“Learning by Doing”: the Experiential Learning Institute Trains Faculty Across OSUN in Civically Engaged Pedagogy

Bard College Associate Dean of Civic Engagement Brian Mateo has some news to share. “Gone are the days when students just wanted to be consumers of knowledge,” Mateo says. “They want to be engaged, and they want to know how the knowledge that they are consuming can affect their lives, and how that knowledge can improve their communities.”

Mateo’s understanding about this change in students’ approach to learning was the impetus for the creation of OSUN’s Experiential Learning Institute (ELI). Led by Mateo, Caitlin O’Donnell, program manager of OSUN's Civic Engagement Initiative, and Erica Kaufman, director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking, ELI takes the “learning by doing” pedagogical approach into the liberal arts and sciences classroom.

And ELI is about a lot more than just learning by doing.

“The idea is to create a curriculum that encourages students to actually do things, like producing podcasts, or working with a community partner on a project,” Mateo says. “Then, students reflect on what they learned in the process and use it to conceptualize and create concrete plans going forward.”

Launched in 2021, ELI was conceived as an opportunity for faculty to teach faculty. Using Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory, the ELI team led six virtual training sessions focused on facilitating the creation of syllabi that allow students to immerse themselves in civic engagement-related activities that could be made sustainable through a reflection and conceptualization process.

ELI alumni and experienced ELI faculty have served as guest speakers in the virtual trainings every spring, sharing impacts and best practices. Last spring, for the first time, ELI hosted an in-person conference in Colombia that immersed faculty members and administrators in experiential learning methodology, each leaving with a draft syllabi.

In three years, ELI has trained 84 faculty members across 15 OSUN institutions.

Another big part of the success of the program is OSUN’s Community Engaged Liberal Arts & Sciences (CELAS) course offerings. Faculty can apply for CELAS grants to fund community projects that have been created at more than 15 OSUN institutions globally.

Jazmin Puicón, a faculty member at Bard High School Early College in Newark, N.J., created a history course documenting the achievements of Black and brown people in Newark. In addition to learning about local communities’ less heralded contributions, students were encouraged to partner with Newark community groups to design projects that find solutions to local challenges.

“ELI gave me the tools to make my course a reality, Puicón says. “Participation in ELI helped me realize the importance of setting smart goals and provided a toolkit to apply to my course. The CELAS grant allowed my course goals and dreams to become a reality. I could now offer community members a stipend for their time and work in the classroom,” adds Puicón.

At BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Professor Turzo Nicholas Mondal sought and received a CELAS grant for his course, “For the Love of Food.”

“One of the activities involved directing the students to solve one of the problems a community partner was having with natural farming,” Mondal says. “The students picked a problem – water management and irrigation – by consulting with the partner and developing an automated irrigation technology.” The CELAS grant was key in helping students address the problem.

Koching Chao, a CELAS grant recipient from National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, collaborated with the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts to craft an immersive art appreciation course. Students engaged in experiential learning by exploring the museum’s contemporary art exhibition guided by Kaosiung artists and curators. They then produced a podcast reflecting on the intersection of art and local memories that attracted over 4,000 global listeners, helping to contribute to the placemaking of Kaohsiung.

“Now the genie is out of the bottle,” Mateo says. “The ELI has prompted deans and other administrators at OSUN institutions to expand the model on their own campuses.” He goes on to explain that at BRAC University, administrators are rethinking the structure of their divisions at the School of General Education. And at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan, administrators have created their own programs specifically related to experiential learning for training faculty.

“It was an unintended outcome of ELI,” Mateo adds. “Never did we think that deans and alumni would be teaching ELI on their own campuses. It’s really blossoming and we’re looking for more ways to expand.”

Post Date: 01-10-2024