Shatter the Glassy Stare: Implementing Experiential Learning in Higher Education

SHATTER THE GLASSY STARE: IMPLEMENTING EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION Editor Peter A. Machonis A Companion Piece to Place as Text: Approaches to Active Learning Jeffrey A. Portnoy Georgia Perimeter College [email protected] General Editor, NCHC Monograph Series Published in 2008 by National Collegiate Honors Council 110 Neihardt Residence Center University of Nebraska-Lincoln 540 N. 16th Street Lincoln, NE 68588-0627 (404) 472-9150 FAX: (402) 472-9152 Email: [email protected] http://www.NCHChonors.org National Collegiate Honors Council © Copyright 2008 by National Collegiate Honors Council International Standard Book Number 978-0-9796659-2-9 Cover Design by Prof. P.J. Aievoli (with the addition of art excerpted from John Bailly’s Cienfuegos) Managing Editor: Mitch Pruitt Production Editor: Cliff Jefferson Wake Up Graphics, Birmingham, AL Printed by Commercial Printing Company, Birmingham, AL ABOUT THE COVER John Bailly. Cienfuegos, 2007. Mixed media on paper (30”x 22”). Collection of Bill and Margaret Gellatly. Cienfuegos was part of an exhibition entitled “Place of Mind,” a col- laborative show highlighting cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dia- logues between a French-American painter, John Bailly, and a Cuban- American poet, Richard Blanco. In their frequent conversations, they showed each other how to look at each other’s work differently. The 3 painting on the cover represents a portrait of Blanco, whose family comes from the town of Cienfuegos, Cuba. As Bailly states: I then drew a portrait of Richard from life as he sat in my stu- dio in Miami. I wrote his name, Blanco, in Braille. But this Braille is two-dimensional, intended to be a symbol of the diffi- culty in communicating. I then drew my favorite line of all his poems, “There should be nothing here I don’t remember.” Richard later shared with me that when I included that line in the drawing, he had not yet realized its significance, just as I had not understood certain parts of my paintings until he shared his thoughts about them. He then wrote a poem using that line as its central theme. This type of conversation between us was, for me, the most wonderful part of our collaboration; we helped each other look at ourselves in a new manner. In the lexicon of Place as Text, the visual artist and the poet removed each other’s blinders. During small group explorations at NCHC Institutes, participants are deliberately assigned diverse groups representing different backgrounds and fields of specialization. While investigating their assigned areas, participants not only strike up conversations with the people they meet but also with each other. Everyone notices different aspects of the same landscape, helping all of the participants realize that they indeed do have blinders in how they see the world. When these blinders are removed, individuals become better learners and have richer experiences, similar to what the two artists shared. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments. 7 Foreword by Bernice Braid . 9 Semesters Institute Facilitators . 13 2007–2008 Honors Semester Committee Members. 15 Introduction . 17 Introduction to City as TextTM and Overview of Contents . 19 Joy Ochs, You’re not Typical Professors, Are You?. 27 CHAPTER 1: CAMPUS AS TEXT . 31 Anita R. Guynn, Place as Text: Town and Gown . 33 Mary Lou Pfeiffer, From Cigarette Butts to the “Stacks” and Beyond . 37 Joy Ochs, Campus as Text: a Faculty Workshop. 45 CHAPTER 2: LOCAL NEIGHBORHOODS . 51 Janice Allen, The Lower Ninth Ward: First Impressions, Final Realizations, Future Plans. 53 Peter A. Machonis, Little Haiti as Text . 57 CHAPTER 3: TRAVEL COURSES. 65 Joy Ochs, Adapting an Honors Pedagogy to a General Studies Travel Course . 67 Rick Ostrander, The Adopt-a-Village Project . 73 5 CHAPTER 4: SCIENCE-RELATED APPLICATIONS . 77 Devon L. Graham, Turning Over a New Leaf . 79 Kevin E. Bonine, Gourmet to Galapagos: Experiential Learning in the Sciences . 87 CHAPTER 5: MYTHOS, LOGOS, ETHOS WRITING EXERCISE. 97 Kathy A. Lyon, Crete Faculty Institute: A Change in Pedagogical Style . 99 John Kandl, Crossroads and Beyond . 105 Stephen J. Nichols, Do You Get the Blues? . 113 CHAPTER 6: PHILOSOPHICAL AND PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS. 119 Alan W. Grose, Platonic Thoughts on the Frustrations of Experiential Learning and Teaching: Reflections after the New Orleans Discovery and Recovery Institute . 121 Robert Strikwerda, Experiential Learning and City as TextTM: Reflections on Kolb and Kolb . 131 Appendix A: NCHC Faculty Institutes from 1998 to 2007. 139 Appendix B: Template for Institute Design . 145 Appendix C: How to Organize City as TextTM . 147 Appendix D: City as TextTM Strategies: Mapping, Observing, Listening, Reflecting . 149 Appendix E: Written Assignments . 151 About the Authors . 155 6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This monograph began as a proposal of the Honors Semesters Committee of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC). I would like to thank all of the colleagues of that committee for their input into the original design of this work as well as the members of the NCHC Publications Board for their encouragement in bringing together the essays of this volume. In particular, I would like to extend my deepest appreciation to the Semesters Committee members who helped with the initial and subsequent editing of the essays submitted, in particular Elizabeth Beck, Kevin Bonine, Bernice Braid, Clarence Christian, Craig Cobane, William Daniel, Shirley Forbes Thomas, Devon Graham, Kim Klein, Matt Nickerson, Joy Ochs, and Todd Petersen. Special recognition goes to Bernice Braid, Ada Long, and Shirley Forbes Thomas for reading the entire manuscript and to Devon Graham for his numerous constructive comments throughout the editing process. I am also grateful to all of the NCHC Faculty Institute Directors who provided detailed information on the past seminars for the appendices, as well as the members of the NCHC Publications Board, in particular Jeffrey Portnoy, who provided advice on the myriad details of this monograph. In addition, I would like to extend my gratitude to Ivelaw Griffith, Lesley Northup, and the Florida International University Honors College staff for supporting my par- ticipation in the 2003 Island as Text Faculty Institute and, more importantly, for their professional assistance in organizing the 2006 Miami Faculty Institute. Finally, special thanks to my mentors extraordinaire, Ada Long, Dail Mullins, and William Daniel, facilitators of the 2003 Island as Text Faculty Institute, who first introduced me to City as TextTM. Peter A. Machonis Department of Modern Languages The Honors College Florida International University 7 8 FOREWORD BERNICE BRAID LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITY-BROOKLYN City as TextTM grew out of a particular configuration: course clusters comprised of several disciplines that were organized to address a theme especially resonant with a given site. It was clear that students needed a mechanism to sensitize them to context and to integrate their reading, discussions, and writing. Multiple components—structured explorations repeated over time in various locations; laboratory observations recorded with attention to detail and nuance; formal and informal interviews of people who live, play, work, worship in, and shape their environment—became the experiment that evolved into a versatile exercise we now call Place as Text. Whether “city,” “town,” “village,” or “neighborhood,” any socially constructed enclave we tested yielded similar and spectacular results: students looked, listened, heard, and saw differently and better when the larger place became a text they sought to decipher in terms of the cumulative information they were compil- ing in their classes. Better yet, they were energized, determined, and persistent about returning to locations, pursuing ideas, and asking questions. They used their forays into people’s arenas to begin to see how others convert space into place, how others domesticate the enormity of a great metropolis, how others create personal lives unfolded in utterly public places. In this process they also examined how they themselves went about assembling impressions, interpreting interactions, seeing into and beyond the immediate world around them. We who were their instructors in such semesters, or who came to closing symposia to hear students present their findings about local phenomena, began to see the larger implications—and much broader applicability—of these field laboratories. For one, they opened minds in a remarkably short time. This phe- nomenon seemed to be in part because time constraints—no more than three months—forced clarity of focus. “Transformation,” students said, was also a product of their perceptions about themselves as active investigators with the inescapable burden of having to present in a public forum work derived from their explorations. At a profound level, students experienced themselves as discoverers of unknown territory. Experiments with short- and long-term uses of these field activities— in orientation classes; as preliminary steps in selecting and developing research topics; as mapping exercises in foreign or unfamiliar domestic 9 Foreword cities—yielded similar outcomes. Age group (use of this methodology with high school students as well as with professional development faculty workshops have been reported in NCHC publications for some time) did not weaken the results; heightened attention, careful analy- sis, curiosity, self-awareness, and confidence emerged from each fresh application of CAT. What we who have

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