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IN HIS COMEDIC PERSONA of Father Guido Sarducci, Don Novello captured the central challenge to educators in the liberal arts: providing an education that sticks and is usable. Father Guido's solution was to bypass an expensive four years of liberal education; in his "five-minute university," students would pay twenty dollars and spend five minutes learning what the typical college graduate remembers five years after graduation. In economics, that would be supply and demand; in Spanish, como esta usted and muy bien. For any of us who have traveled to Madrid and tried to call on our college Spanish, this strikes a chord.
The challenge for liberal educators is to design learning environments and instmction so that students will be able to use what they learn in appropriate new contexts - that is, to enable the transfer of learning. This is, of course, a bigger challenge than the one recognized by Father Guido. Graduates need not only to remember what they learn, to develop and retain a "broad knowledge of the wider world (e.g., science, culture, and society) as well as in-depth study in specific area of interest," but also to have "a sense of social responsibility, as well as strong and transferable intellectual and practical skills such as communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills" (AAC&U). Effective citizenship requires students to be knowledgeable, to be able to use what they know, to have the capacity for critical analysis, and to be equipped for lifelong learning; personal, social and intellectual goals are intertwined. Yet programs designed to develop students' personal, social, and economic capacities are often separated from the core academic experience.
Experiential education, which takes students into the community, helps students both to bridge classroom study and life in the world and to transform inert knowledge into knowledge-in-use. It rests on theories of experiential learning, a process whereby the learner interacts with the world and integrates new learning into old constructs.
Experiential education
Within professional programs, there is a long tradition of including field experiences as a way to build practitioner skills and facilitate the move from theory to practice. Two of the most common forms of workplace learning are cooperative education and the internship. In cooperative education, students alternate periods of paid work with campus study...