Faculty Expeditions in Experiential Learning
Reimaging Experiential Learning at ODU for African American/Black and LatinX Students
What happens when we place the student and teacher experiences and relationships at the center of our academic mission?
An expedition is a journey that is undertaken by a group of people with a particular purpose, and Faculty Expeditions in Experiential Learning is just that. Each of the three paths for learning are invitations to each faculty member to become our best teaching selves and together venture toward creating student learning experiences that help all of our students to become their best selves.
Why start with faculty? When we think about how we might transform learning experiences for our African American/Black and LatinX students, we must first consider how this transformation might occur for those designing the learning experiences. In our prototype, we aspire to be a university "that cultivate[s] connected, participatory educational development that crosses institutional and national boundaries, and which takes equity, social justice, and power differences into consideration, promoting educator agency" (Bali & Caines, 2018).
Photo by Kevin Andre Elliot from flickr
"…the academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”
Do. Go. GROW.
References
Bali, M., & Caines, A. (2018). A call for promoting ownership, equity, and agency in faculty development via connected learning. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-018-0128-8
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.