Thursday, May 31, 2012

Engaged Learning and Teaching

The May term ended yesterday, and the students left Iowa returning to their homes in West Virginia, Washington, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina.  I have remained in the Hawkeye States for a few more days to bat clean up with my sister.  But I am taking a break from the mundane to reflect on this experience from my vantage point.

Furman touts its commitment to engaged learning, and it has done so for many years.  I was the University's first Director of Engaged Learning, serving in that post from 1997-2003.  During my professional career, I have served as the President of the Faculty Special Interest Group of the National Society for Experiential Education and the President of the Undergraduate Education Section of the American Political Science Association.  I've published essays on the importance of internships in enhancing the quality of undergraduate education, particularly among liberal arts students.  For many years, I've led Furman's mock trial program, a stellar example of transforming students from bench warmers to players in the learning process.

As a result of my previous involvement with experiential education, I am familiar with its principles.  Perhaps the most central tenent of the experiential pedagogy is that the professor moves being the "sage on the stage" to being a coach or a facilitator of learning.  Experiential educators believe that seeing, tasting, and participating in an activity, especially when coupled with significant reflection, leads to a richer learning experience, and one that has staying power for the students.  This kind of learning is often far messier than conducting a course in the classroom--the professor has a large amount of control over the content of the course, and the information contained in the course can be arranged in a logical fashion.  The traditional classroom makes ample use of deductive approaches, while students engaged in an experiential course typically employ inductive logic to make sense of their subject.  Experiential courses do not have disciplinary walls--the academy may be organized by subjects, but the world is not.

Nonetheless, my nearly 25 years of teaching and writing about experiential education did not adequately prepare me for what happened during Farm.

1. I truly could not be the sage on the stage because I do not know the agriculture policy area.  Often times, I think experiential educators can twist an experience for students because it is being arranged in a way that is deductive in orientation and reflects the professors' expertise in the area.  The distinct disadvantage I faced--not knowing the ag policy area--soon became an advantage.  I was learning along with the students.  While I had read and thought about the topic for more than a year that seemed a minor advantage.  That only meant that I knew the broad parameters of the topic.  The fact that I knew less about the subject's content, let the experience develop organically; I couldn't superimpose a logic over a subject area in which I was not the content expert.  I depended on others to help me decide which experiences should be included in the student's tour.  So experts were involved, but much less so than I envision in the typical course.

2. My students have discussed the many miles logged in the Roadmaster.  I never gave a thought to exactly how many miles we would be driving or what impact it would have on our learning environment.  My conclusion is that it made our group far stronger.  I was blessed to have students who were not divas, and they had a strong sense of who had sat on the hump in the front seat for the longest period of time.  There is something about being cramped in a car on a regular basis that provides a new dimension to the experience--and, it is especially memorable if you've just been processing chickens, inseminating pigs, or dairying!  Maybe my colleagues in the natural sciences or health sciences know about the impact of physicality on learning, but this was a very knew kind of learning for me, and I believe for me students.  I liked it--it enhanced the learning experience.

3. Furman is famous for its home-grown study away projects, but Farm pushed that definition even further.  Since the students lived in the farm house I own with my brother and sister, I was at one point a host as well as a professor.  Everyone in my family (sister, brother, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, nephew, and spouse) had a role in preparing the house for the students.  My sister assumed the role of house mother for three weeks, and she was amazing.  I took on the role of chauffeur driving the students to all of the sites and picking them up at the airport in Des Moines.  Our library was located at the house, and it consisted of all of the books on agricultural policy that I could pack into my car.  The bonus room in the house became the place that we met for reflection and discussion sessions--the living room was where we viewed the many videos watched during the term.  Farm was most assuredly a "home-grown" study away experience.  

4. I am still working through how the teaching experience was different because it was so deeply personal.  To share a portion of your life's experience with your students is a component of any good course, especially at an institution that prides itself on developing personal relationships between a faculty member and a student.  Farm, however, meant sharing the place where you grew up.  It is a level of exposure of one's self that is atypical and somewhat intimidating. And, add into the mix that you also are exposing your siblings to this kind of scrutiny.  "Teaching" with my sister and brother and having their voices included was one of the real blessings of the course--not because we agreed, but because it gave the students a varied view farm life.  Add in one's neighbors and friends, who also have stories to tell, and well, one's life becomes quite an open book.   And the impact of the experience is hardly uni-directional from the "adults" to the students.  The experience also had an impact on my view of the past--literally writing and rewriting one's own past.  But if one is going to truly understand the way in which an agricultural community operates, it starts with the way in which family and neighbor networks operate.  And for the students to understand something about community, it means exposing them to these complex interrelationships, even if the interrelationships are those which directly involve the professor of record.  I suspect sociologists steeped in qualitative methodologies would say that I am both the phenomenon as well as the investigator of the phenomenon.

5. It is unclear to me how living in a house for a period of three weeks (with no opportunity to leave) has an impact on the learning experience.  But it does strike me as a unique aspect of the course.  The students had to learn to live with some serious constraints, and, yet, they did so.  I think that they learned a great deal about themselves as a result of living together, preparing food together, and studying together.  The students, too, were exposed to their professor in a way that is highly unusual.  Again, I am unsure of the impact on the learning environment, except that my provisional assessment is a positive one.

6. This course required that I was often a student--listening to lectures, presentations, etc.  What an amazing experience to be on the other side of the podium after so many years.  It was humbling to think about how to improve the quality of one's own teaching by observing others, and also to engage students about which presentations were more effective in their minds and why.

I am confident that over time, I'll think of more ways in which Farm pushed the envelope of my thinking about teaching in general and the experiential pedagogy in particular.  But for now, these are my musings.



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