Experiential and Transformative Learning through Cross Cultural Approaches to Environmental Knowledge
Grant recipients: Daniel McCarthy, Kaitlin Kish, and Stephen Quilley, Department of Environment and Resource Studies
Project team: Daniel McCarthy, Stephen Quilley, Kaitlin Kish*, and Kristen Giesting*, Department of Environment and Resources Studies
*Graduate student
(Project timeline: September 2015 - August 2016)
Description
Experiential education has the potential to fall victim to what Ivan Illich (2000) referred to as ‘counterproductivity’ – when a beneficial process (i.e.: hands-on learning) becomes too far removed from institutional intent (i.e.: intellectual growth). This project seeks to examine the role of experiential learning as an abettor for critical thinking when coupled with critical historical discourse, through novel approaches to teaching. Student participants will focus on a critical exploration of historical political economies leading to a series of modern ‘wicked’ dilemmas in relation to environmental issues. Simultaneously, students will engage with an Indigenous elder on potentially disorienting topics from pre-modern Indigenous Knowledge. We hypothesize that the combination of critical wicked dilemmas and experiential learning will profoundly impact students, leading them to a liminal state (Turner, 1985). This may serve to entrench theoretical ideas while creating opportunity for development of creative solutions to wicked dilemmas.
Questions Investigated
a. How effective are cross cultural experiential learning courses for facilitating new understanding of historical, political and cultural processes relevant to developing a new political-economy centered on environmental behavioural change?
b. How can experiential education coupled with topics of the environment, history politics and culture enhance the learning experience?
c. Can critical social theory and experiential education be effectively combined to utilize mutually beneficial processes and ideas from each?
Findings/Insights
a. Given this course, and others, we have found that emerging students into a new culture and/or environment is an effective way of understanding historical, political, and culture processes. However, without the prerequisite of what a political economy might entail, it is difficult for students to make real world linkages for how their new, and growing, cultural competency might be implemented on larger scales. Based on observations, we agree as a research team, that the historical political analysis should not always be included in the experiential course. The format of university classes already makes it difficult to implement transformative education without interfering with experiential lessons. However, it may be beneficial for students to take a theory class simultaneously, there is some disagree among the researchers on whether this should be mandatory and further research is needed. While learning the historical and critical application components of cultural and social lessons is important, it may not be the goal of each individual student.
b. Students were eager to engage with indigenous lessons on environmental history and approaches. This experiential course is important for challenging students’ lens, manufactured by their own upbringing, to begin considering new approaches to environmental action. For example, in this course students were repeatedly challenged to think of environmentalism as a passive part of life and being rather than as something that needs to be extrinsically implemented into businesses and organizations.
c. We deduced that critical social theory and experiential education can complement each other for creating creative problem solving for environmental issues. However, learning about culture should come first so that students are able to consider this in the actions they may recommend. For example, students should understand that ‘critical social theory’ itself is not necessarily an academic framework that an indigenous scholar would recommend or that may be compatible with their teachings and ways of life. To be an effective researcher, politician of community activist, students should consider the culture and viewpoints of citizens before enforcing a particular kind of thinking upon the situation. To this end, coupling the two methods of teaching may be more suitable for graduate students, although more research is required in this area.
Dissemination and Impact
This research contributed greatly to a research group where there is an ongoing debate between graduate students and faculty about the level of cultural competency required and how best to implement it into undergraduate programming. This course demonstrated to some in our research group that cultural approaches to knowledge may require differential treatment in the academy so that their voices are included in their own way. For others, this remains up for debate, with the argument that a traditional academic setting is appropriate for only the western scientific approach to knowledge and ‘truth’.
The success of this course and the student experience has set it up to be an ongoing course in the School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability.
References
Project Reference List (PDF)