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Creating powerful learning environments beyond the classroom

Change - May 1, 2004

Since the last decades of the 20th century, the teaching and learning environment at colleges and universities has been expanding significantly beyond the standard space-bound classroom. In addition to online and distance learning opportunities, many students have taken part in structured experiential learning that has given them opportunities to test the academic foundations and knowledge they are exposed to in class settings well beyond the walls of the classroom.

The emerging education sites are often not on campus at all. Students' involvement in undergraduate research, internships, and service learning has expanded tremendously in recent years, as has been documented by many studies. Many of the groups of instructors involved are not part of any formal faculty, but they serve to complement campus-based professors and strengthen students' educational development all the same.

Non-traditional educational experiences connect students' cognitive learning inside the classroom with their affective learning in the lab, on the job, or at the service learning site. The instructors and mentors involved begin to shape or enhance young adults' sense of professionalism in their fields well before they leave the campus.

A young finance and marketing major can get experience in an accounting firm to see if that major truly matches her career goals and whether she feels comfortable in the organizational structure. A biology major interested in attending medical school can secure an internship in the emergency room of a local hospital to make sure that medicine is the best fit for his career goals and the next 10 years of his life.

Students can learn to translate knowledge into action or research into practice during such non-traditional educational activities, something that even the most intense study in the classroom cannot easily convey.

"Our systematic processes too often stop at the acquisition of knowledge. The much harder and more meaningful process is to facilitate understanding and wisdom, leading to ... informed thought and action," Susan Komives has said. "Part of our role as a teaching community is to help students inhabit the gap" between knowledge and practice, she adds. Many institutions have tried a variety of approaches to do that, including a program at my institution, the University of Maryland, called the Beyond the Classroom Living & Learning Program (BTC).

Our program is a partnership involving Maryland's Division of Undergraduate Studies, Student Affairs, and a private housing-management firm. The program's focus is to assist juniors and seniors to obtain significant research, internship, or service learning experiences on campus and in the greater Washington, D.C. area. Recent venues have included a local classic rock radio station, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, soup kitchens, and the local ASPCA pet shelter.

The goal of this practicum is to engage students in the real world, including civic life, to advance their professional and personal development. Onsite supervisors guide the students through the practicum, and there is a corresponding course taught by on-campus faculty or staff members that is parallel to the semester-long activity. Unlike some other programs, the students in our program live together in a building owned and operated by the management company, which has co-sponsored educational and social programs with the BTC program.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Onsite training grounds for new workers or young craftsmen are not a new or novel idea. The craft professions have routinely used the "learn by doing" method for centuries, through apprenticeships and journeyman certification, to pass their expertise from one generation of workers to another. What sets the "learn by doing" experiences or experiential learning apart in higher education is the goal of having students observe and reflect on their current actions in order to formulate future practice.

Early in the 20th century, John Dewey, among others, launched the principles of experiential education as an established pedagogy. David A. Kolb in 1984 outlined an experiential learning model including four elements: concrete experience, observation and reflection, the formation of abstract concepts, and testing in new situations. Kolb wrote that the learning process often begins with a person carrying out an action and seeing the effects of the action; the second step is to understand the effects of the action. The third step is to understand the action, and the last step is to modify the action given a new situation.

Kolb's Experiential Learning Model is used today as one of the standards to support the use of learning through experience outside the traditional classroom. This model provides a powerful framework, for example, to help a student explain and describe, both cognitively and affectively, his lived experience working in a soup kitchen versus reading about a soup kitchen in class. Other models also have proved useful on some campuses.

RESEARCH

While professional academic research includes systematic investigation, model testing, and development of generalizeable knowledge, at the undergraduate level at the University of Maryland, undergraduate research is defined simply as "the process of creating new knowledge."

Undergraduate research exists along a continuum from apprentice (knowing little, experiencing a piece of the whole, minimal contributions) to research partner (the undergraduate student performs more along the lines of a colleague or graduate student; she or he can see the whole picture and contributes much to the outcome, perhaps even publishing with one or more faculty members).

Wherever a student is along the continuum, providing students with the opportunities to engage in the process of inquiry has benefits far beyond the practical. Such experiences can, among other things, attract students to graduate school through increasing their enthusiasm for research; encourage undergraduates to view education as more relevant for their future lives; and help minority or non-traditional students to identify more closely with the institution.

But perhaps the most striking piece of data on the impact of undergraduate research comes from the University of Michigan's Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. African American undergraduates in the program had a 51 percent lower attrition rate than a control group, according to a 1995 report by John Jonides.

Our Beyond the Classroom program's seminar on research experiences was set up similar to a graduate seminar, allowing students the opportunity to reflect on their breakthroughs, fears, and frustrations during the research process. The twofold objective of the course was to assist students in understanding the culture of research, as well as to help them understand the rights and feelings of research subjects.

Students consider the research process itself, ethical issues in research, how research funds are obtained, and analyze who benefits from research. Some of students' recent research included working with a faculty member involved in the excavation and DNA-typing of bodies found in the African Burial Ground Project in lower Manhattan; studying Shakespearean theater architecture in a university archives; and studying the song patterns of crickets in a campus biology laboratory.

To extend this vision, we need to help more faculty members expand their definitions of research, identify connections for curricular-based research opportunities, and provide experiences that are developmentally appropriate for our students. Sharing practices among disciplines will help this happen. While many faculty members believe that only graduate students can engage in research that is meaningful to them, a program at Maryland for first-year chemistry students, for example, provides them the opportunity to solidify their commitment to the discipline and become valuable research assistants while still undergraduates.

This kind of model can be replicated in other disciplines with faculty members willing to make the strong commitment to the undergraduate research process. The mentoring of these first-year students is time consuming, but one faculty member whose laboratory is filled with undergraduate researchers said, "Getting students excited early on in research gets me excited about my own research. They are so eager and they ask really good questions."

This faculty member spoke like a proud parent when he went on to list some of the accomplishments of his students since their experience in his lab: college honors theses, advanced research projects, and enrollments in masters and doctoral degree programs.

INTERNSHIPS

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