Abstract
This special issue of the Journal of Experiential Education comes at a particularly salient time in the history of higher education. As the sector experiences what many have called the “great disruption” brought about by a host of interrelated factors including the global economic recession of 2008, rising income inequality, rapidly shifting demographics, and the changes associated with the Internet age, colleges and universities around the world have scrambled to respond. One such response has been an increasing emphasis on experiential education.
Experiential education, or perhaps more accurately experiential learning in this context, works well as both an institutional and pedagogical response for a variety of reasons. First, from an institutional standpoint, the emphasis on developing “real world skills” through hands-on and applied learning helps counter the persistent critique that colleges and universities do not prepare students adequately for the world of work and provides, in theory, a demonstrable return on investment for that expensive degree. Second, institutions are finding that certain kinds of experiential work, such as community-based learning, serve as public exemplars of the educational mission while providing good public relations with local, state, and regional stakeholders. Finally, as colleges and universities across the United States and in many other parts of the world continue to compete for students and their tuition revenue, innovative experiential programs can help differentiate institutions in a very crowded marketplace.
But beyond the perhaps cynical and market-based viewpoint of the institution, there are also sound pedagogical reasons for the rise in experiential approaches. George Kuh’s (2008) influential research on High Impact Practices demonstrates that many experiential applications such as study abroad, service learning, project-based learning, and internships have significant impact on students’ overall success in school. In addition, the Gallup-Purdue Index Report (2014) study found several key experiential factors contributed to postgraduate success and workplace engagement including experiences where students could apply learning outside the classroom, active involvement in extracurricular activities, and project work that took more than a semester to complete. And, according to a 2016 National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) survey, attributes employers most seek in job applicants include leadership, the ability to work in a team, communication, and problem-solving skills—all attributes developed through well-designed, effective experiential learning environments. Finally, the emerging field of the neuroscience of learning supports many of the approaches used in experiential education including the role of uncertainty and ambiguity in learner engagement, the significance of emotion and the social context for learning, and the importance of review and reflection in long-term memory acquisition (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010; Bransford, 2000; Caine & Caine, 1991).
The current socioeconomic context along with these findings substantiates the usage of experiential learning in a whole host of contexts in higher education. Yet bringing experiential learning into the formal curriculum remains a pedagogical and structural challenge. Randy Bass (2012) makes this point in his article “Disrupting Ourselves: The Problem of Learning in Higher Education”:
. . . [O]ne key source of disruption in higher education is coming not from the outside but from our own practices, from the growing body of experiential modes of learning, moving from margin to center, and proving to be critical and powerful in the overall quality and meaning of the undergraduate experience. As a result, at colleges and universities we are running headlong into our own structures, into the way we do business. (p. 25)
As the lines between the curriculum and co-curriculum become increasingly blurred, as we begin to recognize that learning happens everywhere—not just in the four-walled classroom, and as research continues to support a variety of experiential methodologies, challenging questions are being asked about the quality and nature of the teaching and learning experience in higher education. If learning happens everywhere, how does that change the way we think about what “curriculum” is and how we create educative opportunities for students? Why are such learning activities considered outside the formal curriculum in the first place? What is the appropriate balance between so-called “traditional classroom experiences” such as seminars and lectures and more experiential ones such as collaborative research and project work, study away, internships, and other forms of applied work?
These are big questions that get to the core of the mission and purposes of higher education, and yet, too often, the scholarly discourse in experiential education is weak and diffuse. Certain methodologies and approaches, such as service learning, are reasonably well represented and studied in the literature. Others, such as active learning, seem to cut across a variety of disciplines and have limited coverage within the specific field of experiential education. Still others, such as project-based learning and integrated learning, are recent developments that require careful analysis and study as to their impact and effects.
This special issue of the Journal is representative of all of these trends. Interestingly, our call for submissions yielded an abundance of manuscripts on service learning, for example. In “Finding the Right Fit: Helping Students Apply Theory to Service Learning Contexts,” Audrey Ricke presents a case study of an upper level Anthropology course that included a service learning project. Her findings show that overt framing and scaffolding can help students move from rote memorization of theory to a more nuanced sense of theory-in-practice. In “Are We Experienced? Reflections on the SUNY Experiential Learning Mandate,” the authors take a critical stance on service learning mandates from the perspective of participating faculty and urge policy makers to focus on the pedagogical dimensions of such mandates rather than a more simplistic emphasis on activities.
Another area of submission interest involved field-based pedagogy and coursework. In “Outdoor Fieldwork in Higher Education: Learning From Multidisciplinary Experience,” the authors attempt to synthesize the range of disciplinary literature on what they call Outdoor Fieldwork (OFW) and come to conclusions as to the relative strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the approach. In “Place as Pedagogy: Toward Study Abroad for Social Change,” Jennifer Pipitone takes a critical perspective on study-abroad programming, highlighting the problems associated with relationship and context-free approaches to intercultural engagement. She argues for a place-based approach to study abroad that emphasizes relationality, critical self-awareness, and a commitment to social change beyond the experience itself. Finally, in “Impact of Transculturality on Student Experience of Outdoor Studies in Higher Education,” Smith examines a case study of a multicountry outdoor education experience in terms of developing transcultural competencies and growth.
Other areas of experiential education were underrepresented in our submissions. There were relatively few studies on classroom-based approaches in experiential education, for example, or other kinds of on-campus integrated curricular and co-curricular activity. Two articles included here examined curricular and co-curricular integration through experiential learning. In “Enhancing the College Student Experience: Outcomes of a Leisure Education Program,” the authors studied a range of activities associated with a leisure education program to measure the impact of leisure activity on dimensions of college student success. And, in “Student Employment as a Model for Experiential Learning,” the authors evaluate the outcomes and experiences of students involved in a university work–study program, finding benefits in terms of transferable civic and employment skills.
This issue, then, is fairly representative of the current state of scholarship and research into experiential learning in higher education and reveals both the current limitations and the possibilities that exist to move beyond those limits. What is clear is that more research on experiential learning in higher education is needed and, in particular, more longer term, rigorous, and mixed-methods studies on student learning outcomes—both inside and outside the classroom. There is also a need for greater focus on issues of diversity and inclusion as experiential approaches expand in both scope and scale in higher education. What are the impacts of experiential pedagogy across a range of constituencies? Are these impacts distributed evenly? The follow-up work on Kuh’s High Impact Practices (Brownell and Swaner, 2010) is one such example of this kind of research. Finally, opportunities exist to extend the connections and relationships across other fields and other discourses in the scholarship of teaching and learning. As experiential applications and methodologies continue to grow and expand, the field needs to grow and expand along with them. We need new voices, new perspectives, and new terrains of inquiry that can only be developed by branching out, networking, and cutting across old dividing lines.
There was a time not too long ago when the popular lament in regard to experiential education in this journal and elsewhere was its overly narrow focus on a particular form of experiential learning typically manifested in outdoor and environmental education. It seems as though we have begun to move past this limited notion of the field over the past decade. But there is more work to be done. One of the central tenets of experiential education is codified in the etymology of the word “experience.” Experience, in Latin, comes from expereri, which means to experiment, test, or risk. It is time the field tested its limits and risked its identity to stretch to new possibilities. As experiential learning both metaphorically and literally comes “in from the outside” in higher education, there will be exciting new opportunities for scholarship and research. From new curricular–co-curricular integrations, to internship programs, to active and collaborative learning in the classroom, to project and problem-based learning, there are a whole host of pedagogical approaches being developed on college and university campuses across the world. Each of these presents opportunities for study and research. But we must meet these opportunities prepared with a rigorous and well-developed scholarship agenda that pushes beyond our current limitations and mind-sets. Experiential education, and this Journal in particular, has the potential to serve as an important conceptual hub for research on these methodologies and practices both now and into the future.