Abstract
Field-based experiential learning is a high impact teaching practice that results in widespread learning benefits. However, critical scholarship suggests that benefits are not equally distributed among all students. This study asks how students from diverse positionalities engage with experiential learning. Our data come from 62 undergraduate students’ positionality statements and reflections from an applied research course on local housing insecurity. We find that the benefits of research experiences vary based on social positionality. Students who identify as insiders, female students, and those from low-income backgrounds tend to form empathetic connections, indicating improved reflexivity and affective learning during the research experience. The emotional burden on students, especially those studying socially proximate respondents, underscores the need for support systems and integrating self-care strategies into course design. Course outcomes should include both affective and cognitive learning domains to capture the range of benefits for students of diverse social positionalities.
Students’ growth in empathy, care, and emotional intelligence are integral features of deep learning. Yet the formal and informal pedagogical paradigms in higher education greatly emphasize cognitive learning outcomes and either downplay or exclude affective learning outcomes. A commonly perceived limitation of using affective outcomes in course design is that conceptualizations of affect, such as “empathy,” are generally difficult to systematically measure and assess and therefore should not be an explicit learning outcome. We propose that Fink’s (2013) Taxonomy of Significant Learning, with its integrated cognitive and affective learning outcomes, can capture a wider spectrum of cognitive and affective outcomes from experiential learning experiences in sociology courses. Drawing on reflective assignments from a course on poverty, we suggest that integrating affective learning outcomes can enrich the student experience and foster the kind of significant learning described by Fink. Affective learning outcomes may help explain college graduates’ long-term gains in civic engagement, feelings of personal responsibility, and increased self-efficacy (Chittum, Enke, and Finley 2022). Recognizing affective learning as a measurable outcome opens the door to identifying, assessing, and cultivating its growth across curricula.
Through an exploration of reflective assignments in an experiential learning course on regional poverty, we argue that this integration of cognitive and affective learning outcomes creates a significant learning experience, as demonstrated by indicators of increased student empathy and awareness of local social issues. Understanding how affective learning happens in the context of sociology courses is important because it helps instructors understand how to design course activities that enhance socio-cognitive learning, increase retention, foster student interest in service professions, and connect to local community issues. Additionally, better understanding affective growth in experiential learning vindicates the intrinsic value of social sciences in higher education and their role in promoting a more equitable society (Kromydas 2017).
Resolving the Cognitive and Affective Rift in Learning
In 1986, Barbara Martin and Leslie Briggs identified a rift between affective and cognitive domains of learning for both research and application. The most popular learning taxonomies previously addressed either cognitive domains of learning (e.g., Bloom 1956) or affective domains of learning (e.g., Krathwohl, Bloom, and Masia 1967; Wiggins and McTighe 2005) but failed to integrate both domains to measure learning. This gap persisted despite widespread agreement from educational research and neuroscience that cognitive growth does not happen in the absence of affective engagement (Mezirow 1985; Pessoa 2008). Affective domains tend to capture attitudes, which are simply “internal states that influence behavior” (Martin and Briggs 1986:101). Affective learning is growth across the social-emotional aspects that relate to socio-cognitive learning and development, including students’ awareness and understanding of emotions (Baker, Andriessen, and Järvelä 2013). Cognitive taxonomies emphasize the mental processes students are expected to perform, for example, demonstrating the ability to recall concepts, synthesize them, and perform an analysis (Martin and Briggs 1986:75).
To better integrate the cognitive and affective domains of learning, Fink (2013) developed a taxonomy to capture “significant learning experiences” and unite indicators of both domains. Fink’s learning taxonomy presumes that affective and cognitive growth coalesce for deep, significant learning. Fink (2013:8) defines significant learning as learning where students integrate lessons from courses into their everyday lives in ways that enhance their social interactions with others and help them to become more informed and thoughtful citizens. Significant learning results in “some kind of lasting change that is important to the learner’s life” (Fink 2013:34). This significant learning arises from a “comprehensive reassessment of oneself and the very criteria that one has been using to make crucial value judgments about one’s life” (Mezirow 1985:24). Fink’s taxonomy reflects this concept of significant learning in an intuitive theoretical narrative: Profound learning happens when students care about the course topics and can envision connections to their lived experiences.
Students’ growth in empathy, care, and emotional intelligence are integral features of significant learning (Fink 2013; Shephard 2008) and fundamental to developing the sociological imagination (Ghidina 2019; Latshaw 2015). Indeed, affective learning has long been part of the sociological tradition. Max Weber suggested that empathy was a precursor for comprehending the social world. Weber’s verstehen can be interpreted as an empathetic understanding of others, which is necessary to better “comprehend social action” (Wynn et al. 2023). Practical cognitive skills, specifically critical thinking, are considered a necessary foundation for developing a sensibility of social justice and an empathetic “understanding [of] another’s lived experiences” (Zornado, Harrison, and Weisman 2020:80). Furthermore, scholars have argued that critical thinking in sociology relies on a social justice orientation that is indivisible from empathy (Zornado, Harrison, and Weisman 2020). This example of integrated learning, of either critical thinking-driven empathy or empathy-driven critical thinking, can result in improved “emotional intelligence,” including skills of improved self-regulation and self-awareness (Fink 2013; Wynn et al. 2023). Fink (2013:37) resolves the chicken-egg dilemma of whether cognitive skills preempt more affective capacity or vice versa by suggesting that these facets are relational and integrated, or “synergistic.”
Yet in comparison to scholarship on other educational frameworks, such as Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy, Fink’s (2013) model, including affective learning, has been the subject of fewer critical assessments. For example, a recent systematic literature review considered a decade’s (2014–2024) worth of scholarship on Fink’s taxonomy and found only 31 relevant articles and theses (Vargas et al. 2024). Of this sample, 68 percent of assessments utilized qualitative methods, such as content analyses of students’ reflections or journals, student interviews, or focus groups with students or instructors. Only 13 percent used quantitative instruments, such as Likert scales of self-rated growth in the affective domain or formal assessments as proxies for growth (Vargas et al. 2024:1347). Previous scholarship in the health and human services educational field offers some examples of operationalization of affective learning in ways applicable to sociology, such as growth in ethics, empathy, and civic values (Nazar, Rathbone, and Husband 2021; Potgieter, Filmalter, and Maree 2025). Likewise, past scholarship in the field of teacher education has also focused on growth in empathy and managing emotional states (DeLuca et al. 2021; Schoffner 2009).
Integrating Experiential Learning
Experiential learning courses are useful spaces to investigate how affective growth might be observed in student work. Community-based experiential learning, recognized as a high-impact practice (HIP), offers students field-based applied learning with community partners grounded in the principle that meaningful, reciprocal engagement with the community beyond the university enhances the overall quality of learning while also benefiting society (Kuh 2008). Community-based learning encompasses previous notions of service learning and elements of experiential learning that acknowledges the partnership of the community, broadly defined, in the learning process (Mooney and Edwards 2001). Community-based learning within sociology courses has been demonstrated to improve multiple aspects of the student experience, including in academic performance (Bach and Weinzimmer 2011; Garoutte 2018; Mayer et al. 2019), resilience and adaptability (Jakubowski and Burman 2004), and civic engagement (Rocha Beardall 2022).
Fink’s (2013) taxonomy captures six domains of learning, including more traditional cognitive domains, or “Foundational Knowledge” that overlap with affective domains (see Figure 1). Affective learning is captured in Fink’s taxonomic dimensions of “Human Dimension” and “Caring Dimension.” Fink’s Human Dimension encapsulates students’ growth in emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills (pp. 53–54). Fink’s Caring Dimension captures the change of students’ feelings, interests, or values as a result of taking a course. For example, the Caring Dimension might assess the level of students’ interest or excitement to continue learning about the topic beyond the course (Fink 2013:55).
Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning.
As sociology instructors, we often intend for students to learn the skills of social science research and applications in purposeful and socially meaningful ways. To understand how both skill development and affective growth co-occur in deep learning experiences, we analyze data from an applied experiential learning course to consider students’ views on their growth in capacity for empathetic listening, self-regulation, and self-awareness. By better defining and measuring elements that validly capture the growth of these capacities and mobilize critical sociological thinking, we aim to capture the broader extent of learning occurring in experiential learning courses and help justify future inclusion of integrated outcomes in social science curricula.
Methods
This study uses a qualitative, classroom-based approach to examine the impact of integrating affective learning into a sociology course. We detail our course design, data collection, and analysis of 62 students’ work across two semesters to assess changes in affective and cognitive learning outcomes. To explore how affective learning in experiential activities might enhance student outcomes, we introduced new modules and assessments into an established course cotaught by the authors. Across two offerings of our course, students considered how aspects of affective learning, such as building connections, practicing empathy, and reflecting on their positionality, may have influenced their learning. Qualitative analyses of written assessments showed patterns of growth in key aspects of both affective and cognitive learning.
Course Context
The Poverty in Tucson Field Workshop (Workshop) is an upper-division elective course regularly offered every spring semester in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. As an applied experiential learning opportunity, the Workshop serves as a capstone course designed to bridge the gap between theory and practice by providing students with hands-on experience, allowing them to apply concepts and techniques learned across their personal and educational endeavors. The Workshop is akin to a methodological field school. Although there are no prerequisites for enrolling in the Workshop, the typical annual 40-student enrollment skews toward seniors in the School of Sociology. The University of Arizona is a large public university in the southwestern United States that serves as the state’s land grant institution. In 2022, the University of Arizona’s enrollment was approximately 40,000 undergraduate students. As a Hispanic-Serving Institution, the university’s largest minority group identifies as Hispanic, at 25 percent, and 45 percent of the undergraduate student body identifies as non-Hispanic White (hereafter, White 1 ).
For this course’s applied research component, students conduct eight structured interviews with residents facing housing insecurity, analyze the data, and present their findings to community partner organizations. Students carried out the interviews remotely, over telephone or video conferencing software, each lasting 45 minutes to 2 hours, and followed a structured interview guide with closed- and open-ended questions on finances, housing, employment, health, and caregiving. Because there are no required prerequisites, the beginning of the course is dedicated to content delivery on patterns of poverty in the local community. The remaining weeks include training in interview techniques (four weeks), data collection (four weeks), and data analysis and public presentation (three weeks). As part of their preparation for ethical research, all students completed the institutionally mandated CITI Human Subjects Protection Training for human research. To learn how to conduct the interviews that included potentially sensitive topics, including housing, finances, and subjective well-being, students spend four weeks learning the fundamentals of interviewing for research, including how to navigate and read the interview instrument, how to perform active listening without biasing the respondent, how to perform empathy, and how to prompt respondents to provide more information for open-ended questions.
When preparing students to conduct interviews, they rehearsed how to use empathetic listening as a strategy to reduce possible distress for respondents and to gauge when it was appropriate to probe with follow-up questions. Students practiced reading the interview guide aloud and role-played active listening and empathetic responses including phrases and scripts to respond to respondents sharing difficult experiences. To help with these scripts, students also watched a short video resource on the difference between empathy and sympathy where Brown (2013) defines empathy as “sitting with” someone in their experience and offers examples of how to offer support.
Student Positionalities and Reflections
To assess the possible integrated cognitive and affective outcomes associated with participating in experiential learning by conducting the research interviews, students were assigned two writing assignments, one prior to the fieldwork component and the second at the conclusion of the course. The first assignment was to write a positionality statement. In preparation, students read Holmes’s (2020) article of the emic-etic or “insider-outsider” considerations of a researcher’s reflexive positionality and attended a course lecture and discussion on the role of positionality as a human researcher. They then completed a written assignment of 500 to 800 words responding to the prompt: “Describe and analyze 3–5 factors of your personal identity and how this ‘positions’ you as a researcher. How will these factors allow you to engage with respondents and topics around poverty?” When students learn about their own social positionality, they are better able to understand another person’s relationship to social power and resources (e.g., Berard and Ravelli 2021; Haskie 2013; Roca, Bermúdez-Figueroa, and Estepa-Maestre 2020).
After the conclusion of the interviews and analyses, students were asked to complete a second writing assignment responding to the prompt:
Now that you have completed your research, revisit your written positionality memo from earlier in the course. . . . How did you see your positionality in action? What events in the research process prompted you to think about your positionality? In what ways did your positionality help or hinder your ability to engage with respondents? What would you change about your positionality statement after completing the assignment?
Sixty-two students (2022: n = 32, 82 percent response rate; 2023: n = 30, 80 percent response rate) submitted both a positionality statement and an end of course reflection and consented to have their statements included in this research. We paired the students’ positionality and reflection statements for analysis. The findings presented here come from the students’ end of course reflections, but we coded the responses with the additional context provided by the paired positionality statements. The positionality statements inform the demographic information in Table 1, relying on students’ self-described factors of their identity for demographic information. Commonly cited factors of student identity include socioeconomic status (94 percent), race or ethnicity (92 percent), and gender (86 percent; see Table 1).
Student-Identified Positionality (N = 62).
Does not equal 100 percent because not all students disclosed in all categories.
Analysis
Qualitative coding requires reading the documents line by line and systematically classifying document segments as they align with an established codebook (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995; Rubin and Rubin 2005). We manually coded the paired student positionality statements and final reflections from the 2022 and 2023 cohorts (total pairs, N = 62) using the project-specific codebook developed from inductive codes from the data itself and deductive codes constructed from Fink’s (2013) Significant Learning Taxonomy. The inductive codes also include students’ self-identified characteristics, including race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, language ability, local status, and perceived insider/outsider status. Using qualitative software Atlas.ti (version 24.0.0), we coded and reviewed a sample of the reflections to check for intercoder reliability (simple intercoder reliability = 84 percent). The remaining reflections were coded and analyzed according to the shared codebook. This research was conducted according to the requirements of the university’s Institutional Review Board. All quotes presented in the findings are identified by pseudonyms.
Deductive codes from Fink’s (2013) Human Dimension and Caring Dimension are relevant here. Human Dimension emphasizes growth in students’ emotional intelligence and their ability to “discover the personal and social implications of what they learn” (Fink 2013:36). This might appear in self-reporting on how they better understand themselves and their positionality and as a result, better understand others (Fink 2013:36). Students demonstrated growth in the Human Dimension in instances where they (1) defined spaces of commonality with community members despite differences in positionality, (2) demonstrated skills of empathetic listening and building connections, and (3) reflected on improved emotional capacity to empathize when confronted with others’ stories of hardship. We additionally coded for cognitive learning, where students reflected on development of a research skill (i.e., active listening), integrated a discussion of specific course concept, or referenced the broader social structures or community context from the course materials. Although we coded for cognitive learning, this work focuses specifically on how affective growth can manifest as a separate or integrated indicator in a reflective learning activity for students after their participation in a community-based research project.
Affective Learning Outcomes
Students demonstrated significant affective learning outcomes through their interview work with community members experiencing poverty. Their reflections illustrate processes of interpersonal connection, the development of empathy, and an emerging ethic of care.
Connecting with Others
Almost half of the students reflected that they connected more with their respondents than they expected after completing the interviews (n = 30). For example, Sarah, a White female student, wrote about her “surprise” at being able to connect with her respondents. She wrote:
I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to connect with and have meaningful conversations with everyone that I interviewed. My biggest fear going into the fieldwork portion of this course was that I would be so different from the people I interviewed that we wouldn’t be able to find any common ground, or they would feel uncomfortable opening up to me. My experience could not have gone more differently. Despite differences we had in life circumstances and experiences, I found a lot of common ground with the individuals I interviewed.
Along with Sarah, Alicia, a Black female student, also described her “shock” when she connected with her respondents when she had anticipated being an outsider relative to her respondents. Alicia wrote, “I was shocked by how being an outsider did not hinder my ability to relate to the participants specifically caregivers as much as I thought it would.” And then, Andrea, a Black, Hispanic 2 female student wrote about her surprise at respondents’ willingness to share difficult experiences in the interviews. She reflected: “One man I spoke to had explained to me about how his life had taken a drastic turn of events. I can honestly say I was surprised about how he was able to be so open and honest with me, a complete stranger.” Like Andrea, Alicia, and Sarah, the surprise of being able to connect with respondents was present in about half of the student reflections. Students’ “surprise” in their own capacity to connect with respondents suggests a change in awareness of how they engage in conversations as researchers and as humans listening to others’ stories and experiences.
Empathy as a Learned Skill
Empathy emerged as both a skill (as a performance of empathy) and an emotional response (as a shared feeling) in the student statements. Julia, a White female student, shared how she used empathy as a skill to help make the respondent comfortable enough to share their experience. For Julia, empathy was akin to knowing what “social cues” should be read to ensure the comfort of the respondent and the success of the interview. Julia wrote:
When discussing a woman’s situation with her, I utilized empathy to put myself in her shoes and understand what she must feel like and is going through. Using empathy and perception can help you pull back at times when you can sense the participant is uncomfortable. When talking about sensitive material, it is imperative to pick up on social cues to discuss topics of relevance within conversations. . . . Empathy is extremely necessary when having these difficult conversations.
Students, like Julia, who discussed empathy as a skill shared other additional skills of emotional regulation. Emotional regulation was shown when students shared how they were able to withhold judgement or manage their reactions during the interviews. Madison, a White female student, described how her socialization, her prior abilities, and the skills she learned in the class helped her successfully navigate in the interviews. Madison wrote:
I am really good at listening to people and making sure that they feel heard and understood. I learned a lot during these interviews, and it allowed me to develop interview skills as well as know how to respond when people are telling you difficult things that are happening to them.
Furthermore, Brianna, a Hispanic female student, wrote how her development of her listening skills in the early interviews improved her ability to connect with subsequent respondents. She wrote:
At the beginning of this course, I doubted much of my social skills because I didn’t have experience. My first interview was a bit rough but after the second interview, it was much easier to connect. These skills not only helped during the interviews but also during the [community-partner] forum.
Here, Brianna showed how the skills of listening allowed her to connect and successfully complete the interviews, which led to increased confidence. Already, these reflections hint at the difficulty of extracting a skill like empathy from other affective growth, in this case, confidence and increased “passion” regarding the research population and topic. This integrated nature of empathy demonstrates how facets of empathy develop in both cognitive and affective spaces of learning.
Empathy as Emotion
Students described their ability to both identify and then regulate their emotional response when conducting interviews. When students indicated that they “put themselves in their shoes” or felt an emotional empathetic reaction to difficult situations, including sadness, we coded this as emotional empathy, which we classified as an affective indicator in accordance with Fink’s (2013) Human Dimension. Just over half of the students (n = 34) wrote that as a result of the training, they were better able to connect and respond with sensitivity when listening to people sharing difficult experiences.
Students, like Naomi, an Asian female student, described how their emotional responses prompted reflection on their positionality. Naomi described feelings of guilt that her upward mobility had allowed her to escape the housing precarity described by a respondent. She wrote:
I realized that although my insider knowledge was very beneficial in being able to understand my participants and their housing needs, I found that it made it very difficult to go through. Being able to relate to some of their situations was favorable because they were more willing to open up to me about their situations. Unfortunately, I didn’t think that their stories and their current experiences would affect me as much as they did.
In recognizing shared experiences with their respondent, Naomi found herself strongly affected by their hardships. Laura, a Hispanic female student, wrote how the issues of hardship became more real only when she had made “deeper connections” with her respondent. Laura wrote:
Of course, you feel awful hearing everyone’s stories of losing their homes, not being able to afford food, clothes, or other basic necessities but it doesn’t really hit you until you make that deeper connection. She spoke to me about how she makes tamales every week to be able to put food on the table. That reminded me of my own grandma who also makes tamales every week, but she’s fortunate enough to give them away to friends and family without having to worry about what she’s going to eat herself. It was very eye-opening to see that someone I am similar to can have such a different lifestyle. It made me want to help her more and try to do everything I can in order for her and her family to not lose their home.
For Laura, empathy allowed her to better understand the very human costs of housing insecurity in the community and inspired her to want to help. Students, like Laura, described how skills in active listening and performed sensitivity helped them to realize a fuller perspective and connect emotionally to their respondents’ stories.
Like Laura, Hailey, a White female student, also reflected on feelings of helplessness at the difficulties of hearing stories of hardship. Hailey described the emotional demand that accompanied the interviews. She wrote:
The process turned out to be not only demanding in terms of hard work and hours invested but also emotionally impactful. . . . It’s challenging to know how to respond appropriately when individuals are sharing experiences of eviction, mistreatment, and, in some cases, poverty stemming from past abusive relationships and other challenging circumstances. Conducting these interviews turned out to be an eye-opening experience, teaching me valuable lessons and deepening my compassion beyond my initial expectations.
For Hailey and others, this emotional response was, as Hailey wrote, “eye-opening” and helped her to better understand her capacity to connect and navigate these conversations.
These significant learning moments were prompted by empathetic connections for many students. Amelia, a White female student, described how the connections prompted self-reflection and led her to realize the importance of having empathy and compassion for others. She reflected:
Most of the individuals I spoke to I could not relate to in consideration of their personal experiences. A few times, participants cried during the interviews, because they were reflecting on their personal struggles. I was told some very upsetting and heartbreaking stories, that made me reflect on the life I live. These interviews made me realize how important it is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and try to understand their point of view. Everyone is going through something, and it’s essential to be judgment-free and show empathy.
Awareness and connection to respondents’ stories stirred feelings of guilt, sadness, helplessness, and pensiveness. Additionally, some students shared feelings of outrage and an increased sense of the importance of the course topics as a result of their empathetic engagement.
The Caring Domain
As students developed emotional connections with their respondents’ stories, many (n = 20) also expressed concern about the social and policy issues that exacerbated their hardships. Students reflected on their desire to help respondents, their desire to invest in the community, and their ambitions to carry the lessons from the coursework experience with them into their personal and professional lives. We coded these occurrences as “increased interest” and classed this as an affective characteristic as captured under Fink’s (2013) Caring Domain.
For example, Diana, a White female student, expressed outrage that a respondent working full-time was unable to escape financial precarity. This outrage pointed outward, to the injustice of housing insecurity for full-time workers and caregivers. She wrote:
A single mom that has two jobs and working full-time while still taking care of her children can be homeless. This is something that should not be happening. We see homelessness all the time in [our city] and obviously so many things have to change, and doing this research really made me think about all of these issues.
Like Diana, a quarter of students (n = 16) expressed a kind of moral outrage that their neighbors were living in financial and housing precarity. Importantly, Diana also showed signs of structural thinking by linking an individual’s experience to the broader patterns of homelessness in the community introduced in the course content. Isabella, a Hispanic female student, reflected on privilege and experienced feelings of guilt, shame, and anger that the country and community failed to provide for basic necessities to those struggling with mental illness. Isabella wrote:
I was able to empathize with everyone I spoke to and could understand their struggles and feelings of uncertainty about the future. I could especially empathize with those who had mental health struggles, since I battle with the same issues they do. Knowing I have the ability to not worry about the things that they do made me feel guilty in a way, but I mostly felt anger and shame at the fact that there are so many people in the U.S. who struggle to afford basic necessities.
One of the benefits of applied experiential learning is the opportunity for students to see the impact of their skills in the real world. This realization can help them to make the transition to the workplace with clear expectations and motivation to make positive change. Hallie, a Black female student, reflected: “It was hard being asked questions about inflation and policies, but it is even more crucial to think about the answers to those because, in a decade or so, we will be making [the policies].” Leah, a White female student, also wrote about the relationship between poverty and policy and the importance of research for making informed changes. Leah reflected:
I believe that poverty is systemic, that there are systems in place that keep people poor. I have complicated feelings about how our government handles poverty and how policy should be used to help. I believe this research is important, and I hope that it will help in creating more stability for people in [our county].
Here, these reflections show both increased understanding of social issues and how they come to see themselves as future agents of policy and change.
Cognitive Learning Outcomes
Conceptual knowledge of sociology has typically been assessed by indicators exclusively in the cognitive learning domain (Rickles et al. 2013; Wagenaar 2004). However, in hypothesizing learning as an integration of both skills and affect, we anticipated that students who showed strong affective indications would also demonstrate a strong grasp of the course topics on social structures.
A quarter of students (n = 17) both showed emotional empathy and indicated cognitive growth in their ability to express elements of empathy-driven critical thinking of social structures. These students used their reflections to reference structural, rather than individual, explanations for patterns of poverty in their community. We coded references to course content and structural explanations as indicators of cognitive learning. For example, Micaela, a Hispanic female student, shared how the experience helped her to understand the human cost of poverty and displacement in their local community. She wrote:
Once the interviews were done and all the data was gathered, seeing such high numbers of those who could barely make ends meet, barely afford rent, etc., really made me sad in a way. How there are so many people out here in [county] trying to live a life where they could be financially stable.
Looking at the overall patterns from the full data set, Micaela grasped the scope and human impact of housing insecurity in the community. Sarah, a White female student, also realized respondents had found themselves facing housing insecurity as a result of common life events, which had set households from the state of financial precarity to the crisis of potential eviction. She wrote:
None of us were actually that different. Just because the person being interviewed has faced eviction before doesn’t mean that they didn’t live a regular life before that. These people were not always born into poverty, most of them actually opened up to me about how they could never have imagined themselves being in the situation they are currently in. The majority of individuals I spoke with had an event like divorce, an accident, or an unexpected financial setback that they were not equipped to handle that resulted in them being faced with eviction.
Sarah connected predictive factors of poverty, these life events, with the individual stories her respondents shared. In engaging structural explanations, students found new ways to think about their positionality relative to their respondents. As with Weber’s verstehen (see Wynn et al. 2023), the integration of empathy and critical thinking about social structures yielded a significant learning outcome. In these learning experiences, we see that integrating students’ personal life experiences with observations of others shapes how students might rethink the social structure.
Achieving Significant Learning
Fink (2013:7) suggests that if all domains of learning are engaged, students are more likely to have a “significant learning experience,” where what students learn “become[s] part of how they think, what they can and want to do, what they believe is true about life, and what they value.” Across the data, students’ reflections described their learning as meaningful, rewarding, and having the potential of long-term impact. Unprompted, half of the students (n = 31) shared their experience as a meaningful or rewarding experience. Olivia, a White female student, described how her skill development as a researcher opened a profound way to connect with other people, the course content, and community issues. Olivia wrote:
The journey from feeling like an outsider to recognizing the transformative power of empathetic listening has been both humbling and enlightening. I am reminded that true understanding goes beyond surface-level identifiers, reaching into the core of shared humanity. In conclusion, these interviews have been a journey of self-discovery, challenging preconceptions, and expanding my capacity for empathy. The intersections of privilege, language, and personal experience have woven a tapestry of connection that defies easy categorization.
Olivia’s growth up to this point may indeed “def[y] easy categorization” if categorized within an exclusively cognitive framework of learning. In Fink’s (2013:36) integrated model, significant learning also accounts for students’ growing interest or “care” about the course topics. Victoria, a Hispanic female student, spoke about the ways that the fieldwork helped her to see applications in real-world experiences. She wrote:
These interviews and fieldwork process in its entirety truly equipped me with new perspectives on life. One of my biggest takeaways from this research and fieldwork was that it reintroduced humanity back into the pandemic discussion. There are real people and real lives which continue to experience significant setbacks and obstacles due to the pandemic.
Victoria’s “new perspectives on life” indicates a shift in how she is interpreting broader social events and structures.
Other students described their research as likely to have a lifelong impact. This speaks to the long-term impact of a significant learning experience as one that has “some kind of lasting changes that is important in terms of the learner’s life” (Fink 2013:34). Taylor, a White female student, exemplified the potential of this long-term impact when she wrote, “It is very easy to slip into a college town bubble mindset, but this project definitely broadened my horizon on how other people here are living. Overall, I . . . feel the things I have learned will stay with me forever and help me in my future career.” Isabella, a Hispanic female student, echoed this idea of a lifelong impact and wrote: “I will reflect back on this experience throughout my lifetime, especially if I am able to continue doing similar research like this in the future.” Students like Victoria, Taylor, and Isabella exemplified the significant learning outcomes described by Fink (2013), including the prospective long-term impact of participating in the course.
In teaching sociology, many instructors, including us, aim to help students understand social structures and the social context that patterns social outcomes. Yet all too often, we expect students to think critically about these social structures without explicitly including opportunities to integrate empathetic learning outcomes. The affective dimensions establish how and to what extent the course concepts matter to the students.
Conclusions
Students in our experiential learning course demonstrated growth across both cognitive and affective domains, suggesting that they are experiencing significant learning as described in Fink’s (2013) integrated taxonomy. Given the integrated nature of affective and cognitive learning that manifested in the student reflections, a taxonomy that focuses solely on cognitive learning overlooks an important portion of learning taking place.
We find that students developed empathetic listening and used it both as a research skill to elicit information and as a meaningful way to connect with respondents. Students reported affective growth across multiple dimensions, including Fink’s (2013) Human Dimension and Caring Dimension. Growth in the Human Dimension manifested in student reports of increased self- and others-awareness. Growth in the Caring Dimension surfaced in student reports of increased concern and interest around course topics. Thus, using an integrated taxonomy is shown to be a useful tool to classify the affective learning taking place and better capture the impact of experiential and community-based learning courses. While experiential learning courses have been lauded for their ability to enhance learning outcomes across cognitive domains (e.g., Chang, Wu, and Chang 2023), we also find that students increase their capabilities for emotional regulation, empathy, and connection to course content in ways that motivate their professional goals and engagement with community issues. Further work might explore the role affective growth plays in civic engagement and other indicators of humanitarian outlook not captured here.
Indications of affective growth appear when students are asked to reflect on their own learning. Our work here shows that exercises to measure affective growth can be intentionally integrated into course learning activities, such as student reflection assignments. Other scholars have shown the importance of student reflections for student learning (e.g., Howes 2017; Wheeley, Klieve, and Clark 2022), but this research demonstrates that affective growth is happening for students in these spaces even as few learning outcomes address them. Still, community-based experiential learning with disadvantaged residents carries risks of exploitation and regressive student education that require instructors to be very intentional about course content presentation, research supervision, and debriefing to ensure that students avoid leaving the research experience with worse class or racial biases than when they arrived (Clever and Miller 2019). To achieve high-quality learning outcomes, improving students’ interest, engagement, and emotional intelligence will require systematic support for students’ personal growth and critical reflections on how course content challenges their existing worldviews, biases, and social outlooks. Failing to measure the affective growth, particularly when the literature shows strong theoretical support for its integration, undermines pedagogical best practice. To remedy this oversight, Fink’s (2013) integrated taxonomy affords affective growth a central and inextricable role in quality learning outcomes. In focusing only on cognitive learning outcomes, we systematically overlook the integrated learning in these applied, experiential learning spaces.
Limitations
Although our work, along with the growing body of literature on affective learning, demonstrates students’ growth in key domains of both cognitive and affective learning, further work is needed to identify the causal mechanisms that can be clearly linked to improvements in broad learning outcomes. This scholarly frontier includes the difficult task of reliably measuring the magnitude of improvements that affective growth measures influence when properly integrated with cognitive outcomes. For example, while the importance of the Caring domain and practice of empathy is central to our students’ growth, their community-based research efforts are limited to a remote interaction, potentially limiting this domain’s influence on overall learning. We would expect to see similar, if not more pronounced, affective growth in a more in-person community-based experiential activity. Still, our work here demonstrates how affective growth can be captured in student reflections and therefore might be more systematically included in learning outcomes for experiential courses.
Additionally, because our findings rely on students’ open-ended reflections, it is difficult to draw general conclusions about the students who did not clearly express growth in empathy or connection. Thus, future work and closed-ended tools might better account for the experience of these students, variations by student positionality, and preconceived expectations of connection. Furthermore, students’ assessment of their positionality is based on their subjective perceptions of their relative social position to the sample population rather than more objective data on demographic information. Therefore, this study does not analyze students’ demographic information against the actual income, race, or gender of respondents, potentially limiting our ability to discern the role of demographic differences in our students’ learning.
Future research might build from this and explore how to quantify and systematically assess the magnitude of this influence on cognitive growth and student retention. In this work, our understanding of mechanisms of affective growth is not yet sufficiently understood to use to inform grades that might penalize students who do not have a significant learning experience. Still, as instructors start to better understand the many elements of integrated learning, we can continue to improve learning experiences and outcomes for students.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Center for University Education Scholarship and the Culturally Responsive Curriculum Development Institute at the University of Arizona for the intellectual support and engagement.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: funding for this project was received from the Garcia Family Foundation.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.