In the middle of a sustainable farming lecture in Santa Barbara, California, one of my students snored in the back row on a February afternoon when I heard a sound that my teacher didn't want to hear. Loudly. Even if the other students turn around and erupt into laughter, I decided to plow them up before. Finally, someone awakened the problem student and the class went on.
Later that week, my teaching assistant approached me and explained how bad the snoring felt about the incident. The students didn't have any interest or my lectures felt boring, explained TA. They struggled to stay awake through these passive, sedentary experiences. It wasn't the content of my class that had a problem. It was a form.
I have been teaching for a long time (this is my 11th year as a professor), and I have been leaning towards experiential learning. It is a practical activity that brings students out of their seats and attracts all their senses and abilities. I see students seek something else, despite universities in my state contracting with tech companies and offering free AI training to campus.
We found that students work harder, learning more, and looking forward to the class with hands-on lessons focused on integrating more field trips to local farms, volunteering with community organizations, and building tangible skills. In addition to showing compost slides, students will also take to campus farms to harvest castings (nutrient concentration worm poop!) from worm bins. They not only lecture on how California farmers are adapting to water shortages, but they also take students to visit farms that operate without irrigation. The long wait list for these types of classes indicates that demand is much greater than supply.
I am a supporter of experiential learning in almost all educational contexts, but there are several reasons why this year is particularly relevant and important.
For one thing, the generated AI overturned most traditional allocations. The writing submitted by students can no longer be assumed to show what they have learned. Just as many of my colleagues have found the difficult way, students are routinely completely unfamiliar with the content of their papers. In this environment, there is a real advantage to directly supervising and assessing student learning, rather than relying on proxies that robots can forge.
We found that students work harder, learning more, and looking forward to the class with hands-on lessons focused on integrating more field trips to local farms, volunteering with community organizations, and building tangible skills.
Liz Carlyle
Second, young adults today face an uncertain economy and job market, partly due to AI. Many employers are deploying AI instead of hiring entry-level workers or simply suspending employment while waiting for the market to settle. As instructors, we must admit that we are 100% unsure of the technical skills students need to succeed in this rapidly evolving workplace, especially in the workplace 5-10 years from now. Experiential learning has the advantage of helping students build timeless, translatable skills such as employability, teamwork, communication, emotional intelligence, and project management. As a bonus, a community-involved learning approach allows students to showcase their professional settings in real time and ensure that they have more up-to-date and relevant experience than any cooked lesson plan.
Finally, not unrelated to the two points mentioned above, Gen Z experiences a mental health crisis that hampers many students' ability to concentrate, set goals and develop confidence. It's completely different to seeing them build a garden with shovels and some seeds (preferably out of range on your phone) and watching them build a garden with their peers. Being outdoors, digitally detoxifying, moving around, bonding with others, feeling a sense of accomplishment and making a difference is a powerful tonic for anti-mission and constant online quarantine.
The field of environmental studies has helped with outdoor experiential learning, which has long been an important component of courses in ecology and geosciences. However, this approach can be very powerful throughout the curriculum. I know of political science professors who take students to city council meetings, historians who walk down the streets of the city to witness the heritage of previous eras, and historians who write instructors who bring groups of students into wild spaces to develop local story essays.
With the support from my department, I am grateful to be able to teach a completely experiential field course, but I am equally excited to integrate the modest experiential elements into a lecture course of 216 people. Even experiential assignments in one discussion section (such as participating in public events or reflection) and practical activities can catalyse and deepen learning.
Certainly, effective experiential learning is an art form that requires a significant investment of time and energy from an instructor. This work needs to be properly evaluated and compensated, and off-campus experience requires careful planning to finance the transportation and ensure student safety. However, this payoff can be the most meaningful and memorable experience of a student's academic work. Instead of snoozing lectures, they can actively build themselves into the adult they want to be.
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Liz Carlyle He is an associate professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara and a Public Voices Fellow at the Open Project.
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