Experiential Learning at Carleton

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Experiential learning allows students to “learn by doing.” Experiential learning is especially suited for a social work program, in which graduates are expected to provide ethical and competent services to clients from marginalized communities.

The use of human simulation, a pedagogy that involves professional actors to come into the classroom as “clients,” began in medical and other health professional programs. Simulation is now widely used in teaching students to integrate theory and practice across social work programs, including here at Carleton.

As an instructor, I develop a detailed case study based on my own clinical practice, hire and work with actors to refine the client characters and their circumstances. In the classroom, the actor comes in as a client, and students take turns to interview the client, while other students observe the client-­‐worker interaction. Each student engages the actor/client for approximately 10minutes. At that point, the actor and the counselling session are stopped. I then facilitate a class discussion to assist the students to engage in reflection. All other students are expected to provide the student worker with constructive feedback, and to discuss the linkage between theory and practice. This process is repeated throughout the class period, so that other students also have the opportunity to take the role of a worker. In the end, the client/actor offers student social workers constructive feedback and suggestions for further professional development from the perspective of a client.

This activity is conducted at the beginning of class as a way to connect students with one another, establish classroom culture and norm, and introduce students to qualitative research methods.

Students are instructed to individually write a “ground-­rule” or value on a post-­it note that they would like to see practiced in the class throughout the academic term. In small groups of 2 or 3, students are to share and combine their “ground­‐rules” or values into common categories. Once the small groups had some time to share and discuss, they are instructed to stick the post-­it notes on the wall in front of the class and attempt to organize and cluster them into themes. Result: The first step of writing a “ground-­rule” or value is “generating initial codes “in thematic analysis (Bruan & Clarke, 2006). The second step of sharing and combining their “ground-­rules” or values into common categories is “searching for themes”. The third step of combining all post-­‐it notes and attempting to organize and cluster them into themes is the process of “reviewing themes” and “defining and naming themes” in thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

The exercise actively engages students in learning the qualitative research method of thematic analysis. Students also develop some foundational “ground-­rules” or values that can be drawn upon to throughout the term when working on research projects with one another.

Stories North: Stories of Reconciliation was a fourth‐year, special topics course in journalism that was offered during the summer of 2017.

The following is a summary of experiential learning activities:

1. Active lectures: As an alternative to class‐based, instructor-led lectures, students will venture out into the field, hiking, mountain biking and possibly even canoeing alongside a Yukon biologist, Indigenous youth and First Nations elders. These experiential discussions are, in part, an attempt to acknowledge the profound influence of the terrain on territorial history, culture and politics. The landscape will provide an ever-present reference point for local experts to refer to when sharing their knowledge and stories. By getting students physically out of the classroom and engaged in issues in unconventional ways, another goal of these field classes is to encourage digital detox, prying students away from their phones and laptops.
2. Alternative Canada 150: During their first weekend in Whitehorse, students will disperse around the city and its Canada Day celebrations to interview and photograph residents, asking what Canada looks like to them on its sesquicentennial and what our country’s 150^th “birthday” means to them as Northerners. The approach will resemble that taken by Humans of New York. The photos and stories will be presented and shared on Instagram.

Ottawa Citizen news article: Tales from the North: New Carleton course in Yukon ‘an experiment in experiential education’

I brought The Washington Center Agreement to campus with me in 2006 – I had previously been associated with it in Boston for ten years at my previous university.

The Washington Center is the world’s largest private sector provider of internship experiences, based both in DC and now in London as well. They set students up with internships in various areas of the public sector (Congress, Executive Branch, NIH, Smithsonian, Embassies); independent sector NGO’s (examples including the Human Rights campaign, NOW); media (CNN, Fox, CSPAN); and private sector (K-Street lobbying groups and law offices).

Students participate in a semester or summer long internship while registered full time for Carleton courses.

2nd Year:

Lab work in which students are involved in hands on engagements.

3rd Year:

Students complete a River Water Project, where all labs are mirrored with the analysis of water from the Rideau River to provide a real world experience with the techniques they are learning.

4th Year:

We bring in a guest speaker from industry and students complete two different field trips to different labs in town.

Grad Level Course:

Students complete a 2-week (condensed) intensive course where students walk through an entire analysis of a sample often from their own lab. Historically, one student actually publishes their results from this class in a peer-reviewed journal.

Undergraduate biology labs are by design, experiential in nature. Students are using equipment, manipulating organisms, collecting and analyzing data, most often, following a protocol outlined in a lab manual, to a predictable end or result. Labs can offer great learning experiences where students are most often, exposed to learning WHAT to do and HOW to do it, but the best of scientists are both curious and creative, driven by a much bigger question, WHY. They don’t merely follow a protocol to a predictable end –they are driven to explore areas not yet explored, are able to make new connections, forge new paths and be creative in the application of their skills, abilities and knowledge toward their own novel ideas. This is what we hope our graduates will be able to do and become.

With this in mind, labs in our 2nd year ‘Plants: Form and Function’ course are designed to not only teach and develop skills but also, to nurture curiosity and encourage creative thinking. Students learn how to prepare plant tissue sections from live material, how to stain them as well as develop microscopy skills to examine them. Students are also regularly encouraged to exercise curiosity when looking into their microscopes and really explore the material they have prepared. We also intentionally use a range of plant species that illustrate the diversity (and sometimes contradiction) in form, relative to function to encourage critical thinking. We purposely integrate time into the lab sessions -­‐time that is vital to allow students to explore and be curious, ask questions and discuss, while in the moment. We also understand that plant biology may not be everyone’s first passion and even perhaps incongruous with a student’s bigger plan, so we actively seek to make connections between plants and other areas (sports, architecture, medicine, engineering, design) in conversations and discussion with students throughout the lab sessions. What we aim to do with this is metacognitive in nature –help them to identify for themselves possible transferable skills, content, ideas, that are of value to them and may fit their personal bigger plan. The lab exercises are scaffolded, such that, as much as possible, they build on one another and formative assessments, both in the form of group work as well as independent work, are injected into the term at regular intervals.

The summative assessment in this lab course covers all the targets set for the formative assessments but students must apply their knowledge and skills to an entirely new specimen they have not seen during the term. It also includes a creativity component (for bonus marks and optional), where students are asked to apply what they have learned in the lab about plant anatomy to anything that interests them, in any way they want. A handful of students rise to the challenge and some of them have submitted great work, making very interesting and unconventional connections between plant anatomy and a broad spectrum of topics including stained glass work, the design of prosthetics, military tactics, drawing. and rock climbing.

The Human Rights and Resistance course is organized as a critique of the Academic Industrial Complex (AIC). The objectives of this course is for students to be able to better understand the ways that university education has been devolving into a business and learning is often approached from a very rationalist and instrumentalist basis (i.e. doing what needs to be done to become employable). How can they orient themselves towards student-­led advocacy and resistance?

Clearly, understanding of neoliberalism, ablism, etc., provides the analytical foundation for this critique of education; however, this course begins with a think-­piece assignment (“Why are you here?”) so open space for students to understand the importance of their embodied existence within the classroom as a microcosm of society. Why are they in university? How do they think about themselves as students? What are their expectations of themselves, their peers as classmates, faculty, senior administrators? I try to foster spaces where students themselves understand that they are texts. Their thoughts, their embodied responses to the demands of education and the imbalance of education-­work-­social life-­activism are all very important pieces to come to a deeper understanding of the systems of power framing society and the ways that such relations mediate everyday life and interactions with others.

By lectures where I raise pointed questions, think piece assignments, class discussions and group work where students spend class time establishing a campaign/intervention/action that addresses a specific issue on campus (past examples: necessity for more support for student’s mental health; the politics of space on campus; the politics of food on campus and corporate contracts (e.g. Coke); services for “international students”), students become more comfortable inserting their own embodied and experiential knowledge into analysis.

They also begin to understand the hyper-­individualism of neoliberalism and the ways that resistance through building social environments and relations can be enacted within the classroom. For example, the last time I taught this course (2012) students remarked that when they come to a class, they only talk to their friends but rarely to those around them. They often feel so ashamed and stigmatized by their struggles with anxiety, depression, etc. and feel they are so alone; however, group projects where students shared their struggles and organized to find out more about counselling services and other ways of meeting their needs on campus brought them together. Others spoke of feeling better about relating to students not as competitors for the professors attention but as allies and part of a community (i.e. we were all working towards a common event -­the four/fivegroup projects merge into one big event at the end of the semester -­ in 2012 it was called “Got Space?” and took place in the Atrium).

I have been able to witness student’s confidence grow, their abilities to trust their bodies and lived experiences as teachers and sources of knowledge that need to be valued. Yes, they are graded but regardless of the letter grade received, they often continue to foster relationships with their classmates, work on campus-based issues and feel more confident in pursuing areas of scholarship that interest them and incite a passion for learning.

As a professor teaching for the undergraduate-level Architectural Conservation and Sustainability Engineering program, my goal is to immerse students in building design process and also to have them reflect on the effectiveness of spaces for comfort and productivity.

All of my courses involve some experiential learning, though a few examples include:

1. Assessing daylight quality in spaces on campus,
2. Assessing indoor environmental quality in restaurants,
3. Working with major community development firms to assist in designing sustainable neighbourhoods.

For the first two, I assign groups of students to choose a space, develop a methodology to evaluate the space, and then conduct a field study. For the last topic, I work with a group of five other engineering professors to conduct an eight-­month building design process with a group of about 40 engineering students.

Not only do the students perform technical design, but they also interact with real stakeholders (e.g., the developer and professional engineers), develop meeting agendas and minutes, and have a management structure.

We use cuPortfolio to have students reflect on their learning outcomes and profile their contribution to the project. Students are evaluated through a set of performance appraisals, where by three professors interview each student for 15 minutes.