THE NEA HIGHER EDUCATION JOURNAL: Thought & Action (Spring, 1996, Vol XII (No. 1), pp. 131-140)

Teaching as Experiential Learning

By Leonard J. Shedletsky

We evade the burden of freedom by embracing pressures to conform. 
We clothe our nakedness in literary or philosophical illusion. We immerse
ourselves in the power of our weapons, our
machines, our corporate enterprises. As T.S. Eliot put it,
mankind cannot stand very much reality. In learning to live with
less self-awareness, we also diminish those distinctively human
possibilities for freedom, creativity, caring, and ethical insight
which are based on that awareness.

--E. Cell, Learning to Learn From Experience


Three years ago, my university launched its first three-week
"intersession," and the director of the program asked me to
think about teaching a course in the fledgling program.
Years earlier, I had taught a four-week summer course and
concluded that 1 cannot condense a course from 15 to four weeks
without seriously damaging vital features of the course.  To offer a three-week course, 
I decided, I needed to design the course from scratch, with a three-week time period 
solidly in mind.  Writing this now, I can hear someone from outside the academy
saying, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to come to that conclusion." And I would
heartily agree. But I was so well indoctrinated by the bureaucracy that it was difficult
to break out of the restrictions (at least the ones in my mind) in 
what was supposed to constitute a course -- contact hours, tests, pages assigned in texts, and
the traditional teacher/student context for interaction.
  
LEONARD J. SHEDLETSKY IS PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN
MAINE. HE HAS WRITTEN WIDELY IN THE AREA OF COGNITION AND COMMUNICATION. HIS BOOK,
MEANING AND MIND: AN INTRAPERSONAL APPROACH TO HUMAN COMMUNICATION, OFFERS A
THEORY-PRACTICE CURRRICULUM FOR STUDYING INTRAPERSONAL COMMUNICATION. SHEDLETSKY, THE
CO-EDITOR OF A NEW BOOK, INTRAPERSONAL COMMUNICATION PROCESSES, ALSO TEACHES 
UNDERGRADUATES AND K-12 EDUCATORS ABOUT THE INTERNET.



Perhaps the most important
idea: I needed to shed the
ingrained sense of what a
course "should" be. 


The director gave me the go-ahead to structure the course as I
saw fit, with a maximum of 15 students, using a senior seminar format.


I left for a Speech Communication Association conference carrying the book 
I was considering using  for the course, Edward
Cell's Learning to Learn from Experience. The distance from
home, a powerful text to read and dream with, and the willingness
to step back from my usual way of thinking conspired to give me a
fresh look at what I wanted to do. Cell's book encouraged me to
learn from my own experience as a teacher. The process I went
through in designing the course resembled what I hoped the course
would do for my students.


Perhaps the most important idea: I needed to shed the
ingrained sense of what a course "should" be. I needed to hear the
authentic voice within myself that was trying to tell me what I had
witnessed through years of experiencing teaching and learning. I
imply needed to own up to what I already knew-that students
benefit from a close look at themselves and their own experiences.
I had to give myself permission to allow students to study
"being"-- being a significant person, being with others, being in an
organization, being a learner.


We bring to teaching a largely implicit theory of teaching and
learning that we use to design and teach courses. We adopt conventional 
regulations for teaching our courses. Experience, Cell
argues, introduces another voice, a voice from within, a voice that
is resisted, a voice that requires reflection and courage to be heard.


The very relationship between that voice and experience is
complex. Experience does not stand independently of us as interpreters. 
What do we perceive as experience? How do we make
sense of our experiences? What forces form the context for our
interpretation? How do we understand the situation we are in?
Weick writes: "A crucial property of sensemaking is that human
situations are progressively clarified, but this clarification often
works in reverse. It is less often the case that an outcome fulfills
some prior definition of the situation, and more often the case that
an outcome develops that prior definition."3   The sense we make out

 



In designing the course, I
found myself taking a fresh
look at my experience as a
teacher.




of our encounters with the people, events and things in our lives
does not always neatly build from smaller units to larger units,
from prior thoughts to later thoughts, from left to right, from one
point to another on a line. Sometimes we need to observe ourselves
in a situation before we know how we react to it and what sense we
make out of it. The line between being an observer and being a
participant is not all that thin: It is a critical boundary to cross,
and, as we do cross it, our sensemaking is altered. The key, it
appears, is to be willing to take a fresh look at our own experience
and reflect upon it.


In designing this new intersession course, I found myself taking a fresh
look at my experience as a teacher. As the course design
came together in my mind, I had a strong sense of how right it felt.
I asked myself good, direct questions: What is education for?
What's important to study? What is valuable to do with our time in
school? What can be done in three weeks? How do you fully engage
students?


I sensed internal conflict between the voice that was saying,
"Appropriate content is knowledge, what we know," and the voice
that was saying "What is more worth knowing than who we are
and how we got here and what sort of change is possible?" There is
a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) authoritarian voice telling
the teacher what is correct for the classroom, even as lip service is
paid to academic freedom. In a wonderfully lucid essay about
teaching and learning and living, John Rodden writes:

The word "instruction" is revealing and well-chosen. To educate
(educare) is to "draw out" students to grapple with basic questions, 
to make the material come alive; to instruct (instruere) is
to "build in" data and methodologies, which closes down questions 
and furnishes packaged answers. Here again is the
assumption that university teaching, even undergraduate teaching, has 
nothing to do with how people lead their lives, that it's
all a matter of "information transmission" and "professional
training." No wonder our students are alienated! No wonder
many of them choose courses according to the time of day, read
only the Cliff's Notes, and worry chiefly about their "credit





Students are required to
 take a stance and draw
 connections to their own
 experience.



hours," for when they reach the magical number they'll be
released. No wonder they hearken to sports heroes and rock
stars, who at least engage young people on issues of emotional
and even spiritual depth in their lives, who at least remind them:
You're alive! The outrage is that the academy rather like the
Church, invariably pretends to uphold a higher ideal.4


The Course Design




This is how my ideas came together. Instead of teaching about
communication and cognition by reviewing the research literature
on such topics as memory, balance theories, and attribution
processes, I decided to focus on learning. But rather than using the
perspective of a decontextualized cognitive process-variables
abstracted out of the everyday world--learning would be seen from
each student's perspective. The course would focus upon learning
as a broad-based process of gaining understanding about the
world, the self, others, the organization, and, ultimately, our own
learning.


All students could read the textbook and connect to the learning that
goes on in their own life. Experience has taught me that it
is not enough to have undergraduates read a text and come to a
seminar to discuss it. Under those conditions, more often than not,
students listen passively and read the text passively.


I had an idea that might correct that: the "position statement."
The student takes a position on an idea discussed in the reading,
writes that position, presents it to the group, and hands it in to the
teacher. Rather than simply commenting on the writing itself or
the ideas in the textbook, students are required to take a stance,
agree, disagree, modify, and draw connections to their own experience.


In this first intersession course, the 15 students in the class
were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Each class period,
the groups met in separate rooms and read or paraphrased their
position statements to one another. The class met for two a half
hours Monday through Thursday. I joined one of the groups for the



In addition to daily position
statements, students kept a
journal of free-wheeling
reactions to course ideas




first half of the day and switched to the other group after a break.


Meetings went smoothly. Students unanimously praised the
small group format; they liked having some time without the
teacher present. They made excellent use of their discussions. They
kept up with the reading and came prepared to present their positions. 
Each day I collected the position statements, graded them,
and gave them back at the next meeting.


In addition to daily position statements, students kept a journal of free-wheeling reactions
to the reading, to class discussions,
and to their own ideas. Journals were turned in at the end of the
course and were graded.


While the journal was a place to write freely, I strongly encouraged students to adopt
"a project" for their journal, a focus, possibly a sense of incoherent feelings. For instance,
for me a feeling of incoherence came from the personal voice telling me what is valuable
and workable in a course and the institutional voice telling me what a course should be.


Students had mixed reactions to the idea of finding a project
for the journal. I made it clear that if the project idea got in the
way of writing, they should scrap it. I believe that the focus in the
journal was enormously helpful in making the course work and in
building toward a powerful final essay.


I kept a journal for the course, too, and used it when I took part
in group discussions. Each of the three times that I have taught
the course, I have focused my journal on a project.5


Before long, group members knew about one another's projects.
I was the first to publicly announce what mine was for the three week period--relating
experiential learning to computer-mediated
communication, to work out ideas for a paper I was writing. 6


Students were encouraged to set the level of their focus for
themselves, feeling free to deal with highly charged issues if they
wanted. The use of the journal created intense and cohesive
groups. After a very short time, each group had its own identity
and did not want to allow in "strangers." Interactions spanned the
many facets of human experience--intellectual to emotional, public
to private, serious to humorous.





Students were also required
to submit a well developed
final essay for the course,
refining their ideas.




Students were also required to submit a well developed final
essay, refining material from the journal and position statements.
This essay was to be focused, developed, representing the best
insights that the student had. Essays typically demonstrated a
powerful synthesis of direct, life experience, and ideas offered in
our textbook. Frequently, these essays resulted in life changes that
students determined for themselves.


More than once a student quipped: "This is group therapy."
That made me wonder: What is group therapy? What is education?
What is okay to study?  I think that the answers to those questions
are critical to this discussion.


Rodden implores us to think about what is politically correct to
study within a discipline. He speculates that we pay a heavy psychic price 
when we turn away from our own real desires:

And because we are neglecting our real desires, we are highly
vulnerable to envy attacks. Envy is the revenge of cowardice. We
do not acknowledge what is really important to us and fail to follow
our dreams. Envy is "born out of spiritual idleness ... and a
lack of great intimate projects." The envious person measures
self-worth not intrinsically, but only in comparison with others.
He or she concentrates with a fury on what they have or do.

There is, finally, only one antidote. Go your own way. If you
pursue your own vision, you never feel envy. If you really love
what you are doing, you're not worried about what others think
or do. But know that you will not relinquish the habit of envy
easily, for it furnishes a ready-made explanation for all disappointments,
an excuse not to test yourself by exploring your
own ambitions, and a convenient method of scapegoating.8


We need courage to accept our own ambiguities, out own imper­fection, our vulnerabilities. 
Not only are we more powerful learners
when we face our powerlessness, we help to create the sort of classroom climate 
that promotes learning for our students.


Learning requires energy, courage, motivation, and active
involvement.7  It also takes patience to allow others to learn. And






What does this mean for
the individual teacher?
Potentially, it leads to some
pretty scary ideas.




learning in public adds complications. If students are going to be 
life-long learners, then they need to think about what life-long
learning might mean. Our institutions are not going to hand over
courage and independence. There are choices to be made by individuals. 
But most of us can use some help in getting a clear picture
of the situation. It's hard to choose when you don't really understand the
choices and their consequences. Speaking of teaching
and researching and learning at the university, Rodden clarifies
some of these choices:


To become "knowledge generators" or wisdom seekers: That is
the choice. And it's the eleventh hour. "Has the ideal of the
teacher/scholar' been replaced by 'theoretician/researcher'?"
asks Russell Proctor. Answer: Just about. At our "Research 1"
institutions, the transformation from ivory tower to industrial
park is almost complete. The gentleman scholar and absent­minded 
professor have given way to the knowledge technician
and the academic entrepreneur. Even in its failed aspirations, the
multiversity no longer wishes to become an organic society of
intellectuals. It is simply an academic-industrial complex con­ducting a variety
of profit-making activities like any other large
corporation. We are losing all belief that living the intellectual
life in the academy is not just a career but a calling.9

What does this mean for the individual teacher? Potentially, it
leads to some pretty scary ideas. If the institution I work in (for?)
is more akin to an academic-industrial complex than an intellectual community,
then who am I? What is it that I am trying to do?
That is, who do I want to be and how will my choices affect me?
How will they affect my students? What is it that I think my students should 
value in me? Is it that I can make large profits
through my work? Is it that I am a learner, a thinker, a teacher?
What is it that I hope they will value in themselves?
Perhaps the most important question for me as a teacher is
this: If I am preparing students for life, then isn't it crucial that I
think about who I am in relation to the educational institution?
Otherwise, how can I help students to think about their choices?
We must at least reflect upon our choices. Instruction or education?





Students are encouraged to
speculate and to try out
applying concepts from the
course.



Profit or reflection? What is it that I really want to work toward in
myself and for my students?


The methods I used in this intersession course are not just
applicable to a three-week course or a specific content area. It is a
strategy for integrating the students' experiences with the course
content. At the same time, it allows the teacher to integrate her/his
experience as a teacher with the course content and process.


Here are some conclusions I've come to that I believe can be
applied to many teaching contexts:





For me, these questions are components of a simple model for
course design. In every course I teach these days, a central component is the
requirement that students make connections between
abstractions and the concrete stuff of our lives. Individuals and
their ordinary experiences are valued as at least equal to the content of the texts. 
Students are slowly drawn into the circle of thinking and interpreting. They are
encouraged to speculate and to try
out applying concepts from the course. They are taken seriously.
An atmosphere of reflection in which it is okay to be wrong or go
up a deadend is fostered. Students take positions on course content
and connect them to their lives. They are also required to present
their ideas to one another, and asked to take one another seriously
as learners and teachers.

In this atmosphere, students are willing to think about issues
that matter to them, to make connections to course content, and to
risk telling others what they are thinking. None of this happens in
an instant. It takes time; more for some than others. But it does
happen. And when it does, students make comments like these:




They rank the technique
highly and praise the
collaborative learning
format.




The class was set up in a way that allowed each of us to express
our feelings and reactions to our lives and our reading. Classes
were interesting and educational. The classes were comfortable
and good for personal growth.




This was a great class. The structure of the class was somewhat
flexible and it was a stress free environment. The small group
really worked for me. I enjoyed learning from the others and
their experiences. The text had a lot of valuable information.




Lenny doesn't try to control the environment. Since there are no
right or wrong answers in this course, our personal experiences
proved most valuable.


These comments, typical student reactions, speak to the effectiveness of the 
above ideas, at least from the student perspective. I
have wondered about the effectiveness of the techniques and objectives I discussed above, 
and I have asked students to respond to a
questionnaire about the "position statement" technique. They rank
the technique highly, reject the alternative of lectures, and praise
the collaborative learning format. They say such things as this:


I enjoyed having something to say that was already written
down. I tend to speak more when I can clearly think out what I
need to say.



I believe that writing Position Statements did help me learn
from the chapter to search for a topic I wanted to write about.




Position Statements allowed (forced) me to think about at least
one aspect of the chapter in greater detail and in a different
view.



Sharing the ideas and receiving input from others on their views
of my position was very helpful. This enabled me to look at the
ideas from a perspective other than my own.



The anonymous comments are very supportive of the classroom
climate, the collaborative learning groups, the connection to self,
and the active learning. None of the responses have been critical or
expressed discomfort. Adopting the technique does not require faculty to 
do anything special to help students adapt.


These ideas and techniques probably will not work in every
course. But I believe that they will work in any course where it
makes sense to relate course content to experience. I use the
approach described here in a variety of courses, including an introduction to 
communication (with 50 students), a senior seminar on
sex-related differences in communication (15-20 students), and a
course dealing with meaning and conversation (25 students).


To sum up, I have written about learning from teaching. At the
same time, this essay is about being innovative in the university
setting. I believe that the course I described "works" because it
gives both the student and the teacher an opportunity to think
about issues that matter to them. It gives them a chance to remember what it is 
they love about learning. The course relates to us all.  Process and content merged in
the course. I loved teaching it and
my students made it very clear that they loved taking it. 

Endnotes

1  Cell, 1984, p. 9.

2  Ibid.

3  Weick, 1995, 11.

4  Rodden, 1993, 130.

5  Phelps and Ryan, 1995.

6  Shedletsky, 1993.

7  Davis and Murrell, 1994,

8  Rodden,1993,132.

9  Rodden,1993,126.


Works Cited

Cell, E. Learning to Learn From Experience. Albany, NY. State University of New York,
1984.

Davis, T., and P. Murrell. "Turning Teaching Into Learning. The Role of Student
responsibility in the Collegiate Experience." ERIC Digest (ED372702). ERIC
Clearinghouse on Higher Education, Washington, D.C., 1994.

Phelps, P., and Ryan, P "Synthesizing Theory and Practice: Praxis for Professors."
Thought & Action 21 (1995):121-28.

Rodden, J. "Field of Dreams." Western Journal of Communication 57 (1993): 111-38.

Shedletsky, L. "Minding Computer-Mediated Communication: CMC as Experiential
Learning."  Educational Technology 33 (1993): 5- 10.

Weick, K. Sensemaking in Organizations. London: Sage, 1995.