By MARTY LEVINE
Experiential learning at Pitt “felt a little bit like a secret … not well known outside of particular schools and units,” says Belkys Torres, associate vice provost for curricular innovation, and she hopes the Experiential Learning Student Showcase — from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. March 18 in the Tansky Family Commons at Hillman Library — will change that.
Yes, experiential learning can mean an internship or study-abroad experience, but its broader possibilities will be on display (and available for hands-on experiences) here. That will include virtual reality headsets showing English students’ very short 3D film experiments, engineering students’ formula-type racing car designs and many other projects.
Faculty and students will be there to discuss their experiences, since the event is designed to connect instructors and students for new experiential learning project ideas and with current projects they may want to take part in, but of which they may never have heard.
Experiential learning “bridges the gap between academic training and practical applications,” says Torres, and at the showcase students involved in such projects will talk about skills and knowledge they developed “and the ways this is helping them meet the expectations” of their eventual professions.
All experiential learning, Torres says, helps students “work with problems of the real world, develop analytical skills and enhance their capacity for innovation.” In addition, she says, “experiential learning allows students to be self-reflective and to think about their own learning process — what do they need — and then to develop skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, even self-confidence.”
That includes students now working at the three Saxby’s cafes on campus — also featured in the showcase. At Saxby’s, students are hired to run and manage the cafes, applying leadership and financial know-how to their day-to-day work.
Many schools, Torres say — from the School of Pharmacy to the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences — have offices dedicated to experiential learning, as do some individual school departments or units. History of Art and Architecture, for instance, connects students to architectural firms in town, where they learn to produce architectural models that better focus the shapes of particular projects for clients.
She views this Experiential Learning Student Showcase as a sort of job fair to match aspirants to new projects and to Pitt resources for undertaking them, many with the help of Hillman Library resources, such as the Open Lab, Center for Creativity and Archives and Special Collections space.
English faculty member Elise Ryan is the experiential learning coordinator for her department, and has recruited professors from all departmental areas (literature, writing, composition and film and media studies) to participate in the showcase.
“Experiential learning is having a boom right now in higher education but in English you can look back and see the pattern” of experiential learning projects, Ryan says, long before 2023, when she took over the coordinator post. She believes students’ projects are “going to give them a richer life and a scope of action in the world that is wider,” leading to “good old-fashioned personal growth and development.” She sees the instructors who create these projects as “motivated, highly accomplished faculty who care about teaching and really understand” the power of experiential learning.
One of the faculty members Ryan recruited to attend the showcase is Nathan Koob of film and media studies. He will have virtual reality headsets on hand, from Hillman’s Open Lab, for viewing students’ short 360-degree narrative films created for his past classes. He will also have students on hand to discuss one project from his current class, in which students devise their own press kits for older movies they saw in class — often as if the movies were being released today.
Hillman Library, Koob points out, has a large collection of movie press kits ranging from the 1930s to the 2010s, which he brings his students to see. Such old press kits, originally sent to the movie theaters, contained everything from hints for decorating your theater to publicize the run of a particular film to movie posters and scripts for radio advertisements. When students are devising the new press kits, he said, “it is important for them to think of the medium — different landscapes work in different ways and offer different opportunities, and drawbacks.”
As for the virtual reality projects, Koob noted their applications for gaming but far beyond as well, including in the School of Medicine and in biology classes, where students can explore virtual living systems. Another student has used the headsets in training modules for airplane engineering tasks, he reports.
The Experiential Learning Student Showcase (supported by the Gismondi Foundation), says Belkys Torres, will also “say to students that a liberal arts education teaches them to be well-rounded individuals and teaches them skills for professional success.”
She praises faculty members for their lengthy experiential learning efforts: “We don’t always recognize the hard work of what it means to be a mentor, someone who is walking beside a student step-by-step through the process. This is labor that faculty take on because they recognize the enormous impact this has on students, to ensure that students have deep and meaningful learning experiences.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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