Deeping the Liberal Learning Experience

Edward ZlotkowskiCollege of the Holy Cross

April 4, 2013

What the Research Shows

The method people naturally employ to acquire knowledge is largely unsupported by traditional classroom practice. The human mind is better equipped to gather information about the world by operating within it than by reading about it, hearing lectures on it, or studying abstract models of it.

The Santa Fe Institute, The Mind, the Brain and Complex Adaptive Systems (1995)

What We Know About Learning• The learner creates his or her learning actively & uniquely

• Learning is about making meaning for each individual by establishing and reworking patterns & connections

• Every student learns all the time, both with us & despite us

• Direct experience decisively shapes individual understanding for each learner

• Learning occurs best when people are confronted with a compelling and identifiable problem

• Beyond stimulation, learning requires reflection

• Effective learning is social and interactive

Peter Ewell, “Organizing for Learning,” AAHE Bulletin, Dec. 1997

Two Essentials

1. A felt sense of relevance: ownership of the material.

2. Actions or activity that confirms a sense of agency.

COURSE CHARACTERISTICS THAT LEAD TO “SURFACE“ LEARNING

• Excessive course material• Lack of opportunity to pursue something in

depth• Little student choice vis-à-vis interests and

learning approaches• Anxiety-producing assessment approachRhem, “Deep/Surface Approaches to Learning,” in National Teaching & Learning

Forum (1995)

High Impact Practices• FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS AND EXPERIENCES• COMMON INTELLECTUAL EXPERIENCES• LEARNING COMMUNITIES• WRITING-INTENSIVE COURSES• COLLABORATIVE ASSIGNMENTS AND PROJECTS• UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH• DIVERSITY/GLOBAL LEARNING• SERVICE LEARNING, COMMUNITY-BASED LEARNING• INTERNSHIPS • CAPSTONE COURSES AND PROJECTS

George Kuh, High-Impact Educational Practices, AAC&U, 2008

Next-Century Learning …today, people worldwide need a whole series of

new competencies…but I doubt such abilities can be taught solely in the classroom, or be developed solely by teachers. Higher order thinking and problem-solving skills grow out of direct experience…they require more than a classroom activity. They develop through active involvement and real-life experiences in workplaces and the community.

John Abbott, “The Search for Next-Century Learning,” AAHE Bulletin (March 1996)

Even At Harvard

…I assumed that most important and memorable academic learning goes on inside the classroom, while outside activities provide a useful but modest supplement. The evidence shows that the opposite is true: learning outside of classes…is vital. …Those students who make connections between what goes on inside and outside the classroom report a more satisfying college experience.

Richard Light, Making the Most of College (2004)

Faculty & Students

Colleges and universities today show an increasing disparity between faculty and students…What suffers as a consequence is the learning process itself - an observation that pervades in numerous national reports…Unfortunately, the natural differences in learning patterns exhibited by new students are often interpreted by faculty as deficiencies. What may be happening, then, is a fundamental "mismatch" between the preferred styles of faculty and those of students.

Charles Schroeder, “New Students – New Learning Styles,” Change (Sept.-Oct. 1993)

Knowledge Consumption vs. Knowledge Production

The nub of the problem, I believe, is that our society encourages a consumer rather than a producer mentality. In school, for example, students spend much of their time reading and listening and taking notes. At all levels they are merely consuming what their teachers and their textbooks tell them, while the only products they learn to produce are usually in the form of tests that measure comprehension rather than intelligence.

Robert Sternberg, Successful Intelligence (1997)

An unfortunate feature of much education today, as well as the assessment of educational progress, is its overwhelming emphasis on well-structured problems. It is easier to teach the facts and only the facts, and then to test on these facts. Facts lend themselves to well-structured problems… with a clear, correct solution….The strategies that work in solving well-structured problems, however, often do not work particularly well, or at all, for ill-structured problems.

Robert Sternberg, Successful Intelligence (1997)

Unstructured Problems

THE SCHOLARSHIP OF ENGAGEMENT

I am convinced that…the academy must become a more vigorouspartner in the search for answers to our most pressing social, civic,economic, and moral problems, and must reaffirm its historic commitment to what I call the scholarship of engagement.

The scholarship of engagement means connecting the rich resourcesof the university to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical problems…Campuses would be viewed by both students and professors not as isolated islands, but as staging grounds for action.

The scholarship of engagement also means creating a special climatein which the academic and civic cultures communicate more continuously and creatively with each other.

Ernest Boyer (1996), The Journal of Public Service and Outreach

CBL Characteristics

• Meets assessable learning objectives

• Involves experience with a community-based organization or group suitable for promoting civic learning

• Involves structured reflection or analysis

• Is based upon principles of campus-community partnership and reciprocity

Public Engagement

Personal Contact& Direct Service

Problem-solving /Asset-

creating Projects

Research as

Resource

Teaching-Learning Objectives for Community-Intensive Work

• Field-based Research• Theory Testing• Skill Activation• Balancing Inductive & Deductive Approaches• Activation of Moral Imagination• Student Agency

How CBL Affects Students: HERI 2000 Principal Findings

• “Service participation shows significant positive effects on 11 outcome measures: academic performance (GPA, writing skills, critical thinking skills), values…, self-efficacy, [and] leadership...”

• “Performing service as part of a course … adds significantly to the benefits associated with community service …”(original emphasis)

• “Qualitative findings suggest that service learning is effective because it facilitates four kinds of outcomes: an increased sense of personal efficacy, an increased awareness of the [surrounding world], an increased awareness of one’s personal values, and increased engagement in the classroom experience.”

The Difference That CBL Makes

“There is an empirical fit between our goals for students and the outcomes of service-learning. If we want students who are lifelong learners, can use what they know, and have a capacity for critical analysis, then programs like service-learning, which help them construct knowledge from experience and reflection , should form the core of their educational experience.”

Eyler & Giles, Where’s the learning in Service-learning? (1999)

Converging Interests

Academic

Social Justice

Professional

Reconceptualizing Liberal Learning

In the twentieth century, proponents of liberal learning drew a sharp dividing line between “practical” or career studies and the “true liberal arts.” Today, we contend, we need to erase that distinction and insist that liberal learning is, among its other virtues, practical….a good liberal education should take pride in preparing students for “effective practice.”

Carol Geary Schneider, The Clark/AAC&U Challenge:

Connecting Liberal Education with real-World Practice” (2009)

LEVELS OF CHANGE

Pedagogy↓

Epistemology↓

Ethics

The Legacy of Positivism Positivism structures our research, our disciplines, our

teaching, and our institutions long after it has been discredited intellectually…. Positivism structures patterns of evaluation, assessment, and outcome measures, sustaining patterns of one-way service delivery and the conceptualization of poor and powerless groups as needy “clients,” not competent citizens. It infuses government funding patterns for “interventions” to fix social problems. It shapes the institutions of the market, the media, health care, and political life. Professionals imagine themselves outside a shared reality with their fellow citizens, who are seen as “customers,” or “clients,” objects to be manipulated or remediated.

Harry Boyte, “Democracy and the Struggle Against Positivism in the Age of the Smart Machine” (2000)

A New EpistemologyIf we intend to pursue the “new forms of scholarship” that Ernest Boyer presents in his Scholarship Reconsidered, we cannot avoid questions of epistemology since the new forms of scholarship he describes challenge the epistemology built into the modern research university….I argue in this article that if the new scholarship is to mean anything, it must imply a kind of action research with norms of its own, which will conflict with the norms of technical rationality – the prevailing epistemology built into the research universities.In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the use of research-basd theory and technique. In the swampy lowlands, problems are messy and incapable of technical solution.

Donald Schön, “Knowing in Action: The New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology” (1995)

Connected Knowing

Connected knowers are not dispassionate, unbiased observers. They deliberately bias themselves in favor of what they are examining. They try to get inside it and form an intimate attachment to it. The heart of connected knowing is imaginative attachment…I am arguing against an unnecessarily constricted view of thinking as analytic, detached, divorced from feeling.

B. M. Clinchy, “On Critical Thinking and Connected Knowing” (1996)

Community, Conflict, and Ways of Knowing

…the way we know has powerful implications for the way we live…every epistemology tends to become an ethic, and…every way of knowing tends to become a way of living….The mode of knowing that dominates higher education I call objectivism….Objective, analytical, experimental. Very quickly this seemingly abstract way of knowing, this seemingly bloodless epistemology, becomes an ethic. It is an ethic of competitive individualism, in the midst of a world fragmented and made exploitable by that very mode of knowing ….We make objects of each other and the world to be manipulated for our own private ends….it’s a trained schizophrenia….

Parker Palmer (1987)• P

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas.

Whitehead. The Aims of Education