Point: Counterpoint

Creditable Study Abroad

Experiential Learning and Academic Rigor

By John Sommer

Creditworthy or not? The academic integrity of “experiential learning” has to be one of the most contested issues in study abroad (see articles by Margaret Pusch and Ken Lewandoski in the March/April and July/August issues, respectively). Coming from an institution that has been a pioneer in experiential education, I have frankly stopped using the term -- not because I don’t believe in the value of this mode of learning, as I define it, but because no two people seem to define it the same way.

Experiential Learning Defined

How do I define experiential learning? First, I must emphasize that to have experience is not necessarily to learn from it. Rather, one must use basic analytic processes and the perspectives of the conventional academic disciplines as ways of seeing and understanding. Further, one must be adaptable to accepting new ways of seeing and thinking in both an intellectual sense and in an everyday living sense. Learning is optimized, and driven home, by the synergy of formal presentations and readings on the one hand and experiential verification and integration on the other.

Experiential verification is not always easy in a new cultural setting. Indeed, it can be stressful to adapt to a different climate, a new language, strange food, prescribed ways of dressing, and unfamiliar ways of acting in order to be accepted in a new culture and thus more able to learn from it. In the process, students are forced to examine many of their fundamental assumptions--assumptions whose existence they may not even have recognized before. They must be open to questioning these assumptions and challenged to do so.

As one commentator put it, the way to learn is to “reflect radically” on the world as we take it in: to use our skills, our knowledge, our values, our perspectives, our individual and collective pasts--and, most important, to draw on each other--in order to invoke meaning so that new and fresh questions may be asked. Experience the world aggressively; view it critically; deal with both fellow students and new host country friends with humility, understanding, and responsibility--both inside and outside the classroom.

Experience and Analysis

In study abroad, visceral experience can- not--must not--be divorced from intellectual analysis. One without the other is incomplete. The visceral grabs us, forces us to confront reality and reflect upon it, applying classroom and book learning that has itself been stimulated by the need to seek answers to questions raised in everyday life in the family, on the street, in a village setting. My students, who actually spend at least as much time in overseas classrooms as they do at their U.S. home universities, learn what would soon be forgotten were it not reinforced and given new meaning. It is the students’ job, and that of their in-country director, to help draw the connections between classroom and field experience in order to enrich the learning and to help it last.

In my experience, most students find this way of learning intellectually invigorating. Many find it difficult. None find it lacking in integrity or potential for inducing growth. They find that formal education is a beginning, not an end. But only if they are willing to make the investment of themselves will such learning occur.

This emphasis on the critical synergy between traditional classroom academics and structured field-based experience is at variance, I think, with prevailing views of experiential learning which too often exclude notions of academic or intellectual rigor. In our own field-based programs we combine classroom study with structured field study in the same way that natural science courses combine laboratory periods with lecture sessions. Our field work is the social science or humanities equivalent of the natural science lab.

Assessment Is No Problem

Assessing this form of learning is important and eminently feasible. As in a biology or chemistry lab, the student who sets out to understand villagers’ attitudes toward a proposed hydroelectric project (for example) begins with a list of appropriate questions to address, interview approaches to follow, and a format for a final write-up. Grading such an exercise is no more difficult than for other types of assignments. While a homestay experience is not gradeable per se, an assigned oral history of the family matriarch or patriarch, which often offers fascinating and unforgettable insights into the life of a community and a nation, is gradeable. Journal writing, assuming analytic and not purely descriptive or emotional content, can also be a valid academic exercise. Independent study projects, too, have their analogies with traditional term papers--term papers that require (once again) an artful combination of library research and field interviewing and observation, often under challenging personal living conditions (especially in non-Western countries).

Learning How to Learn

One of the most important outcomes of study abroad--indeed, of education generally--is learning how to learn. We all know that there are still some conservative faculty members who feel able to validate only what goes on in their classrooms. I have heard one professor from a prestigious university enthuse about the students’ likelihood of learning more on a good field-based study abroad program than in the home classroom, but then still feel unable to consider it credit-worthy.

Happily, however, the trend is in the other direction, of recognizing the value of providing students with an opportunity to develop and strengthen their analytic and writing skills in an overseas setting as part of a four-year undergraduate education. If this complementary semester or year is to offer a truly powerful learning opportunity, it must take full advantage of field opportunities. Intellectual development comes in many forms, not only from reading academic texts and listening to lectures, but also from thoughtful interaction with the people who make the world what it is.

JOHN G. SOMMER is Dean of Academic Studies Abroad at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT.