The Role of Experiential Education in Re-Thinking The Modern University

Jay W. Roberts, Ph.D.
Assoc. Prof., Education and Environmental Studies
Earlham College

A little about me

Overview

Context of current state of Higher Education

Tectonic Shifts

Re-Thinking Pedagogy in Higher Education

Experiential Education- An Introduction

3 Waves: Experiential Education in Higher Education

Some examples of Wave Three

Possibilities and Limitations

Questioning the Value and Purpose of Higher Education

Recent Books

Bok (2006)- Our Underachieving Colleges

Ferrall (2011)- Liberal Arts At The Brink

Delbanco (2012)- College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be

Arum and Roksa (2012)- Academically Adrift

What They Are Saying

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/

Lack of ethical imperative

Too vocational

It's too expensive (bad ROI)

Tectonic Shifts affecting Higher Education

High Speed Connectivity

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

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.

Digital Citizens and New Knowledge Processes

‘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

Economic and Politcal Pressures

Globalism and an increasingly "flattened" world

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

Funding: Efficiency efforts and cost containment

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

Explosion of brain research

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

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

3 Key Findings

Metacognition

What does this mean for teaching?

Make it overt

Teaching process of learning over content

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)

Neuroplasticity

What does this mean for teaching?

Stress and Threat

Importance of affective domains in learning

Ritual/Novelty

Parallel Processing

What does this mean for teaching?

Multi-modal instruction

Complex, mutli-sensory immersion

Enrichment keys: feedback, relevancy, challenge

Simulations, active, authentic, social learning

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).

Student Resistance

Time commitments- this isn't my only class

Non-traditional learning and assessment

Group work- "hell is other people"

Faculty Resistance

Time commitment

Team teaching

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

Social dimensions of learning

Structural Resistance

Academic calendar

Team teaching and interdisciplinarity

Culture of Discplines

Final Queries

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

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

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

In times of change...

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/

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.

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/

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

Wave 1

Separation of the Curriculum and Co-Curriculum

"Extra" curriculum

Volunteering

Part-Time Jobs

Clubs, organizations, etc

Wave 2

First Tentative Linkages

Service learning emerges

Isolated "active learning"

Simulations

Student Leadership Development

Off-campus study programs

Wave 3

Integration

High Impact Learning Initiative (Hoy, 2012)

Place and Problem/Project Based

Collaborations

Thematic, Interdsicplinary Curricula

Strong and deep reflective practices

Capacity building in communities

Scaffolding and sequencing across experiences

Innovative forms of assessment focused on demonstrated learning outcomes

Etymology of Experience

Experience: German (erlebnis and erfahrung)

Latin: Expereri- -to test but also to risk

To be experienced, to have an experience

Common Misconceptions

It has to be outside the classroom

It's "hands on" learning

It only can apply to certain disciplines and fields

It's not rigorous

A Quick Definition

EE in Practice

EELDRC: A Design Framework

Enroll

Experience

Label

Demonstrate

Review

Connect

Experience before Label- Loose Parts Play

Primary vs Secondary Experience

So what is it?

Many things!

Individual/Romantic

Social/Democratic

Critical

Transformationalists

Curriculum Projects

Service Learning

Outdoor Education

Place Based Education

Education for Sustainability

Community Education

Project Based Education

Expeditionary Learning

Active Learning

Cooperative Learning

Collaborative

Student-Student

Faculty-Student

Faculty-Faculty

Campus-Community

Integrative

School World- Real World

Curriculum-Co-Curriculum

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

Theory-Practice

Problem and Project Oriented

Active

Community Research

Civic Engagement

Development of knowledge, skills, and values

Public demonstrations of learning

New Modes of Teaching and Learning

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.

Teachers as Curators of Experience

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

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

Facilitation

Design

Requires not just content mastery but process mastery

Sitting at the center of much of this is
Experiential Education

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