Good Morning, friends and colleagues in the UBC experiential education community. Happy September!

Experiential education is often framed as “learning by doing” – an oversimplification which, by all accounts, does a disservice to the labour and thoughtfulness that often give it life. As we wrap up summer and transition into a phase of institutional activity and ‘productivity,’ this New York Times article got me thinking about the importance of summer, which, for some lucky people, involves a period of the NOT-doing. In the article titled “You are doing something important when you are not doing anything,” author, Bonnie Tsui, argues that this “fallow time” is invisible labour that allows us to generate ideas and reach what Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson calls the “absorb state.” This excerpt gets at the heart of Tsui’s argument:

I’m not talking about boredom, though that is part of the broader picture of maintaining creativity. I’m talking about an active refueling that can seem at odds with our fetishization of productivity. Reading a book, visiting a museum, wandering out to people-watch at the park. Though we purport to value artists and romanticize their muses, the aforementioned activities aren’t often recognized as work. (Tsui, 2019)

In the context of our work, this not-doing (or the not-doing-of-typical-productivity) can be a pivotal component of experiential education – a transformative means of learning through reflection and rest, and giving ourselves time to ponder connections between ideas and realities, or between what we’ve done and what we hope to do. (Sidebar: This restful reflection on what we’ve done is part of the reason that experiential education is so hard to evaluate in the short term. Anecdotally, most people I talk to about their transformative experiential education memories, convey that they didn’t realize how important or transformative it was until years later). This “fallow time”, a privilege to be sure, can be invigorating whether you’re staff, faculty, student, or community/workplace partner. Nonetheless, these “quietly dormant moments” can imbue the actual doing with far more creativity, meaning, and relationality than if we had never paused to reflect, read, play, and be present with ourselves and others. Perhaps this is why reflection is such an important aspect of experiential education for scholars like Kolb and Dewey. I wonder if “learning by being” is a more apt shorthand for such an endeavour.

This is, by now, a long-winded way of saying that I hope that this past summer you have had at least a taste of rest, reflection, and reconnection – of learning by being. As we embark on the fall semester, I wanted to share a few updates on this project and showcase a few events and resources related to experiential education:

• Project Update: Attached is a visual that illustrates a broader picture of this project I have been a part of, which has eventual goal of contributing to recommendations for enhanced support of experiential education at UBC Vancouver. Having conducted a research project, member-checked the findings, and refined action themes, we are now conducting open roundtable focus group conversations. The goal of these consultative conversations is to collaboratively develop actionable recommendations that can be submitted to UBC leadership tables such as Senate Teaching and Learning Committee. Our hope is that such recommendations will honour the suggestions and innovative ideas that so many of you have shared over the course of this project, and contribute to enhanced support (and minimized barriers) for experiential education at UBC. Stay tuned for more faculty- and student-specific focus group conversations in late September, and a larger dialogue event before winter holidays.
• Funding Opportunities:
  • Open Educational Resources (OER) Fund: (deadline Nov. 29/ongoing)
  • Community-University Engagement Support (CUES) Fund: (deadline Oct. 19)
  • Small TLEF Innovation Projects: (deadline Nov. 14)
  • SoTL Seed Program: (deadline Dec. 6)
• New UBC Resources and Publications:
  • Alison Taylor (Faculty of Education) and colleagues recently published a paper in the Journal of Experiential Education.
  • The Centre for Community Engaged Learning has just published some excellent online Assessment and Evaluation Tools (TLEF-funded) for community engaged learning.
• News and Events:
  • University of Calgary’s Taylor Institute just announced a new Director Experiential Education, Dr. Lisa Stowe.
  • University of the Fraser Valley is hiring a Director of Experiential Education (closing date Sept. 20)
  • A new Experiential Learning Toolkit was recently launched by Brock University, Niagara College, and Georgian College.
  • Check out some of the Activating Democracy events coming up this fall at UBC.

If you’d like more regular updates on experiential education, you can also find me on Twitter @experientialubc. My role as Analyst, Experiential Learning, will be wrapping up in the new year (March 2020), so the next steps of this project will be dispersed and passed along to the capable hands of colleagues in the CCEL, CSI&C, and the CTLT (many of whom have been a pivotal part of this work before I arrived and who will continue it after I leave). If you would like to be connected with these colleagues, please let me know and I will initiate introductions.

Thank you once again for your many contributions to the enhancement of experiential education at UBC and beyond. I continue to appreciate and learn from the diverse expertise you bring to this work.

Kari

Holidays are nearly upon us and it is time to share another project update before the New Year. Below are some highlights related to this project. Thank you for your many contributions to experiential education in 2018 and wishing all of you a beautiful holiday season!

• RESEARCH PROJECT UPDATE: Data collection for the institutional case study is nearly complete and the findings are rich with insights, trends, and complexities. In January I’ll begin to write up a synthesis of results and I’ll be sure to share it with all of you. In total, the study includes:
  • 18 interviews with faculty members from nearly every faculty at UBC
  • 7 focus groups with a total of 46 staff and faculty experts
  • 60 surveys from UBC faculty members who are heavily involved in experiential education
• EVENTS: 2019 will be a year for synthesizing the research, disseminating findings with (and beyond) our UBC community, and developing resources that address some of the gaps shown in the research. Although exact dates are not yet confirmed, I’d like to share some presentations that are likely to happen:
  • 26, 2019: Community Engaged Scholars’ (CES) Group Presentation:
    • I’ll be sharing preliminary study findings with the Community Engaged Scholars Group, which is organized by Kat Cureton in the Community Engagement Office.
  • March 2019: PhD Defense:
    • I’ll be defending my PhD dissertation on critical approaches to service-learning and global engagement work! (Although this is separate from the experiential education project, my doctoral research is in a specific area of the field [international service-learning] so please contact me for details if you’re interested in attending).
  • Late April, 2019: Presentation of Findings at UBC-Okanagan’s Experiential Education Day
  • Early May, 2019: Experiential Learning full-day Symposium for Celebrate Learning Week.
    • I aim to invite all of the collaborators, participants, and EE community members I’ve connected with over the past 9 months in this project (this means you!). Stay tuned.
  • June 2-4, 2019: Congress Panel Presentation:
    • Presenters will include myself (sharing findings from this project), the collaborative survey team (sharing findings from the experiential education survey), and Adriana Briseno-Garzon with teaching practices survey findings. *Pending acceptance to conference
  • June 2-4, 2019: Congress Pedagogy Hub: This is an event in partnership with Congress 2019 (rather than a research paper session). We will be contributing to a session that looks at credit-based experiential education.
• RESOURCES:
  • Alison Taylor has developed a blog that shares UBC-relevant resources in community engaged learning. She also has a new podcast (found on the blog) in which she and doctoral student, Stephanie Glick, interview community partners and faculty members. Find it here: blogs.ubc.ca/experience.
  • 12 Principles of Practice: “We need some common language for talking about experiential education” – it’s a sentiment I’ve heard often since this project began. This visual is one way to think about experiential education – not necessarily through a definition, but through principles of practice. This list was adapted from the principles of the Association for Experiential Education. Hopefully it will help you in thinking through your own work.

I hope autumn is treating all of you well. I have been busy with conversations – both formal and informal – with many of you over the past six weeks. In light of those conversations and the incredible work that is being done around experiential education at UBC, I am going to focus this month’s project update on sharing with everyone the events and resources that you have collectively been sharing with me. But first, here is a quick overview of the primary research I have collected so far for my institutional case study of experiential education at UBC:

• 5 focus groups with UBC staff who support Experiential Education (32 participants thus far)
• 7 interviews with UBC faculty who are engaged in Experiential Education (more to come!)
• Surveys to Faculty engaged in Experiential Education (Due to be sent out at the end of October)

I plan to conduct approximately seven to ten more interviews and one more focus group, at which point I will analyze the findings, synthesize, and disseminatie / share with you. Stay tuned for that in the new year. A big thank you to those of you who have taken the time to participate in focus groups, interviews, or general knowledge sharing for this project.

Events Related to Experiential Education:

• “Voluntourism: Critiques, Complexities, and Alternatives”[I will be moderating this panel discussion at the Liu Institute on Monday, Oct. 22 at 6pm. Panelists include four experts in global engagement, experiential learning, and higher education, including faculty members and centre directors] Link Here.
• Winter Institute(December 4-6, 2018): Some of our community engagement colleagues will be presenting on “Preparing Students to Work with Communities.” Another related session explores ways to support inclusion and Indigeneity in the classroom. Link to sessions Here.(Registration required).:
• Community Engagement Network Event (Oct. 25, 3pm): For UBC faculty and staff who connect with external communities through outreach and engagement. This month’s event includes a presentation from PCPE (Patient & Community Partnership for Education, based out of UBC Health). Event link Here.
• “Disruption: A Symposium on Global Sustainable Development” Saturday, Oct. 20, 12—6pm. Link Here.
• CCEL Lunch & Learn: Project Development with Community Partners(Oct. 25, 12pm). Email kyle.nelson@ubc.ca for more information.

Resources:

• Faculty Toolkit Link Here– An incredible (and freshly minted!) resource from the Centre for Community Engaged Learning, for faculty who do community engagement work. Find the Toolkit under Course and Curricular Support.
• Rural Grants:UBC Faculty members are eligible to apply for up to $5000 to support taking students to rural communities in BC to work on projects with communities. Rolling applications until funds are gone. Link: https://facultystaff.students.ubc.ca/student-development-services/remote-community-based-learning-funding
• Wiley International Handbook of Service-Learning for Social Justice [I have worked hard on this book for 2.5 years as Assistant Editor and am pleased to finally share this with all of you. Chapter contributors include UBC scholars such as Alison Taylor, Shauna Butterwick, Tam Baldwin, Nasim Peikazadi, Stephanie Glick, Dawn Currie, and others]

Project Updates:

I hope the start of this school year is going well for each of you. I’ve enjoyed continued conversations with you in relation to experiential learning at (and beyond) UBC over the past couple of months. A few updates regarding my project:

• New  Thought Piece: “Experiential Education and the Politics of Citation: Indigenizing and ‘Communitizing’ our work” – This piece is one that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It pertains to the homogeneity of scholarship and scholars in the field of experiential education. In short form, the “key scholars” in this field who are widely and frequently cited are overwhelmingly White and male. In my examination of experiential learning at a campus as diverse as UBC, I use this blog post to reflect on how we can individually and collectively co-create a more inclusive environment for those who are marginalized from publication & knowledge construction.
• Recent Presentation: “Experiential Learning and University Teaching: Exploring Emotion and Experiential Pedagogies Across Disciplines” Dr. Tara Mayer (Faculty member in History) and I recently facilitated a two-hour workshop for new UBC faculty members at the CTLT’s Summer Institute. It was well attended by faculty and staff from across myriad faculties, departments, and units. To view the slide deck from our session (and others from the Summer Institute), see this UBC Wiki Page. If you’re interested in presenting a session at the Winter Institute, see this call for proposals(due Sept. 21).
• Qualitative Research on Experiential Learning: Next week, I’ll begin a series of interviews and focus groups with faculty members and staff who are deeply involved with experiential learning at UBC. This qualitative data collection process will continue until November/December, at which point I will be switching my focus to analysis and write-up. Thanks to those of you who are involved in this inquiry.
• Survey to Faculty Members: Having recently achieved ethics approval for our collaborative survey to faculty members, we aim to disseminate the survey in the coming month, particularly to those faculty members at UBC who are known to be involved in various forms of experiential learning. The development and planning of this survey has been a combined effort of staff, faculty, and graduate students at UBC.
• Continued Website & Resource Development: I continue to add information to the website as I gather it. Please let me know if you would like to be involved in the co-development of any aspect.

Thank you again for your continued interest and involvement in this project. All the best for a beautiful September.

-Kari

Top 10 Questions, Critiques, and Commentaries on Experiential Learning

“Some feel about experiential education the way Hemingway felt about making love:

Don’t talk about it, you’ll only ruin the experience”

(Nold, cited in Warren et al., 1995, p. 113)

I have discovered through many recent conversations that people are both passionate about – and profoundly confounded by – the concept of “experiential learning.” My observation is that this is often because those who do it (teach it, facilitate it, enjoy it, support it) – recognize that in the doing of experiential learning, there exists a mélange of practical wisdom, intuitive knowing, understanding beyond the confines of words, and sometimes even a touch of transcendence. Perhaps the source of frustration in defining, talking and writing about it, then, originates in the perspective that the whole point of experiential education is to – if only briefly – escape the nasty confines of the academy and breathe a little life into concepts and ideas. Universalizing definitions can therefore impose a false sense of epistemological control, thereby feeding the illusion that all things can and must be categorized – even those educational phenomena that are intentionally designed to be beyond words (or at least in an unconventional relationship with them). Perhaps terminology fails us here because experience was never meant to be reduced to a definition.

…And yet…How can we have a meaningful conversation about a concept if we don’t define our boundaries and generate some common language?

And so begins the journey down the fascinating, frustrating, and yet seductive rabbit hole of experiential learning. Below are some highlights of my conversations with various UBC staff, faculty, and students over the past three months. Many of you will probably hear yourselves in these quotes (which, by the way, I have left unattributed to the speaker[s]). In most cases, I have heard a slightly variable version of similar commentary from multiple people. (*Spoiler Alert: I am not about to respond to or answer any of these questions/critiques in this post. If I focus my career as an academic on one of these questions or commentaries [which is probable], I may be able to provide a substantive contribution in about 12 years):

Top 10 Questions, Critiques, and Commentaries on Experiential Learning

*A quick post-script to say thank you to those of you who have taken the time to chat with me and broaden my thinking about this project. We can only strengthen our support of experiential learning if we understand how people think about it and are challenged by it. Please feel free to leave comments here or contact me directly at kari.grain@ubc.ca.

Since this is the first Experiential Learning Project Update, and a considerable aspect of my work is founded on relationship building, it seems appropriate to share with you a short, perhaps vulnerable narrative about how I became interested in EL. Sometimes reflecting on our beginnings is the best way to understand our motivations, our values, and even our theoretical frameworks.

I was 22, reeling from a broken heart, and (for a change) found myself following my father’s advice: “If you’re not into, take a year off of university and go explore the world. Trust yourself enough to know you’ll return and finish your degree.” In the six months that followed, I traveled to Ghana, volunteered as a (completely unqualified) teacher in a rural village, and backpacked around 8 countries in East Africa. (As it were, I also had my introduction to all the cliché and salvationist ways that one should not behave when volunteering; little did I know that my PhD research would one day focus on critical and social justice-oriented approaches to international service-learning, and I would use my past self’s approach as an example of what not to do). Nonetheless…

Early one morning in Rwanda, my friend Cheri and I took bicycle taxis to a small village called Ntarama. It was known for a graphic and raw genocide memorial that had been preserved over the ten years since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Inside the one-room church-turned-memorial, we had to step on pews to avoid the severed bones and skulls that had been left in place. I write this tentatively and with the knowledge that I can’t possibly unpack and do justice to the horror that occurred in that place. But I do wish to focus on a moment that stands out for me in relation to “experiential learning.” A local woman had come to watch us at the memorial. We couldn’t speak the same language but she studied my face as I took in the scene, and as we discovered through broken translations, she had lost her whole family in that room. I won’t pretend to understand her pain, and I’ll never know if my interpretation of our connection was correct. But when we cried together, and looked at one another in the eye, I felt that she felt sorry for me. Our connection – one that may never be corroborated by her – affected me in ways that “book learning” about genocide never had. That learning moment was replete with intense emotion, a physical connection to place, a passionate motivation that gripped my whole body, and a perceived human connection that eludes capture in the confines of any language or text. The woman we had met thanked us for coming, and as our informal local guide explained, it was helpful for victims to know that the injustices of the genocide had not been forgotten.

To say that I returned to my undergrad at UVic the following year with a renewed hunger to learn and generate change is perhaps a gross understatement. In fact, I took any class that involved East African politics, archaeology, anthropology, and the like; I chose research projects that explored the precursors to genocide; I became an activist for genocide education; I dove into postcolonial theory and gave great thought to why and how the West failed Rwanda. Five years later, I also returned to live in Rwanda as I conducted my Master’s fieldwork there.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, I see experiential learning as incredibly powerful in its potential to educate for justice, social change, and resistance to systemic inequalities. [*On this visual that I developed to show 3 key theoretical currents in experiential learning, I began my journey with the critical theory current]. I also, however, came to understand EL’s capacity to teach tangible skills, prepare me for professional life, and generate important abilities in relationship building. As an undergraduate, in a world filled with colour and humans and wind and injustice, I had often resented the hours I had to sit in a desk and listen to a lecture. But I see now that those content-rich lectures were also necessary, and that the combination of raw experience, critical reflection, and “book learning” is perhaps one of the most potent pedagogical combinations of all. Now, when I teach my own courses with an eye to student engagement, I try to remember my younger self and her desire for “real-world connections” (while also attending to her problematic assumptions that can accompany idealism)

What about you? If you’re engaged in experiential learning as a faculty member, student, community member, or staff member (or other), what makes it special (or not special)? Is there a narrative about the beginnings of your engagement with experiential learning? What does it tell you about your motivations now? I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks for reading.

PS – Expect the rest of the updates to be a lot more pragmatic, focused on goals, research findings, new discoveries, and resources.