Educating The Whole Student

Learning Outside the Traditional Classroom: Educating the Whole Student By Amanda Marsden, Richard Porter, and James R Stellar February 20, 2008 Octavia’s journey began when she was a freshman. After hearing a fellow Northeastern University Student speak about her experience studying abroad in Ghana, there was no doubt in Octavia’s mind that she had to travel abroad as well. As she described: “The moment she finished her presentation I knew that I had to see the deep indigo coastline, smell the hustle of a day’s work that began at 5 a.m. with the mango-colored sun, hear the earth’s heart beat as it danced from the Njombe [a district of Tanzania].” For Erin, a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, her journey to the NASA Johnson Space Center began with an e-mail from an advisor about a fellowship program at NASA. For Mariko the journey began, incredibly enough, before College when she met an advisor at an open house for admitted freshman, toured his research laboratory, and showed up in the first few days of her Freshman year to begin working on neuroscience research. Having published more papers than some graduate students, she is now part of the Stanford medical school fall 2007 freshman class and a different person than when she arrived.

Growing participation The face of higher education is changing as Experiential Education programs including internships, cooperative education, study abroad, undergraduate research, servicelearning, and community-based research are becoming an increasingly important component of college education for nearly all students in the country. According to the third Internship Survey by career publisher Vault Inc., the number of students participating in internships is sharply rising with 62% completing an internship in the summer of 2006, a significant increase from 41% in 2005. Considering that figure only reflects the number of students participating in internships, if the number of students engaging in study abroad, undergraduate research, co-op and service learning were also factored in, the percentage of students nationwide participating in any form of experiential education could be well over 75%. Experiential Education is a significant investment by both students and institutions of higher education. It continues a trend seen in high school where students often have service-learning or internship opportunities or even requirements. Some colleges brag on their web sites about how many hours of community service their entering freshman class performed in high school, as if to say, “Come to our institution. We have students like you.”

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The growing importance of experiential education is also reflected in an increasing number of colleges and universities introducing experiential education as a graduation requirement [NY Times]. Such schools range from small liberal arts colleges, such as Hendrix College and Rhodes College (featured on 2/08 the AAC&U web site for their community engagement program), to large research-intensive universities, such as Northeastern University.

The Value Proposition A growing national debate is emerging on the value versus cost of higher education itself. Faced with escalating tuition costs, many students and their families are asking whether the conventional college/university experience is worth it. Colleges and universities that offer forms of experiential education in addition to traditional undergraduate coursework attract astute parents and students looking to get the most ‘bang’ for their tuition buck. Given the magnitude of the investment colleges and universities are making in various forms of experiential education, it is time to step back, be mindful, and investigate at least the following points: (a) What characteristics of out-of-the-classroom experiences induce students to fully realize their potential to learn? (b) What steps help students to deeply learn from their experiences and integrate their out-of-the–classroom and in-class learning? (c) What are the underlying principles of this different kind of learning? Here, our goal is to promote the importance of asking these questions for higher education and suggest a place to look for answers, not to answer them. That will come later and require significant additional research that contributes to the emerging science of learning from experience as well as the classroom.

Key characteristics of the student experience Answers to our questions must emerge from an understanding of the key characteristics of the student experience in programs such as study abroad, co-op/internships, servicelearning and undergraduate research. Through student examples, we identified a pattern of key characteristics that drive student learning in these contexts. These characteristics are that the students ‘feel’ the experience, take on responsibility, and see an impact of their work that is external to themselves. The result is that students make meaning in their lives, helping to define themselves in what is called a community of practice [Wenger]. Feel the experience: The first key characteristic is that the experience is deeply felt. Whether a student participates in study abroad, service-learning, undergraduate research or co-op, an emotional element exists. Octavia speaks to this point in writing about her study abroad experience in Ghana as follows: “I could have read a book on West African culture, language, history, and values. However, it would have been merely words that sounded like freshly squeezed theories dripping loose from some academic head. My experiences gave me new eyes, tastes, thoughts, sounds, movements, realities, smells, words, relationships, and memories. I realized that it is easy for an outsider to place judgment on

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another’s cultural values and norms but the path toward authentic understanding is tedious and often confusingly painful journey.” Assume responsibility: The second key characteristic is assuming responsibility. Erin’s experiences at NASA offered her this opportunity. In Erin’s words “NASA demonstrates a lot of confidence in their co-op employees. … I got put right in the middle of a project and put in charge of a contract team…they threw you right in like you were a full-time engineer. They were definitely around to answer questions, but they had a lot of confidence in our abilities.” Erin responded to the opportunity. During her first session at the Johnson Space Center, she worked in a thermodynamics group as a test engineer. In her second assignment, she became certified as a NASA instructor, and taught expedition crew members, safety personnel, and flight controllers about emergency hardware. For her third work term, Erin worked in a motion controls group for the international space station. Her fourth work session was in advanced mission design, where she was also involved in the Columbia accident investigation. Not all experiences are as completely successful as Erin’s. What makes the difference? Students’ initial expectations of their experience and contributions are often at odds with the reality they find. Consider for example Octavia’s expectations and the reality she found. In Octavia’s words: “I expected to step off the plane and be embraced by Ghanaians as if I were their long lost sister from across the Atlantic,” Octavia’s initial expectations were far from being met: “Initially they treated me as if I was a wealthy tourist instead of the homeless descendant that I perceived myself to be,” This tension between initial expectations and reality is common. Some students respond by disconnecting. An intern, for example, may feel that his/her initial work assignment is boring or beneath them and respond by just going through the motions. Others may respond by implicitly understanding that this tension between expectations and reality can generate learning [Wenger, p. 227]. These students heighten their awareness of their surroundings to create opportunities to achieve valuable outcomes even though those outcomes may be short of initial expectations. In Octavia’s experience, after considerable interaction with people in Ghana, she wrote about the best she felt she could do at gaining acceptance into their lives. “We were able to build a swinging bridge that allowed us to cross back and forth into one another’s world,” See the impact: The final key characteristic of the student experience is that students see an impact of their work that is external to themselves. For Mariko, she saw the impact from her research in the advisor’s lab as well as from her other co-op experiences. In her first co-op at Boston University Medical School, Mariko had the opportunity to work with a professor in the Department of Pharmacology. She noted that this co-op was a truly unique opportunity for her because she was able to work side-by-side in the lab with this professor, a graduate student from France and a few other technicians, in conducting

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molecular biology research. Toward the end of her co-op, the professor actually left BU Medical School and began working for a major pharmaceutical company. This opened up yet another opportunity for Mariko: “The other students all found new homes, so I remained as his only assistant. This provided an opportunity to make a large contribution to finishing up his work. We recently had our manuscript published in the UK journal Stem Cells and Development, with myself as first author - a lucky opportunity. We have a second one in the writing phase right now,” Mariko continuously sees the impact that her work and research has on the medical and educational communities. Not only did she see the impact during her first co-op at BU Medical School where she had her research published alongside a professor, but each of her “out-of-the-classroom” experiences had more and more impact on the external world and she began to gain credibility that extends outside of Northeastern University and into the medical research field. Mariko spoke about her co-op and undergraduate research experiences: “With these experiences, I've learned how to be a scientist. Without them, I'd just be a person who knew a bunch about biology and psychology. They also have given me a lot of confidence in the real world. I've always been a good student and outgoing, but it gave me the ability to perform on a different level. It provided me with the courage to attend international conferences with the best in the field, such as the Society for Neurosciences, and walk up to someone's work, look them in the eyes and discuss their studies without being afraid that they'll guess that I don't have a degree. Better yet, for the last couple years, I've been able to have top neuroscientists in the field come to MY poster and ask me about my work.” Mariko, like many NU students who engage in the different types of experiential education, sees the impact that they can have on the outside world. Students see that they don’t have to wait until they graduate or attend graduate school to contribute to the world around them. They can partake in undergraduate research, study abroad, co-op, service projects – and really be instrumental in whatever field they choose. In this way students not only grow internally, but externally. It is what draws students to participating in experiential education programs. Summing up to this point, these student examples provide evidence that the key characteristics that drive student learning in experiential contexts are: (a) students ‘feel’ the experience, (b) students take on responsibility and (c) students see an impact of their work that is external to themselves. We see feeling the experience as necessary to initiate learning. We see students assuming responsibility as a lead to having an external impact which in turn provides the internal reward and motivation to continue the process of productive interaction which builds the motivation to continue the cycle. This is an ‘outside-looking-in’ view of education, one that is outside the ivory tower.

Meaning and neuroscience in a college education The search for meaning in an academic setting like the university is not foreign. Richard Light [Light] wrote that college students really want a mentor in their chosen field to help them integrate their academic studies with their personal career path and to make

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meaning in their lives. The very term “academic studies” however, conjures up words like “ivory tower” to describe the disconnected and other worldliness intended for the typical college or university plan of study. One can ask how the academy got to be an ivory tower. Certainly, it always was a sanctuary from the world where ideas could rein supreme and young minds could come to be trained by some of the best thinkers in the world. We suggest that an additional factor---reinforced by the field of Psychology in the mid 20th century---is the view that emotions are not scientific and hence have no place in scientific academic study. In our view, much of higher education internalized this view. The development in more recent times of information technology and the early growth of cognitive psychology reinforced treating the mind almost as a computer. In the classical ivory tower, information is seen as entering the student’s mind as theories and facts presented in the curriculum, and is retrieved by the student on exams to demonstrate competence and meet standards. Some theorists call this didactic learning. It is the world of facts and theories and tests and books. It takes a bit of knowledge, transfers it from the teacher (who knows) to the student (who learns) and uses a convenient exam to judge the success of the process. But there is clearly another way to learn. Many have written about multiple intelligences, perhaps most famously, Howard Gardner [Gardner] in his concept of “Emotional Intelligence” or E.I. (in contrast to IQ). More than a decade ago, the neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio used a case of modern day Phineas P. Gage to refer to a similar type of reasoning based on a body wellness sense. Gage survived traumatic brain injury to emerge with a different personality characterized in part by a lack of social responsibility. Before his accident, Gage’s bosses viewed him as the “most efficient and capable” man in their employ. After his accident, Gage was intelligent, had a good memory, and could speak and interact with others. But when required to act responsibly or interact effectively with others he utterly failed and was unable to keep any job. Damiaso was able to show with modern brain scanners that patients whose actions mirrored those of Gage had damage not to the cortical brain areas long associated with reason and thinking, but to subcortical brain areas typically associated with the limbic system or the emotional processing center. Based on this case, Damasio wrote a well-known book called Descartes’ Error [Damasio], which argues that we need those emotional processes to know when we have arrived at a logical conclusion and that reason alone (based on facts and theories) is not enough. We would argue that what Damasio refers to as the body wellness sense or what others might call E.I. is what Raelin and others [Raelin] would call “dialectic” (constituting the reorganization or reconstruction of experience). We further contend that such a subcortical dialectic reasoning system is connected to meaning making based on experiences, as with communities of practice [Wenger]. It is an open question whether dialectic reasoning reflects a different form of brain function from didactic learning, and the evidence that is emerging from neuroscience is tantalizing. Consider one study [Greene] based on a brain activity scanning method known as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). In this study, subjects were exposed to something called the Trolley Problem. Here a subject is asked to imagine responding in two scenarios. Let’s say you are the subject. In the first scenario you imagine you are standing by train tracks with your hand on a switch. An approaching train will pass you and kill five people ahead on the tracks unless you pull the switch and

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send the train onto a siding. The problem is that one person is on that siding and that person will surely be killed by the train. Do you pull the switch? Most people say yes. In a second situation that is logically the same, you are on a bridge above a straight line of tracks with a train coming. Five people are on the tracks ahead and surely will be killed unless you push the person next to you off the bridge and onto the tracks. You know for sure that person will die but their body will stop the train and save the other five. There is no other way to stop the train. Now do you take the action? Many people say “no” and it often takes much longer to get to an answer. What is relevant to this discussion is that in the first scenario the fMRI reveals that classical cognitive areas are active, but in the second scenario additional activity appears in brain area that is known to be involved in emotional function. The second scenario is harder because it involves a more direct and perhaps emotional connection to the death of another person even though the choice is the same from a purely logical perspective. Our hypothesis is that experiences that are authentic and substantial engage these subcortical, more limbic brain areas and underlie the dialectic form of learning that makes meaning in our lives. Our thesis is that without engaging the dialectic learning through experience, the didactic (or classroom theory/fact learning) can be incomplete, leaving the student without knowing how or where to apply what he or she knows. The business community has long recognized that education is more than classroom facts and theories. It involves working with other people in teams and a certain maturity that experience brings, so called “on the job training.” They also call it applied learning, which may have slowed its adoption because that kind of description can seem to offset academic excellence for which the ivory tower rightly stands. Combining the two approaches may be more complex, but it is more powerful. Northeastern has seen that in its College of Arts and Sciences and across the University where more than 35,000 students applied for 2,800 seats in the fall 2008 freshman class, giving the university a top 5 ranking among private universities. Combining academic excellence with experiential education to achieve transformative student growth is still something to which only a few colleges and universities have committed themselves. Such an action involves attempts at integration between the curriculum and student experiences. Yet the integration actually occurs in the student’s mind, so while the curriculum must be resonant and the experiences relevant and substantial, other strategies may be necessary. For example, reflection on experience may be critical to surfacing the learning from experience so that it can be integrated with the classical curriculum. Pascal, the famous mathematician, said in translation from French “The heart has reasons of which reason does not know.” If those “heart” reasons are the dialectic lessons from experience, then reflection may be required for integration of those dialectic lessons with the didactic learning that is typical of the classroom.

Reflection While reflection may be critical to surfacing the learning from the experience and allows students to get the most out of their experiential education, different forms of reflection yield different levels and types of insight. While the majority of students’ participation in reflection consists of a post-experience meeting with advisors to discuss what they have learned, there are a growing number of students who participate in different forms of reflection. 6

Students who communicate with a professor throughout their experience often find themselves more invested in their experience than their non-reflective counterparts. These students who choose to share their experience with a professor relay not only information about day-to-day duties and responsibilities in the workplace or lab, but also deeper thoughts about the impact that this particular experience has had on them thus far. The uniqueness of this form of reflection is that it occurs constantly and in-the-moment and the relationship between the participants is mentor-student. The in-the-moment reflection gives the student an opportunity to change and improve their experience – giving the student a real sense of ownership of their experiential education. The mentor-student dynamic provides a safe environment for open discussion and different perspectives. This leads to more conscious thinking and reflecting on the student’s behalf. A newer way for students to participate in reflection while on their co-op is through concurrent reflection, what we refer to at Northeastern as Peer Mentoring Project. Building on previous work [Cohen], this program consists of small groups of students on their first co-op meeting together with facilitators constituting upper class undergraduates, graduates and co-op advisors. These small groups or learning teams meet once a month over dinner to discuss their experiences with one another. A facilitator is present to merely keep group discussions on track and to ask insightful questions where appropriate. Like the mentor-student form of reflection, this peer group reflection occurs continuously throughout the co-op cycle. As previously mentioned, the main benefit of this concurrent reflection is that students have more control of their experience. For example, if they are having problems communicating with a supervisor in requesting more work and responsibility, they could go the entire six month co-op period without really addressing this issue simply because they had no input on how to handle the situation. However, if this student were a participant of the Peer Mentoring Project, they would have the opportunity to bring this common workplace dilemma to the learning team, hear advice from their peers, and improve their experience. This concurrent reflection allows students to not only share their experience and learn from their peers, but to put into practice what they learn from the learning team to improve their experience. We are just beginning to study the effects of concurrent reflection on firsttime co-op students and a different team made a preliminary report at the 2007 WACE conference in Charleston, SC1. Many others are doing this kind of research, but we believe that much more must be done to better understand how these two worlds of serious experience and academic studies combine to educate the whole student. About the authors: Amanda Marsden is an undergraduate communication studies major at Northeastern who is graduating in May of 2008. She has participated in several cooperative education experiences, Service-Learning, Study Abroad, and has been involved with the development of the concurrent reflection project since its beginning. Richard Porter is former Vice President for Cooperative Education at Northeastern, Special Assistant on Experiential Education to the Dean of Arts& Sciences, Program Director for the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute on Experiential Education, and a professor of mathematics.

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James R. Stellar is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute on Experiential Education, and a professor of behavioral neuroscience with an appointment in Psychology. 1

Paper presented at the fall 2007 WACE conference in Charelston, SC: Models of Reflection and Approaches to Assessing its Contributions to WIL Programs. Richard Porter, Amanda Parker, Maria Graceffa, James Stellar. Northeastern University

References Cohen, P., McDaniels, M. & Qualters, D.(2005), AIR Model: A Teaching Tool for Cultivating Reflective Ethical Inquiry, College Teaching, 53 (3): 120-127. Damasio, A. (1994), Descarters’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and theHuman Brain, Penguin Books. Gardner, H. (1983), Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, BasicBooks, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Greene, J.D., Sommerville, R.B., Nystrom, L.E., Darley, J.M., & Cohen, J.D. (2001), An fMRI Inverstigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment, Science, 293: 2105-2108, 14 September 2001. Light, R. (2004), Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds, Harvard University Press. NY Times, Internships, Joseph P. Fried, Education Life section, January 6, 2008; available at www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/education/edlife/required.html?scp= 2&sq=internships&st=nyt Raelin, J. A. & D. Coghlan (2006) Developing Managers as Learners and Researchers: Using Action Learning and Action Research, Journal of Management Education, 30 (5): 670-689, October 2006. Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University press.

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