By MARTY LEVINE
A new Experiential Learning Hub, opened as a pilot program this fall in Hillman Library, is aimed at bringing together students, faculty, staff, alumni and community and industry partners to create new experiential learning opportunities and to learn together from current ones.
“We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience,” says Abdesalam Soudi, a linguistics faculty member who is directing the center as Dean’s Fellow for Experiential Learning in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences. “You can give people a million experiences, but if you don’t give them a chance to reflect,” then nothing may come of those experiences, he says.
Everyone knows individuals who have experiences that ought to be life changing, or at least help to shift their perspective, but somehow they don’t seem to have learned anything from the experiences. “How do you develop a language to capitalize on these experiences?” Soudi asks. “What did you learn from those experiences and how can you teach them to others? This is the future of learning.”
Soudi hopes the Hub — which is now just a relatively small office — can bring people together to share their experiential learning, both what they learned and how to find or create new opportunities together. The Hub is partnering with local organizations and companies to create experiential projects that use Pitt expertise for community needs. The Hub is also organizing story circles with those partners, to share what has been gained from experiential learning.
“Students get excited about this, as we just did this morning” with the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council, Soudi said in late December. “Students are thinking about their next steps in life, and a chapter in a textbook is not going to help them do this. Experience will.”
Future Hub plans include experiential learning-focused retreats and institutes for faculty, staff and advisors; career roundtables; student showcases; alumni mentoring; and immersive gatherings and exhibitions.
The Hub is still in its early stages of development, says Aaron Brenner, associate University librarian for research and learning, who is helping oversee the Hub from the University Library System side. He has noticed in recent years “lots and lots of interest in more active forms of learning and creation … rather than just getting information from the material such as textbooks, in a class. It’s increasingly more important for people to have experiences … to create new things.
“The hope,” Brenner adds, “is that we can use the library location to raise opportunities” to get people talking about and sharing their experiential learning outcomes. “We know that there is already a tremendous amount of experiential learning happening on campus” but not always a way to hear about what is underway, to learn about new opportunities and to see models of what works.
Experiential learning is traditionally “learning by doing.” It includes internships, but “we are deliberately treating experiential learning as a broad umbrella,” Brenner says. The library itself, for instance, with its maker spaces and open labs, offers “all different forms of creation that takes place outside of the classroom” through experiential learning, often without a formal instructor.
He and Soudi cite the library’s research wall — an interactive digital showcase for research and other creative collaborations underway — as one method of raising the visibility of experiential learning already happening at Pitt, showing the types of work students, faculty, staff and their partners outside of Pitt may join to experience. The Hub and library also may undertake an open-access scientific journal for scholarly work on the subject.
“This is an effective form of learning,” Brenner says. “This is not a new idea of putting something in practice” among people at different social levels. “The nature of the world we’re living in requires a lot of skills, such as working together, problem solving in real time and working on a tangible project.” There are skills students need to do the work instructors assign, but these may not always include the collaborative skills an eventual employer will desire.
“Skills on their own are not enough,” Soudi adds. “We need to prepare good citizens. We worry too much about skills. … But what about character? Ethical and moral reasoning? How are we able to create a culture that works across differences? You can have someone with amazing leadership skills, but you’re not a good leader” if you lack moral and ethical reasoning. “Empathy at the end of the day is very important. There is no collaboration without empathy.”
“We are excited about the idea; we’re excited about the partnerships,” Brenner says. “It is in a pilot phase, and we are learning, as we’re listening, about what will work.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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