risk

Experience: German (erlebnis and erfahrung)

Experiential Education in the Modern University

Wave 3

Integration

Innovative forms of assessment focused on demonstrated learning outcomes

Scaffolding and sequencing across experiences

Capacity building in communities

Strong and deep reflective practices

Thematic, Interdsicplinary Curricula

Collaborations

Place and Problem/Project Based

High Impact Learning Initiative (Hoy, 2012)

Wave 2

First Tentative Linkages

Off-campus study programs

Student Leadership Development

Simulations

Isolated "active learning"

Service learning emerges

Wave 1

"Extra" curriculum

Clubs, organizations, etc

Part-Time Jobs

Volunteering

Separation of the Curriculum and Co-Curriculum

What does this new wave look like?

ASU's Master's of Public Health

Public Health Program “These are exactly the type of creative, forward-thinking results we knew would come from our partnership with ASU in downtown Phoenix,” says Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon. “We are absolutely becoming the center of education, research and science. And, because of the economic challenges we all feel, the timing is particularly relevant for this exciting announcement.” “The program will have a special emphasis on the public health needs of the multicultural populations found in urban centers, such as Phoenix,” adds Marjorie Baldwin, director of the School of Health Management and Policy, who also will be director of the new program. “We will take a broad view of public health issues, combining fundamental public health skills with competencies especially needed in urban areas, such as community and mental health, diversity, policy and ethics.” From: https://asunews.asu.edu/20090501_business_masterofpublichealth

Mosaic Project at Dickinson

Steelton Mosaics "...23 students and three faculty members met with workers, teachers, local business people, and residents of the multi-ethnic community of Steelton, Pennsylvania to explore questions of mutual interest: how to raise a family, earn a living, and sustain faith in a community hit hard by deindustrialization. This research later continued in the 2001 Steelton Mosaic with 18 students who focused on work, family, and migration narratives with members of the African-American community, and mentored young people in the elementary and secondary schools to conduct their own video-taped oral histories. (1996, Faculty: American Studies, Economics, and Sociology; 2001, Faculty: English, History, and Sociology – in both cases, the 3rd faculty member teaching literature contributed only one course to the Mosaic that was open to all students)." From: http://www.dickinson.edu/academics/distinctive-opportunities/community-studies-center/content/Community-Studies-Center-Global-Mosaics/

Piedmont Project at Emory

Piedmont Project Each summer, 20 faculty applicants from all units and departments of the University are accepted for a four-part program that offers multi-disciplinary brainstorming around sustainability issues, experiential learning about place, and pedagogical exercises designed to help faculty develop new courses or new course modules for existing courses. Participants commit to: -- Attend a two-day workshop usually held a few days after graduation. -- Develop a syllabus for a new course or a course module that incorporates sustainability or environmental issues appropriate to their field. -- Participate in a fieldtrip and discussion session at the end of the summer to share their experiences. -- Attend a dinner meeting in March to report on experiences and intellectual process.

Oberlin Project

The Oberlin Project "The Oberlin Project is a joint effort of the City of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners to improve the resilience, prosperity, and sustainability of our community. The Oberlin Project's aim is to revitalize the local economy, eliminate carbon emissions, restore local agriculture, food supply and forestry, and create a new, sustainable base for economic and community development." From: http://www.oberlinproject.org/

In times of change...

Final Queries

How can we connect students to authentic and relevant problems to be examined and worked on locally, regionally, and globally?

How might we put experience before labels in both big and small ways?

What would it look like if we placed experience at the center of the curriculum endeavor?

Structural Resistance

Culture of Discplines

Team teaching and interdisciplinarity

Academic calendar

Faculty Resistance

Social dimensions of learning

Scaling issues (can you do this with 100 people in a class?)

Team teaching

Time commitment

Student Resistance

Group work- "hell is other people"

Non-traditional learning and assessment

Time commitments- this isn't my only class

The Context: The Current State of Higher Education

Tectonic Shifts affecting Higher Education

Transformation: "We alll know or sense that the academy today is in the throes of transformation. The knowledge, skills, and values in which students should be educated; the intellectual landscape of the disciplines and degrees; the ways in which educational institutions are organized; the funding of teaching, learning, and research-- all of this promises to be profoundly different in 20 years. The forces of change have resulted partly from our own inertia, partly from consequences of our success, and partly from broad political, market, and technological developments not of our making. The question is not whether the academy will be changed, but how." (Scobey, 4).

Emerging Science of Learning

3 Key Findings

Parallel Processing

Simulations, active, authentic, social learning

Enrichment keys: feedback, relevancy, challenge

Complex, mutli-sensory immersion

Multi-modal instruction

Neuroplasticity

Ritual/Novelty

Importance of affective domains in learning

Stress and Threat

Metacognition

What does this mean for teaching?

Less is More

American Academy for the Advancement of Science: “As biology faculty, we need to put the “depth versus breadth” debate behind us. It is true today, and will be even more so in the future, that faculty cannot pack everything known in the life sciences into one or two survey courses. The advances and breakthroughs in the understanding of living systems cannot be covered in a classroom or a textbook. They cannot even be covered in the curriculum of life sciences majors. A more tenable approach is to recast the focus of biology courses and curricula on the conceptual framework on which the science itself is built and from which discoveries emerge. Such a focus is increasingly interdisciplinary, demands quantitative competency, and requires the instructor to use facts judiciously as a means of illustrating concepts rather than as items to be memorized in isolation. The time has come for all biology faculty, but particularly those of us who teach undergraduates, to change the way we think about teaching and begin to develop a coordinated and sustainable plan for implementing sound principles of teaching and learning." (2009)

Teaching process of learning over content

Make it overt

Explosion of brain research

"Reading" the brain- CAT, PET scans, MRI

"We have learned more about the brain and how it functions in the past two decades than in all of recorded history" (Wolfe, 3)

Economic and Politcal Pressures

College Attendance: "In 1960, 392,000 students earned bachelor degrees. By 2007 that number had nearly quadrupled to 1.52 million."(Ferrall, 1)

Funding: Efficiency efforts and cost containment

Global recession and credit crisis (student loan debt in US exceeds total credit card debt for first time in 2012)

Globalism and an increasingly "flattened" world

Technology

The University of Nowhere

‘Place-based colleges’ are good for parties, but are becoming less crucial for learning thanks to the Internet, said the Microsoft founder Bill Gates at a conference on Friday. Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university,” he argued at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif. “College, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based.” from: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/bill-gates-predicts-technology-will-make-place-based-colleges-less-important-in-5-years/26092

High Speed Connectivity

Digital Citizens and New Knowledge Processes

MOOC's!

Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun made headlines in the fall of 2011 when his on-line Artificial Intelligence course enrolled over 160,000 students. According to the New York Times (“Harvard and MIT Team Up To Offer On-Line Classes,” May 2, 2012), Thrun’s new venture, Udacity, has enrolled 200,000 students into six courses thus far.

Distance learning, Video conferencing (Skype, etc), Wiki's, Crowd Sourcing, Social Media, etc.

Questioning the Value and Purpose of Higher Education

What They Are Saying

It's too expensive (bad ROI)

"In 2009, spending by Americans for post-secondary education totaled $461 billion, an amount 42% greater than in 2000, after accounting for inflation. This $461 billion is the equivalent of 3.3% of total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and an amount greater than the total GDP of countries such as Sweden, Norway and Portugal." From: http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/02/opinion/vedder-college-costs/index.html

Too vocational

"The university has shaped itself to an industrial ideal-- the knowledge factory. Now it is overloaded and top-heavy with expertness and information. It has become a know-how institution when it ought to be a know-why institution." (Rowe, 129).

Lack of ethical imperative

Outdated teaching and learning model

"The modern curriculum teaches little about citizenship and responsibilities and a great deal about individualism and rights. The ecological emergency, however, can be resolved only if enough people come to hold a bigger idea of what it means to be a citizen" (Orr, 32).

Students leave college unprepared "In survey after survey, employers seem to agree that the skill they most want in future workers is adaptability. Those who hire complain that they often find today’s college graduates lacking in interpersonal skills, problem solving, effective written and oral communication skills, teamwork, and the ability to think critically and analytically. Employers say that future workplaces need those skills as well as degree holders who can come up with novel solutions to problems and better sort through information to filter out the most critical pieces." From: http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2012/09/12/skills-gap-employers-and-colleges-point-fingers-at-each-other/