Learning Reconsidered - ACPA

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LEARNING RECONSIDERED 2 HOW LEARNING RECONSIDERED IS BEING USED More than 10,000 copies of Learning Reconsidered: A Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience are in circulation on college and university campuses worldwide. The document has been used as an invitation from student affairs educators to their colleagues in other sectors of their institutions to engage in dialogue and planning for institution-wide student learning outcomes. It has become a frequent focus of professional development programs and workshops, and is the topic of many presentations at regional and national conferences of student affairs associations. Many educators are using it in conjunction with Greater Expectations to show how their curriculum, courses, or experiential learning activities will promote specific learning outcomes. WHY LEARNING RECONSIDERED 2? Introduced at the NASPA and ACPA annual conferences in March 2004, Learning Reconsidered: A Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience elicited an enthusiastic response that has been sustained through more than two years of discussion, debate, conference presentations, and professional development workshops. The most common request in response to the document has been of this type: Now that we have definitively stated that transformative learning always occurs in the active context of students’ lives and that the work of student affairs is integral to all learning and not just developmental in nature, how do we create the dialogue, tools, and materials to implement the recommendations? This need for practical assistance harkens back to the original working title of Learning Reconsidered, which was: A Blueprint for Action. Student affairs educators agree with the concepts; now, they want to implement the recommendations. 2 They have learned that changing the culture of a campus to one that supports the intentional development of institutional learning outcomes before the creation of programs and interventions is difficult. They want to demonstrate that there must be an assessment of quality and value—in terms of student learning—in every program and activity. They want to know how to challenge the structures and language of learning—to move beyond ideas of separate learning inside and outside the classroom. Those questions were the impetus for the preparation of Learning Reconsidered 2: Implementing a Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience. Jeanne Steffes, President of ACPA, re-convened the original authors early in 2005 to begin to outline a follow-up document that would provide practical assistance to student affairs educators who wanted to use the ideas of Learning Reconsidered in their programs, services, and activities. To make the work as helpful and relevant to as many professionals in the broad field of student affairs as possible, NASPA and ACPA brought several other associations into the process of writing Learning Reconsidered 2: • Association of College and University Housing Officers–International (ACUHO-I) • Association of College Unions– International (ACUI) • National Association of Campus Activities (NACA) • National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) • National Intramural and Recreational Sports Association (NIRSA) The value of this broad partnership is realized in the comprehensiveness and practicality of Learning Reconsidered 2.
CHAPTER 2 RETHINKING LEARNING Jane Fried WHY RECONSIDER LEARNING? Learning is fundamental to living and is, of course, the reason for higher education. But there are good reasons to rethink our ideas about learning—how it happens, what supports it, and what its outcomes are. The way in which we define and understand learning is critical to our effectiveness in working with students and professional colleagues. If our definitions or understandings are inaccurate or out of date, our ability to work with students and faculty colleagues may be impaired as well. • Our model of learning is out of date and inaccurate. In the academy, teaching has usually been understood as the transfer of information, and learning as the ability to acquire, recall, and repeat information. People who knew information explained it to people who did not know; anyone who could repeat what they had been taught or demonstrate their mastery of the material in some other way was considered to have learned. This teaching/learning model continues to prevail, with technological modifications, in our modern institutions; lecturing remains a key mode of teaching, despite the widespread availability of information from multiple printed and electronic sources. One must wonder why it is still the norm to believe that repeating information for students to transcribe is a productive educational activity. While faculty lecture, technologically-astute students may wonder if it is possible to download the contents of a relevant Web site directly into their brains 3 without writing anything down. There is a serious disconnect between the ways in which students are used to learning about their world, the ways in which knowledge is made available outside the classroom, and the ways in which we are still “teaching” and defining learning. There are at least two other components of learning that are equally or more important in today’s world: intellectual understanding and making intellectual and practical sense of experience (Caine, Caine, McClintic & Klimek, 2005, p.2). The processes for stimulating these additional types of learning are situated in parts of the brain that are not normally involved in memorization or the mechanical repetition of material. • Our ideas about learning are embedded in a positivist epistemology. This means that we typically do not address personal questions of meaning, experience, or involvement in learning. Our ideas about learning have historically been shaped by the belief that knowledge exists objectively, separate from the person who is learning: learning can be considered a process of apprehending information and retaining it. But even in the domain of scientific knowledge, where positivism is most widely accepted, the notion of a separation between the knower and the known fell into disrepute early in the 20 th century when Heisenberg articulated the uncertainty principle (for a more detailed discussion of positivism as an approach to learning, see Shifting Paradigms in Student Affairs [Fried & associates, 1995]). Learning within a positivist epistemology
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REFERENCES Abes, E. & Jones, S. (20
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Kegan, R. (1982) The evolving self:
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The holistic process of learning th
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