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The Power of Experiential Education JANET EYLER

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The Power of Experiential Education JANET EYLER The Power of Experiential Education JANET EYLER IN HIS COMEDIC PERSONA of Father Guido able to use what they know, to have the ca- Sarducci, Don Novello captured the central pacity for critical analysis, and to be equipped challenge to educators in the liberal arts: pro- for lifelong learning; personal, social and in- viding an education that sticks and is usable. tellectual goals are intertwined. Yet programs Father Guido’s solution was to bypass an ex- designed to develop students’ personal, social, pensive four years of liberal education; in his and economic capacities are often separated “five-minute university,” students would pay from the core academic experience. twenty dollars and spend five minutes learn- Experiential education, which takes students FEATURED TOPIC ing what the typical college graduate remem- into the community, helps students both to bers five years after bridge classroom study and life in the world graduation. In eco- and to transform inert knowledge into knowl- nomics, that would be supply and demand; edge-in-use. It rests on theories of experiential Experiential in Spanish, como esta usted and muy bien. For learning, a process whereby the learner inter- education can lead any of us who have traveled to Madrid and acts with the world and integrates new learn- tried to call on our college Spanish, this strikes ing into old constructs. to more powerful a chord. academic learning The challenge for liberal educators is to de- Experiential education and help students sign learning environments and instruction so Within professional programs, there is a long achieve intellectual that students will be able to use what they tradition of including field experiences as a learn in appropriate new contexts—that is, way to build practitioner skills and facilitate goals commonly to enable the transfer of learning. This is, of the move from theory to practice. Two of the associated with course, a bigger challenge than the one recog- most common forms of workplace learning are liberal education nized by Father Guido. Graduates need not cooperative education and the internship. In only to remember what they learn, to develop cooperative education, students alternate pe- and retain a “broad knowledge of the wider riods of paid work with campus study or split world (e.g., science, culture, and society) as their time between the workplace and the well as in-depth study in specific area of inter- campus. While cooperative-education pro- est,” but also to have “a sense of social respon- grams have waned, internships are increasing. sibility, as well as strong and transferable Most college students now complete an in- intellectual and practical skills such as com- ternship. Career centers at liberal arts col- munication, analytical, and problem-solving leges, disciplinary journals devoted to college skills” (AAC&U). Effective citizenship re- curricula, and the popular press are keeping quires students to be knowledgeable, to be up a steady drumbeat encouraging faculty members to support, and students to obtain, JANET EYLER is professor of the practice of educa- internships in order to ease the transition to tion at Vanderbilt University. This article was the workplace. And this is paying off for stu- adapted from a paper presented at “Liberal dents: internships and cooperative education Education and Effective Practice,” a national con- are increasingly important for job placement ference cosponsored by Clark Univer sity and the (National Association of Colleges and Em- Association of American Colleges and Universities. ployers 2008). 24 L IBERAL E DUCATION F ALL 2009 Copyright© 2009 by the Association of American Colleges and Universities Vanderbilt University Copyright© 2009 by the Association of American Colleges and Universities Service learning—a form of experiential similar awareness has also increased among education that combines academic study with employers who are increasingly less concerned service in the community—emerged in the about particular vocational skills and who are 1970s and has since grown exponentially. The demanding the same skills, abilities, and habits pioneers of service learning believed that the of mind long valued by the liberal arts (Business- combination of service and learning would Higher Education Forum 2003; Peter D. Hart improve the quality of both and that it could Research Associates 2006). Additionally, since lead to educational reform and democratic re- the 1980s, there has been renewed interest in vitalization. Service learning is distinguished the civic role of colleges and universities and from other approaches to experiential educa- a call for increased civic literacy for students; FEATURED TOPIC tion by its commitment to certain values as well this has fueled much of the interest in service as its inclusion of continuous, structured re- learning as a way of achieving the goals of lib- flection. From the outset, service learning has eral education so central to citizenship. been oriented to the achievement of academic Experiential education has value far beyond goals in all fields, including the liberal arts. It building the kind of social skills, work ethic, fits easily into most disciplines, and with some and practical expertise that are important in creativity it can be fit into virtually all disci- professionally oriented programs. In fact, ex- plines. Models range from add-on, extra-credit, periential education can also lead to more or assignment options to the thorough inte- powerful academic learning and help students gration of service as a class “text.” achieve intellectual goals commonly associated Experiential education has been a common- with liberal education, including place in vocationally or professionally oriented • a deeper understanding of subject matter than programs for many years, but field-based peda- is possible through classroom study alone; gogies have struggled to gain legitimacy in the • the capacity for critical thinking and appli- liberal arts. As advances in cognitive science cation of knowledge in complex or ambigu- have begun to blur the line between academic ous situations; and practical learning, awareness of the rele- • the ability to engage in lifelong learning, vance of experiential education to achieving including learning in the workplace. goals of the liberal arts has increased. And a Experiential education also identifies the prac- tices necessary for achieving these outcomes, particularly the use of structured reflection to help students link experience with theory and, thereby, deepen their understanding and ability to use what they know. Mastery and use of subject matter A fundamental goal of liberal learning is mas- tery of both broad and specialized bodies of knowledge. The inability to call on this knowl- edge base is what Alfred North Whitehead (1929) described nearly a century ago as the problem of “inert knowledge.” Often, students cannot apply even recently learned informa- tion to new situations. Modern cognitive sci- entists ascribe this inability to apply what is learned to a failure to conditionalize knowl- edge; the learners don’t see the relevance and cannot access what they know when con- fronted with an opportunity for transfer (Brans- ford, Brown, and Cocking 2000). Life is not organized by chapter, with tests to signal what information to apply. Unless students learn explicitly to recognize when their knowledge Janet Eyler might be useful, can recall that knowledge, 26 L IBERAL E DUCATION F ALL 2009 Copyright© 2009 by the Association of American Colleges and Universities Field-based and know how to apply it, they pedagogies have ther information. Neither tol- will fail to transfer what they struggled to gain erance for ambiguity nor criti- know; their understanding is legitimacy in cal thinking is simply a incomplete. function of information, skill, Transfer of knowledge re- the liberal arts and social ability or even of re- quires deep understanding. peated practice, but rather Recall and reproduction of material taught both require intellectual capabilities that are in the classroom do not constitute under - not now generally attained before college standing. For knowledge to be usable, it has to graduation. be acquired in a situation. Otherwise, it is seg- Students often arrive at college with simplis- regated from experience and unlikely to be re- tic ways of viewing knotty problems, and they FEATURED TOPIC membered or transferred to new experiences. may not be able to recognize an ill-structured Well-understood material can be retrieved problem. They are likely to see their task as from memory and used in new situations be- learning right answers rather than under- cause it is linked with multiple experiences standing the difficulty of framing issues and and examples and not isolated from other problems and understanding that the very na- experience and knowledge. ture of difficult problems makes one clear so- A small study comparing student learning lution unlikely. Or they may reject discussion in classes on legislative politics with student as pointless because they regard disagreement learning in internships at a state legislature as simply a matter of opinions, any of which is found that both groups did equally well on a equally valid. King (1992) argues that most traditional test of facts (Eyler and Halteman students graduate without attaining a level of 1981). But when challenged to develop a reasoning ability that would allow them to strategy for enacting policy, the interns incor- frame, explore
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