00:14 JAMES GAMAGE, HOST:
Welcome to Responsible Disruption. I'm your host, James Gammage, and today we're joined by Erin Capellan, the Director of Experiential and Work Integrated Learning at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary Erin is a passionate advocate for student engagement and experiential learning, with a focus on breaking down barriers to ensure all students have access to transformative educational opportunities. Erin is driving innovation in education and community development through her role at the University of Calgary and her involvement with the cooperative education and Work Integrated Learning Canada. CEWIL for short. Welcome, Erin. We're excited to dive into the world of experiential learning with you today.
00:59 ERIN KAIPAINEN, GUEST:
Thanks, James. I'm thrilled to be here.
01:01 JAMES: So can you start by sharing what experiential learning is and can you share your background and journey into this world and what it's inspired your passion for experiential learning.
01:12 ERIN: Sure, I might start with a bit of a story. I'm a bit of a storyteller. I didn't set out in high school or university saying I want a career in higher education or I want a career in experiential learning, but I think of experiential learning as the through line or the thread throughout my professional and my student career. I didn't have a lot of guidance from my parents on what to study or careers to pursue. My dad was a blue-collar worker, and my mom stayed at home. And it was really when I went to university where I was surrounded by peers, by staff and professors who really shaped my experiences and who I would become. I was really involved in student life, in residence life, working on campus, and those experiences and interactions with peers and staff and faculty really shaped who I am and what I do now. I didn't know at the time, but many of those were experiential learning opportunities or learning by doing. I'll give you a few examples because I think I'll come back to these later on. I had the opportunity to follow a professor to rural Argentina in my third year, and I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever been on an airplane. I ended up in Las Pampas, north of Santa Fe, Argentina, and I was studying fires and floods in a rural ecosystem. I didn't speak Spanish. There was no running water or electricity. And, you know, I didn't end up becoming a scientist, but it was that experience of being in a different place and doing research. And then back in Rosario, the second biggest city in Argentina, the experience of being in the streets and seeing graffiti all over the streets, different from graffiti that you see here in Canada, it was really pressing and urgent, harkening back to 1976 to 83, the dictatorship in Argentina. And, you know, this would become the topic for my graduate thesis on the politics of memory, public memory, following periods of trauma and repression. And then I had an opportunity to work on campus in my fourth year. I had been a literature student, so I was a decent writer. I had worked with the student newspaper and had been doing layout, so I brought that experience as well, and they wanted someone to come in, interview faculty members about their research, and then create short articles in plain language, for a general audience.
Remember I said I came from a blue-collar family, didn't I? I had these really funny ideas about what work is. And right there on my first day, I can actually picture being in the director's office with the associate director around a round table and them describing what they were trying to do. And then they turned to me, and this moment was probably less than 60 seconds. They asked me how I would approach this task, and that moment continues to shape the work that I do with students. I was treated as a partner. It wasn't my idea of work before. That was, you go to work, and your boss tells you what to do, and you do it. And in this moment, that all was just shattered. So it's a really long way of describing what experiential learning is. We often say it's learning by doing, it's grappling with something real and turning it over in your mind, connecting it to learning from courses, from books, from your professors, from life, and testing and retesting until you emerge with a more nuanced understanding. So it's a way of challenging what we thought we knew. It's a way of opening doors to things that we didn't know we were interested in. I never thought of working in higher education, but that experience in Research Services really opened that up to me.
05:32 JAMES: Cool. That's a great story. And it it's clear how that's inspired your passion for the work that you do. And I like using the learning by doing. I love that as a succinct way of explaining what experience you're learning is sometimes, just while we're on terminology, sometimes we talk about work integrated learning. Is there a difference between the two? Can you define that also?
05:59 ERIN: Y Yeah. So my work is in experiential and work-integrated learning. I think the easiest way to describe them is under one big umbrella of experiential learning—all kinds of activities that have students or learners grappling with something authentic and making meaning of that. And when those experiences happen in a workplace context, we call them work-integrated learning or WIL. That might be a new phrase for some, but many of us have completed practicums, capstone projects, consulting projects, internships, co-ops. So WIL or work-integrated learning can be paid or unpaid, part of a student's university or college experience, but really about growing your network, developing skills, testing things that you've developed in your studies. Also a way of finding career clarity—so affirming I want to do this but also maybe I don't want to do this, and that's OK too.
07:01 JAMES: Yeah, absolutely. So you work within the Taylor Institute of Teaching and Learning at the University in Calgary, so can you just tell us a little bit about the Taylor Institute and why it was established and what's its goal and how does the work of the Taylor Institute impact the experience of students that you have?
07:19 ERIN: Yeah, I'm really privileged to work in such an incredible center with such incredible people, really focused on high-quality learning and teaching. The Taylor Institute was funded generously by the Taylor family in Calgary. We are like a service unit to the rest of campus. There's expertise in teaching and learning everywhere on campus. We challenge the idea that all of the knowledge about teaching and learning is located in that building or in the staff, faculty, and students that work in the Taylor Institute. Rather, our job is to connect the expertise around campus to amplify the work that folks are doing in different academic disciplines and in the faculties, amplify innovative pedagogies and ways of knowing, and really support high-quality teaching and learning experiences. I think one of the ways that the Taylor Institute does this—and when I moved into teaching and learning from a career in student services, I really noticed this—is by doing a lot of listening, and that really resonated with me. A mentor would often say, "Go where the energy is." And I think we do a lot of doing with, not doing for. So, when the university focused on experiential learning in 2018-2019, wanting all students to have at least one of these opportunities before they graduate, it wasn't that experiential learning wasn't happening elsewhere on campus. In fact, this has been part of many disciplines since the beginning of those disciplines, but our role is really to connect the expertise in experiential and work-integrated learning, to share learning from one discipline to another as we enhance these learning experiences for students.
09:16 JAMES: OK, thank you. You use the word pedagogy then and just for listeners, you might not know. That's the method and practice of teaching. And you did say around how teaching is evolving over time and actually some of these methodologies experiencing experiential learning methodologies are becoming more prevalent, but just clarify how the traditional teaching pedagogy differs from an experiential learning.
09:43 ERIN: Sure. Well, I could go back to those examples I shared of my own experiential learning as a student where I could learn about writing, technical writing, writing for a general audience, about layout for a publication. I could learn about those in courses, or I could read about rural Latin America or ecosystems that have this pattern of forest fires and flooding. But when you're engaged in the learning by doing, by just being there in that forest and studying fire and flood, there's something else that is happening. It's tangible. It's more relevant. So I often talk about experiential learning as being sticky learning. Depending on the instructor, I don't remember all of the things that I studied when I was studying literature or international studies or environmental studies. But those experiences, that is where most of my learning came from, and that is what I like to foster for students—those aha moments that you have to grapple with, something that makes sense of it when you're challenged in your thinking. And that learning, something someone does or something someone says—like that associate director saying, "Tell us how you would approach this task"—that has stuck with me for more than 20 years.
11:16 JAMES: Clearly, there's a growing emphasis on that is was that solving a problem for students and communities, you know, or solving a problem in pedagogy that example did and if so, tell us about that.
11:28 ERIN: Yeah, I think it's not solving or addressing just one challenge, but a couple. The one you probably hear about, especially with work-integrated learning, is the argument for having all students engage in at least one work-integrated learning experience before they graduate as a desire to support a growing economy, to address the so-called skills gap, to ensure that students have experience before starting their careers. But I like to think that it's also about student engagement—feeling connected to what you're studying and learning, a connection to your peers, a connection to the university or college that you're studying at, and a connection to the instructors. That student engagement can be fostered by what we call high-impact practices for learning, like traveling abroad as part of your studies, working with a researcher on undergraduate research, doing an internship or co-op, or working in the community on a service learning project. These are all high-impact practices for student engagement because they're relevant to students' lives, and so I like to think that is one of the challenges that we're trying to resolve and one of the reasons why we do experiential learning. Also, students are asking for it—more and more of them are engaging in experiential learning in high numbers, and they want experience as they grow their careers, and they want to make a difference.
13:06 JAMES: Yeah. Yeah, no, I can see that. I know from my own learning experience, which was many, many years ago now, I don't remember the time when I sat down and read a textbook about something. I made it in geography, actually. But I do remember the times when I went out into the field and saw these things and with my own eyes and went through an educational experience in the field and I think it is so important, so important for our youth, that they have these opportunities. So just changing gear a little bit, so you work with obviously within the university context, universities are really complex organisations and I'd imagine they're sometimes quite difficult to navigate. And when you think about organizational change and shifting how education is thought of or how education is practiced. What challenges do you have in embedding experiential learning in the educational context within the university?
14:06 ERIN: Yeah. Thanks for asking that question, because obviously this is something I feel really passionate about, and I'd love to see more of this and want all students to have these opportunities. But there are challenges. For example, in work-integrated learning, many disciplines have long had a requirement for a practicum or a field placement. Think of a Bachelor of Education—you can't become a teacher without some practice teaching. Nursing involves doing clinical practice. Social work requires doing a practicum supervised by a registered social worker as part of that process. But now there's an expectation that all academic programs have work-integrated learning. I think one of the challenges—one of the things that, I don't say it keeps me up at night, but it is troubling, it is something that we really think about—is this saturation in the community and industry with the ability to provide adequate supervision and mentorship. At some point, there has to be a threshold. We need people to supervise and mentor these students. So, what is that threshold? How many students? One of my colleagues at Mount Royal calls it the absorption capacity—how many students can an organization provide more than adequate, really quality mentorship and supervision to? So, that's one challenge. I think the rising cost of living is affecting everyone, and it's really affecting our students a lot. We did some research a couple of years ago on what gets in the way of students participating in experiential learning, and there were lots of different things—from culture, feeling culturally safe in a workplace setting, to not having the confidence, not seeing yourself in a co-op or an internship experience, not seeing yourself doing an international learning experience.
But also, financial barriers were very, very real, and this was in 2021. Imagine now, with the rising cost of housing in Calgary, this is really affecting students. And so while there was pressure on students before, especially those engaged in mandatory unpaid work-integrated learning experiences—to become that teacher, that social worker, that nurse, that veterinarian—you're engaging in unpaid work placements. But when you're doing that, you're often forgoing paid work to do so, or you're incurring costs that you might not have had otherwise, like parking, transportation, or relocation expenses. So this is really something that we think about—how do we both ensure that students have these opportunities, but also that there's equal or equitable access for students to these learning opportunities?
17:08 JAMES: And I can. Obviously I have two university aged children at the moment who are going through summer work and one of them is going trying to access an experiential learning experience himself and that it's a very real issue, the cost of achieving that if ithere is no pay in effect for these placements. So how do you navigate that? Do you help students apply for grants or how do you?
17:38 ERIN: Yeah, it's really difficult. This has been something on my wish list or a priority for me for some time. Some institutions provide a fund that students can apply to, to offset the costs of participating in unpaid work-integrated learning. This is something I continue to work with fundraisers to create a sustainable fund for—if we're going to do more of this, we need to have resources to support students. I recently was working with a co-op student, actually—an international student who has been working in our office doing experiential learning and is also a student leader with the University of Calgary Students' Union. We were applying for a grant together to create a fund for students in unpaid work-integrated learning. So, I actually have an announcement—this is something we're hoping to launch for the fall. And honestly, this is not a solution; this is a Band-Aid. And I will admit that. But right now, with the cost of living, they need a Band-Aid, and so students will be able to apply to cover costs for transportation, stethoscopes, equipment, relocation expenses so that they can participate in these learning experiences without, or with less of, that stress about how they're going to pay their rent.
19:00 JAMES: Yeah. OK, that's great. That's great. And you also mentioned the reciprocity issues with working with organizations external to the university. How do you navigate that? How do you ensure that it's not extractive, the experience?
19:09 ERIN: Yeah. I would say that this is a dance. Experiential learning is really relational. It’s often a negotiation. There are clear benefits to students and to organizations, whether they're nonprofit organizations or industry as well. But it is a balance. You're also sending a student into an environment that isn't familiar to them and is different in many ways from what they're accustomed to—it's kind of a bubble on campus. The university is a bit of a bubble. So fostering relationships with organizations that take students and supervise them semester in and semester out—maybe not every semester, but regularly—is one of the strategies. Some forms of experiential learning—I started in this work in my professional career in what's called service learning—focus on working with nonprofit organizations around community-identified issues. I think post-secondary institutions are known, for better or for worse, for helicoptering into a community. Sometimes it's not what we try to do, but we might say, "Can you help us with this? Can you supervise these students? We're working on this course. Here's the model. Will this work for you?" But service learning flips that on its head a little bit. It’s meant to be a learning institution and a nonprofit organization coming together around a community-identified need and identifying, "OK, how can we engage students in working with you on this challenge?" They’re not the experts coming in; part of the model is also recognizing the expertise within the community, in community or in industry, having a balance is key. Not everything's going to be service learning, and not everything's going to be a co-op or internship, but having that in the mix as one of the ways we work with nonprofit organizations helps address that reciprocity.
21:35 JAMES: OK. Yeah, that's great. And I mean, I think you're talking to it a little bit there, but I'm also interested in how you develop a program. So you know how you identify where a program needs to be established and the process that you might go through in establishing that program, building it up and testing it and then launching it so to speak with the student body. So tell us a little bit about that.
22:05 ERIN: I don't think there's any one way of developing a program, but now there is an expectation from our provincial government that all new academic programs have experiential and work-integrated learning. So there is more intentionality around design. There's more design work happening in experiential and work-integrated learning. But sometimes I want to share an example that I think is really atypical because, quite often, the program design is done by the university or the college, the post-secondary institution. Several years ago, when most of my work was in service learning, I got a call from a community organization that works with children and youth of immigrant families. I almost couldn't believe what I was hearing because, instead of me calling a community organization, here was an immigrant-serving organization calling me to say, "We have this idea for a service learning course or a service learning program, and we want to talk to you. We've been talking to this professor in education. Can we talk to you about this?" It still blows my mind that we did this work, but they convened, rather than the university where the experts, air quotes, live. They convened a number of their partner organizations that work with children and youth of immigrant families. They had done a literature review and a logic model and had identified these two issues: a growing number of children and youth of immigrant families in Calgary schools and a growing achievement gap among those students.
At the same time, they were perceiving a lower level of preparation among new education graduates to be teachers and to be prepared to go into Calgary's increasingly diverse classrooms. So, they were thinking, "What if we worked with those students when they were still in their BEd program?" Working with a faculty member, this really was a partnership—no one person could do this on their own. Together, we designed a section of the diversity and learning course. I think this was like 10 years ago, and that course still runs. In this course, students would do non-traditional placements. They would work with Calgary Bridge Foundation for Youth, the Calgary Immigrant Women's Association, and with children and youth of immigrant families. By doing so, they would learn more about the students they would ultimately end up teaching and about the families—something they might not get in their BEd classrooms, or if they did, it would be delivered through an in-class presentation or a handout. They would also learn about all the support around children and their families in the community outside of the school setting, so that when they became practicing teachers, they would be better prepared to support those children and their families.
25:20 JAMES: That's a great story. I love that. And when you introduce a program like that, do you tend to introduce it... pilot it with one or two students and then look to scale it afterwards. How does that work?
25:36 ERIN: Yeah. Again, I think it probably varies by the goals for the academic department or the program. We often start smaller. For example, one program started with one section; we didn’t know if there would be future sections. It has evolved to include multiple sections of the diversity and learning course for BEd students. At one point, there was another section that focused on disability more broadly, but I’m not sure if that is still offered. We have been working with the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary to create a smaller, bite-sized work-integrated learning course for students. Research around what gets in the way of experiential learning highlighted issues like confidence and imposter syndrome. Co-op or internship programs tend to be long, and if students don’t see themselves fitting in or getting hired, they might not apply. But what if students could have a smaller, bite-sized opportunity to sample work-integrated learning or working in community or industry?
We're still in the design phase of what we call University 304: Experiential Learning in the Workplace. It's intended to be a flexible work-integrated learning opportunity. It might be the only work-integrated learning experience that a student in any degree program, not just in the Faculty of Arts, takes. It might also be a stepping stone for students as they build their confidence and see the richness of learning in this way. They might then apply to a co-op or internship program, do undergraduate research, or get a job on campus. For this course, we took a very different approach. Unlike traditional course design, which is often done by one instructor or a small group, we involved folks from student services like career services, our office, and the Faculty of Arts to imagine what this different way of doing work-integrated learning would look like.
We started small. The first section had 25 students. It's now offered twice a year with a cap of, I think, 60 or 65 students. We’re still in the design phase, figuring out the best way to do this and how to maintain that sense of community in the class. The course fills up every single time it’s offered, usually within 24 hours. So, we're trying to find a balance between extending the course and maintaining the magic that happens in it. That's one of the ways we design.
28:35 JAMES: Yeah. And I like the way you talked to the iterative nature of it as well. A well designed course will probably never be the same from one year to the next. And I like that, I can see the parallel and some of the work we do in the in the social impact lab here and evaluation. Obviously you know to decide what to do next, whether to continue with a program, whether to scale it, whether to end it, how do you go about that evaluation piece?
29:08 ERIN: Yeah. Again, it would be different for every course or different by academic unit. But in this particular case, the experiential learning in the workplace course, there’s a member of our team who does program evaluation, so she is doing surveys and focus groups with students, but also connecting with folks in our partner faculty and our office. Is this delivering on our goals? So we do a fair bit of program evaluation. I will offer, you know, the design of work-integrated learning or experiential learning programs. Sometimes it's not designed, sometimes it's redesigned as well. And so one of the ways that this is fairly new for us, and I’m sure there are others in Canada doing similar things, is that we’ve partnered with the Sydney Family Foundation to think about how we can change the system within higher education for work-integrated learning to be neuro-inclusive. So thinking of that, Co-op is often held up as the gold standard for work-integrated learning because there’s so much research on why it works, but it doesn’t work for all students either. Some learners can’t work full time, and Co-op programs often require full-time work. They often require students to, you get into the Co-op program and then you get access to the job board for Co-op. And it’s on you to navigate that journey. So there’s support with your resume and mock interviews and things like that, but landing that job is your responsibility. And I’m getting back to the evaluation, I promise. So, really working with students as partners, thinking back to me sitting in that Research Services Office, that was a students-as-partners model, and we’re trying to be really intentional about incorporating student feedback into the design process for work-integrated learning or the redesign process, so that they’re designed with principles of universal design for learning in the course, so that from the outset, we don’t have to fit students with learner differences into a work-integrated learning program, but they feel like they belong from the beginning. So we have engaged a number of students who self-identify as neurodivergent.
And really, we get them, and we want to do more of this work with the academic units as a way of renewing work-integrated learning and making work-integrated learning more neuro-inclusive. But we get them to walk us through a work-integrated learning program and identify what are the sticky points, where are the points of friction for them, and if we can address those friction points for neurodivergent students, our partners with the Sydney Family Foundation say, and we believe, that we will make work-integrated learning, make these learning experiences better for all students.
32:25 JAMES: I wanna shift gear a little bit. You've given us a great picture of the work that you do at University of Calgary, but you also, I noticed in your bio that you're active within the cooperative education and work Integrated Learning Canada. You've also talked about provincial government mandates and thinking beyond University of Calgary. What are some of the bigger critical conversations that are going on in this space?
32:55 ERIN: Yeah, I've been really fortunate to be a member of the Board of Directors for SEAWELL Canada for about five years. This work is relational. It's really helpful to learn what others are doing in this space. Our learners are also different. I went to a really great keynote at the SEAWELL conference last year in Mi'kmaq territory in Halifax. The keynote was talking about Gen Z. I wouldn’t say that I was really big on generational theory, but what Corey C. Miller was talking about was the expectations and needs of Gen Z students. I think those are students who were born after 1995.
Things that are important, and we see these trends in our workplaces and in our work with students, are that they have seen their parents or grandparents work really hard for one organization and still lose their house. They have seen this, so they don’t have the same loyalty to an organization. They’re not going to stay with one business for their entire lives. We see this movement to paying attention to the expectations of the students we have now and what’s important to them. One of the things that’s really important to Gen Z students is making an impact. They’ve grown up with climate change and a planet that’s on fire. They want to see that the work they’re doing is making an impact. They’re not going to sit around and wait to make that impact.
The University of Waterloo is the world leader in cooperative education. One of the things that they're doing in their work-integrated learning programs is connecting the Sustainable Development Goals or incorporating Sustainable Development Goals into the learning outcomes for their work-integrated learning programs. These are really meaningful experiences for students to be working on social change or addressing really messy problems and challenges in our world today. So that is one of the things that’s happening. To really name it, considerations of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in experiential and work-integrated learning are at the heart of the work that we’re doing with SEAWELL Canada within our organization. This is the work that we need to do, but also supporting our members across Canada to be doing this decolonial work and focusing on equitable pathways to experiential and work-integrated learning. There’s some really great work happening in Canada around work-integrated learning and Indigenous students working. Great learning for neurodivergent students. I would say that this is probably one of the biggest topics right now.
36:25 JAMES: And I mean, you're painting a great picture of the future of work, integrated learning or experiential learning. How do you see the field evolving and growing in response to what you're seeing now or the changing educational pedagogy? How do you see the future and what excites you about that?
36:50 ERIN: You may have stumped me, James. It’s really tricky. You try to imagine what the future is going to look like for work-integrated learning. I think there are some smaller changes that we need to make. Just thinking of work-integrated learning, co-op, and internships, I mentioned this kind of saturation level in the community. We need to move from focusing on the next semester and ensuring we have enough placements for students to moving much further upstream. This involves creating partnerships and relationships where we have an understanding of creating quality experiences, but also really tying into an organization’s talent development pathways. We need to understand what these organizations are trying to do and what is important for them. They’re not just doing a service and mentoring our students, but it really is this reciprocal benefit.
I’m not an expert in AI, but there are lots of questions about how artificial intelligence is changing the world of work and even supporting students with mock interviews or with resume reviews. There is certainly a lot happening with artificial intelligence. I had a really interesting conversation just last week with some other folks who do similar work in Calgary. We were imagining a future where students are working on big projects in Alberta. Not just, you know, this co-op placement here, but working with students and professionals from different disciplines on, I think the example someone shared was high-speed rail between Calgary and Edmonton. I had this opportunity as a graduate student—I don’t know how I ended up with this opportunity, but I was working in Argentina in informal settlements. I had these funny ideas of what work was, and I really didn’t even know about the different fields that I could pursue a career in. In short, this was a development program to incorporate informal settlements into the fabric of the city so that folks owned the land and couldn’t be pushed off when a Walmart was going to be built or something like that.
That they had electricity and running water and sewage and garbage pickup and all the services that come from being part of the city. But these are families that have, in some cases, been there for decades. To do this work to fold informal communities into the city requires relocation, which can be quite traumatizing. So, this development project—I thought it was fascinating the way you had social workers working with those community members, architects designing the new homes, engineers designing the sewage systems and modern streets, and lawyers because, at the end of the program, the families received the deed to the land. To me, it was fascinating to see how those different, very different fields worked together and had to work together. I think about the future in Alberta: Can we have students, even from different institutions, working on big, messy challenges like that? It’s not just bound to one semester; you have to imagine it in phases where students from different disciplines work on different phases of the project. Down the line, what are the other students and what do we need in the future? I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen, but it’s something I like to imagine. I definitely need some thought partners to think through that one.
40:47 JAMES: That's an exciting future. If you pair that with the one you talked about Gen Z coming through and their desire for impact. If you compare that desire for impact with projects like that big projects that really make a difference to the system. That's exciting.
41:06 ERIN: Right. Yeah. Like you think of how that would stick with you and then those students would be able to talk about that work, what they learned, and not just, you know, there's technical skills for sure, but also how they learned about working with other people.
41:21 JAMES: Yeah, for sure for sure. Exciting. Anyway, we've come to the end and I always leave the last question with you if there's anything that we've missed and you think our listeners might need to know or want to know or if there's any question that I haven't asked and you've got a burning answer for, it's over to you.
41:46 ERIN: It's not a question, but there is some emergent thinking around experiential learning that I wanted to share. I started off by saying experiential learning is learning by doing in a way that we explain this to students, and it makes sense. But for various reasons, we were revisiting how we define and frame experiential learning at the University of Calgary. Part of that goes back to when we first started focusing on it. We needed a definition and taxonomy of all the activities that count as experiential learning. At the time, the University of Calgary was developing, with elders in the community, our Indigenous strategy, Ataa'kto'p. We looked across Canada and didn’t see other institutions that had gone before us, focusing on experiential learning. We didn’t see anyone talking about things like land-based learning or learning from elders. I had read about some really cool courses at the University of Northern British Columbia where students were engaging in moose hide tanning, and I was thinking this is experiential. This has happened since time immemorial. Sometimes good intentions are not enough. At that time, we thought we needed to include land-based learning in how we think about experiential learning, and I think that was really important. A couple of years ago, an Indigenous scholar in art history, Erin Sutherland, reminded me that there are lots of citations in our framework for experiential learning but not a single reference from an Indigenous scholar. That set us off on some reasons to revisit how we define experiential learning, and I’m grateful to two colleagues who have really picked this up. Then, an Indigenous scholar joined the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. Her name is Dr. Christine Martineau. In every conversation and opportunity to sit with Christine, I take away something new. She honed in right away on that “learning by doing” as being incomplete. It's like when you see something and can never go back and unsee it. She really challenged that. It’s not just about doing. I wonder where that comes from.
I think the roots might be in capitalism or this obsession where we have to be making progress. We have to be doing something. A student has to be doing something in their internship or their practicum. But Christine has really challenged us to think of experiential learning as learning by doing, learning by being, learning by connecting, and learning by reflecting. Sometimes it isn't about the doing; it is witnessing. It is sitting there. It is being a paraprofessional in a professional context. It is being on the land with an elder or with an Indigenous community. It is being with your peers on an international learning experience. You're not always the expert.
This way of thinking about experiential learning also helps to destabilize the idea, especially in service learning, when we send students into a community. There’s this idea, I don’t know where it comes from, that we are the experts. But when you are just being in the community, it’s easier to recognize the expertise in the community. Experiential learning is often not solitary; it’s connecting thoughts, connecting what you're saying to what I read, what I experienced in the field. It's connecting with big ideas and with other people. Christine also really challenged me to think that it's not just about connecting with the instructor or with students. For some Indigenous students, it might be about connecting with the spirit. She shared with me that that is the most important teacher for many Indigenous peoples. Lastly, if you know, I don’t think we talked about it, but anytime you read about experiential or work-integrated learning, reflection—turning things over in your mind—is essential. It's a key part of learning in this way. There has to be a sense of thinking about what you’ve heard or experienced, or when something didn’t go according to plan. That’s why we say it’s learning by doing, being, connecting, and reflecting. I'm really grateful to my colleagues Christine, Lisa, and Kayla for helping to shape this thinking.
46:59 JAMES: That's such wonderful wisdom to share at the end of this podcast. So thank you so much for that. And you know that your passion for the subject is obvious and you know the insights you've brought and the expertise that you clearly have in the subject is very apparent. So thank you very much for sharing that today. And it's been a really wonderful discussion. So listeners, we hope you enjoyed that conversation with Erin and have gained some insights into the transformative power of experiential learning in education and community development. So until next time, keep exploring, learning and innovating.
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