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/
Recent Books
Arum and Roksa (2012)- Academically Adrift
Delbanco (2012)- College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be
Ferrall (2011)- Liberal Arts At The Brink
Bok (2006)- Our Underachieving Colleges
Introductions and Overview
Overview
Possibilities and Limitations
Some examples of Wave Three
3 Waves: Experiential Education in Higher Education
Experiential Education- An Introduction
Re-Thinking Pedagogy in Higher Education
Tectonic Shifts
Context of current state of Higher Education
A little about me
