Learning Outside the Traditional

Classroom: Educating the Whole

Student
By Amanda Marsden, Richard Porter, and James R Stellar
February 20, 2008

Octavia’s journey began when she was a freshman. After hearing a fellow Northeastern
University Student speak about her experience studying abroad in Ghana, there was no
doubt in Octavia’s mind that she had to travel abroad as well. As she described:
“The moment she finished her presentation I knew that I had to see the deep
indigo coastline, smell the hustle of a day’s work that began at 5 a.m. with the
mango-colored sun, hear the earth’s heart beat as it danced from the Njombe [a
district of Tanzania].”
For Erin, a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, her journey to the NASA
Johnson Space Center began with an e-mail from an advisor about a fellowship program
at NASA.
For Mariko the journey began, incredibly enough, before College when she met an
advisor at an open house for admitted freshman, toured his research laboratory, and
showed up in the first few days of her Freshman year to begin working on neuroscience
research. Having published more papers than some graduate students, she is now part of
the Stanford medical school fall 2007 freshman class and a different person than when
she arrived.

Growing participation
The face of higher education is changing as Experiential Education programs including
internships, cooperative education, study abroad, undergraduate research, service-
learning, and community-based research are becoming an increasingly important
component of college education for nearly all students in the country. According to the
third Internship Survey by career publisher Vault Inc., the number of students
participating in internships is sharply rising with 62% completing an internship in the
summer of 2006, a significant increase from 41% in 2005. Considering that figure only
reflects the number of students participating in internships, if the number of students
engaging in study abroad, undergraduate research, co-op and service learning were also
factored in, the percentage of students nationwide participating in any form of
experiential education could be well over 75%. Experiential Education is a significant
investment by both students and institutions of higher education. It continues a trend
seen in high school where students often have service-learning or internship opportunities
or even requirements. Some colleges brag on their web sites about how many hours of
community service their entering freshman class performed in high school, as if to say,
“Come to our institution. We have students like you.”

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The growing importance of experiential education is also reflected in an increasing
number of colleges and universities introducing experiential education as a graduation
requirement [NY Times]. Such schools range from small liberal arts colleges, such as
Hendrix College and Rhodes College (featured on 2/08 the AAC&U web site for their
community engagement program), to large research-intensive universities, such as
Northeastern University.

The Value Proposition

A growing national debate is emerging on the value versus cost of higher education itself.
Faced with escalating tuition costs, many students and their families are asking whether
the conventional college/university experience is worth it. Colleges and universities that
offer forms of experiential education in addition to traditional undergraduate coursework
attract astute parents and students looking to get the most ‘bang’ for their tuition buck.
Given the magnitude of the investment colleges and universities are making in various
forms of experiential education, it is time to step back, be mindful, and investigate at least
the following points: (a) What characteristics of out-of-the-classroom experiences induce
students to fully realize their potential to learn? (b) What steps help students to deeply
learn from their experiences and integrate their out-of-the–classroom and in-class
learning? (c) What are the underlying principles of this different kind of learning?
Here, our goal is to promote the importance of asking these questions for higher
education and suggest a place to look for answers, not to answer them. That will come
later and require significant additional research that contributes to the emerging science
of learning from experience as well as the classroom.

Key characteristics of the student experience

Answers to our questions must emerge from an understanding of the key characteristics
of the student experience in programs such as study abroad, co-op/internships, service-
learning and undergraduate research.
Through student examples, we identified a pattern of key characteristics that drive
student learning in these contexts. These characteristics are that the students ‘feel’ the
experience, take on responsibility, and see an impact of their work that is external to
themselves. The result is that students make meaning in their lives, helping to define
themselves in what is called a community of practice [Wenger].
Feel the experience: The first key characteristic is that the experience is deeply felt.
Whether a student participates in study abroad, service-learning, undergraduate research
or co-op, an emotional element exists. Octavia speaks to this point in writing about her
study abroad experience in Ghana as follows:
“I could have read a book on West African culture, language, history, and values.
However, it would have been merely words that sounded like freshly squeezed
theories dripping loose from some academic head. My experiences gave me new
eyes, tastes, thoughts, sounds, movements, realities, smells, words, relationships,
and memories. I realized that it is easy for an outsider to place judgment on

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 another’s cultural values and norms but the path toward authentic understanding is
tedious and often confusingly painful journey.”
Assume responsibility: The second key characteristic is assuming responsibility. Erin’s
experiences at NASA offered her this opportunity. In Erin’s words
“NASA demonstrates a lot of confidence in their co-op employees. … I got put
right in the middle of a project and put in charge of a contract team…they threw
you right in like you were a full-time engineer. They were definitely around to
answer questions, but they had a lot of confidence in our abilities.”
Erin responded to the opportunity. During her first session at the Johnson Space Center,
she worked in a thermodynamics group as a test engineer. In her second assignment, she
became certified as a NASA instructor, and taught expedition crew members, safety
personnel, and flight controllers about emergency hardware. For her third work term,
Erin worked in a motion controls group for the international space station. Her fourth
work session was in advanced mission design, where she was also involved in the
Columbia accident investigation.
Not all experiences are as completely successful as Erin’s. What makes the difference?
Students’ initial expectations of their experience and contributions are often at odds with
the reality they find. Consider for example Octavia’s expectations and the reality she
found. In Octavia’s words:
“I expected to step off the plane and be embraced by Ghanaians as if I were their
long lost sister from across the Atlantic,”
Octavia’s initial expectations were far from being met:
“Initially they treated me as if I was a wealthy tourist instead of the homeless
descendant that I perceived myself to be,”
This tension between initial expectations and reality is common. Some students respond
by disconnecting. An intern, for example, may feel that his/her initial work assignment is
boring or beneath them and respond by just going through the motions. Others may
respond by implicitly understanding that this tension between expectations and reality
can generate learning [Wenger, p. 227]. These students heighten their awareness of their
surroundings to create opportunities to achieve valuable outcomes even though those
outcomes may be short of initial expectations. In Octavia’s experience, after considerable
interaction with people in Ghana, she wrote about the best she felt she could do at gaining
acceptance into their lives.
“We were able to build a swinging bridge that allowed us to cross back and forth
into one another’s world,”
See the impact: The final key characteristic of the student experience is that students see
an impact of their work that is external to themselves. For Mariko, she saw the impact
from her research in the advisor’s lab as well as from her other co-op experiences. In her
first co-op at Boston University Medical School, Mariko had the opportunity to work
with a professor in the Department of Pharmacology. She noted that this co-op was a
truly unique opportunity for her because she was able to work side-by-side in the lab with
this professor, a graduate student from France and a few other technicians, in conducting

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molecular biology research. Toward the end of her co-op, the professor actually left BU
Medical School and began working for a major pharmaceutical company. This opened up
yet another opportunity for Mariko:
“The other students all found new homes, so I remained as his only assistant. This
provided an opportunity to make a large contribution to finishing up his work. We
recently had our manuscript published in the UK journal Stem Cells and
Development, with myself as first author - a lucky opportunity. We have a second
one in the writing phase right now,”
Mariko continuously sees the impact that her work and research has on the medical and
educational communities. Not only did she see the impact during her first co-op at BU
Medical School where she had her research published alongside a professor, but each of
her “out-of-the-classroom” experiences had more and more impact on the external world
and she began to gain credibility that extends outside of Northeastern University and into
the medical research field. Mariko spoke about her co-op and undergraduate research
experiences:
“With these experiences, I've learned how to be a scientist. Without them, I'd just
be a person who knew a bunch about biology and psychology. They also have
given me a lot of confidence in the real world. I've always been a good student
and outgoing, but it gave me the ability to perform on a different level. It provided
me with the courage to attend international conferences with the best in the field,
such as the Society for Neurosciences, and walk up to someone's work, look them
in the eyes and discuss their studies without being afraid that they'll guess that I
don't have a degree. Better yet, for the last couple years, I've been able to have top
neuroscientists in the field come to MY poster and ask me about my work.”
Mariko, like many NU students who engage in the different types of experiential
education, sees the impact that they can have on the outside world. Students see that they
don’t have to wait until they graduate or attend graduate school to contribute to the world
around them. They can partake in undergraduate research, study abroad, co-op, service
projects – and really be instrumental in whatever field they choose. In this way students
not only grow internally, but externally. It is what draws students to participating in
experiential education programs.
Summing up to this point, these student examples provide evidence that the key
characteristics that drive student learning in experiential contexts are: (a) students ‘feel’
the experience, (b) students take on responsibility and (c) students see an impact of their
work that is external to themselves. We see feeling the experience as necessary to initiate
learning. We see students assuming responsibility as a lead to having an external impact
which in turn provides the internal reward and motivation to continue the process of
productive interaction which builds the motivation to continue the cycle. This is an
‘outside-looking-in’ view of education, one that is outside the ivory tower.

Meaning and neuroscience in a college education

The search for meaning in an academic setting like the university is not foreign. Richard
Light [Light] wrote that college students really want a mentor in their chosen field to help
them integrate their academic studies with their personal career path and to make

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meaning in their lives. The very term “academic studies” however, conjures up words
like “ivory tower” to describe the disconnected and other worldliness intended for the
typical college or university plan of study.
One can ask how the academy got to be an ivory tower. Certainly, it always was a
sanctuary from the world where ideas could rein supreme and young minds could come
to be trained by some of the best thinkers in the world. We suggest that an additional
factor---reinforced by the field of Psychology in the mid 20th century---is the view that
emotions are not scientific and hence have no place in scientific academic study. In our
view, much of higher education internalized this view. The development in more recent
times of information technology and the early growth of cognitive psychology reinforced
treating the mind almost as a computer. In the classical ivory tower, information is seen
as entering the student’s mind as theories and facts presented in the curriculum, and is
retrieved by the student on exams to demonstrate competence and meet standards. Some
theorists call this didactic learning. It is the world of facts and theories and tests and
books. It takes a bit of knowledge, transfers it from the teacher (who knows) to the
student (who learns) and uses a convenient exam to judge the success of the process.
But there is clearly another way to learn. Many have written about multiple intelligences,
perhaps most famously, Howard Gardner [Gardner] in his concept of “Emotional
Intelligence” or E.I. (in contrast to IQ). More than a decade ago, the neuroscientist,
Antonio Damasio used a case of modern day Phineas P. Gage to refer to a similar type of
reasoning based on a body wellness sense. Gage survived traumatic brain injury to
emerge with a different personality characterized in part by a lack of social responsibility.
Before his accident, Gage’s bosses viewed him as the “most efficient and capable” man in
their employ. After his accident, Gage was intelligent, had a good memory, and could
speak and interact with others. But when required to act responsibly or interact
effectively with others he utterly failed and was unable to keep any job. Damiaso was
able to show with modern brain scanners that patients whose actions mirrored those of
Gage had damage not to the cortical brain areas long associated with reason and thinking,
but to subcortical brain areas typically associated with the limbic system or the emotional
processing center. Based on this case, Damasio wrote a well-known book called
Descartes’ Error [Damasio], which argues that we need those emotional processes to
know when we have arrived at a logical conclusion and that reason alone (based on facts
and theories) is not enough. We would argue that what Damasio refers to as the body
wellness sense or what others might call E.I. is what Raelin and others [Raelin] would
call “dialectic” (constituting the reorganization or reconstruction of experience). We
further contend that such a subcortical dialectic reasoning system is connected to
meaning making based on experiences, as with communities of practice [Wenger].
It is an open question whether dialectic reasoning reflects a different form of brain
function from didactic learning, and the evidence that is emerging from neuroscience is
tantalizing. Consider one study [Greene] based on a brain activity scanning method
known as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). In this study, subjects were
exposed to something called the Trolley Problem. Here a subject is asked to imagine
responding in two scenarios. Let’s say you are the subject. In the first scenario you
imagine you are standing by train tracks with your hand on a switch. An approaching
train will pass you and kill five people ahead on the tracks unless you pull the switch and

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send the train onto a siding. The problem is that one person is on that siding and that
person will surely be killed by the train. Do you pull the switch? Most people say yes.
In a second situation that is logically the same, you are on a bridge above a straight line
of tracks with a train coming. Five people are on the tracks ahead and surely will be
killed unless you push the person next to you off the bridge and onto the tracks. You
know for sure that person will die but their body will stop the train and save the other
five. There is no other way to stop the train. Now do you take the action? Many people
say “no” and it often takes much longer to get to an answer. What is relevant to this
discussion is that in the first scenario the fMRI reveals that classical cognitive areas are
active, but in the second scenario additional activity appears in brain area that is known to
be involved in emotional function. The second scenario is harder because it involves a
more direct and perhaps emotional connection to the death of another person even though
the choice is the same from a purely logical perspective.
Our hypothesis is that experiences that are authentic and substantial engage these
subcortical, more limbic brain areas and underlie the dialectic form of learning that
makes meaning in our lives. Our thesis is that without engaging the dialectic learning
through experience, the didactic (or classroom theory/fact learning) can be incomplete,
leaving the student without knowing how or where to apply what he or she knows. The
business community has long recognized that education is more than classroom facts and
theories. It involves working with other people in teams and a certain maturity that
experience brings, so called “on the job training.” They also call it applied learning,
which may have slowed its adoption because that kind of description can seem to offset
academic excellence for which the ivory tower rightly stands. Combining the two
approaches may be more complex, but it is more powerful. Northeastern has seen that in
its College of Arts and Sciences and across the University where more than 35,000
students applied for 2,800 seats in the fall 2008 freshman class, giving the university a
top 5 ranking among private universities.
Combining academic excellence with experiential education to achieve transformative
student growth is still something to which only a few colleges and universities have
committed themselves. Such an action involves attempts at integration between the
curriculum and student experiences. Yet the integration actually occurs in the student’s
mind, so while the curriculum must be resonant and the experiences relevant and
substantial, other strategies may be necessary. For example, reflection on experience
may be critical to surfacing the learning from experience so that it can be integrated with
the classical curriculum. Pascal, the famous mathematician, said in translation from
French “The heart has reasons of which reason does not know.” If those “heart” reasons
are the dialectic lessons from experience, then reflection may be required for integration
of those dialectic lessons with the didactic learning that is typical of the classroom.

Reflection
While reflection may be critical to surfacing the learning from the experience and allows
students to get the most out of their experiential education, different forms of reflection
yield different levels and types of insight. While the majority of students’ participation in
reflection consists of a post-experience meeting with advisors to discuss what they have
learned, there are a growing number of students who participate in different forms of
reflection.

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Students who communicate with a professor throughout their experience often find
themselves more invested in their experience than their non-reflective counterparts. These
students who choose to share their experience with a professor relay not only information
about day-to-day duties and responsibilities in the workplace or lab, but also deeper
thoughts about the impact that this particular experience has had on them thus far. The
uniqueness of this form of reflection is that it occurs constantly and in-the-moment and
the relationship between the participants is mentor-student. The in-the-moment reflection
gives the student an opportunity to change and improve their experience – giving the
student a real sense of ownership of their experiential education. The mentor-student
dynamic provides a safe environment for open discussion and different perspectives. This
leads to more conscious thinking and reflecting on the student’s behalf.
A newer way for students to participate in reflection while on their co-op is through
concurrent reflection, what we refer to at Northeastern as Peer Mentoring Project.
Building on previous work [Cohen], this program consists of small groups of students on
their first co-op meeting together with facilitators constituting upper class
undergraduates, graduates and co-op advisors. These small groups or learning teams meet
once a month over dinner to discuss their experiences with one another. A facilitator is
present to merely keep group discussions on track and to ask insightful questions where
appropriate. Like the mentor-student form of reflection, this peer group reflection occurs
continuously throughout the co-op cycle. As previously mentioned, the main benefit of
this concurrent reflection is that students have more control of their experience. For
example, if they are having problems communicating with a supervisor in requesting
more work and responsibility, they could go the entire six month co-op period without
really addressing this issue simply because they had no input on how to handle the
situation. However, if this student were a participant of the Peer Mentoring Project, they
would have the opportunity to bring this common workplace dilemma to the learning
team, hear advice from their peers, and improve their experience. This concurrent
reflection allows students to not only share their experience and learn from their peers,
but to put into practice what they learn from the learning team to improve their
experience. We are just beginning to study the effects of concurrent reflection on first-
time co-op students and a different team made a preliminary report at the 2007 WACE
conference in Charleston, SC1. Many others are doing this kind of research, but we
believe that much more must be done to better understand how these two worlds of
serious experience and academic studies combine to educate the whole student.

About the authors:

Amanda Marsden is an undergraduate communication studies major at Northeastern who
is graduating in May of 2008. She has participated in several cooperative education
experiences, Service-Learning, Study Abroad, and has been involved with the
development of the concurrent reflection project since its beginning.
Richard Porter is former Vice President for Cooperative Education at Northeastern,
Special Assistant on Experiential Education to the Dean of Arts& Sciences, Program
Director for the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute on Experiential Education, and a
professor of mathematics.

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James R. Stellar is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, a member of the
Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute on Experiential Education, and a professor of
behavioral neuroscience with an appointment in Psychology.
1
Paper presented at the fall 2007 WACE conference in Charelston, SC: Models of
Reflection and Approaches to Assessing its Contributions to WIL Programs. Richard
Porter, Amanda Parker, Maria Graceffa, James Stellar. Northeastern University

References
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