This guide helps instructors connect place-based experiences and experiential learning to different courses in the WR sequence.
Guiding Questions for Adventures Outside of the Classroom
- How can students engage deeply and safely with a place/event and its community/ies? What clear ground rules can you create to protect students while giving them freedom to explore?
- How wide a range of options will you give your students? What will be the opportunities and limitations created by the range you choose?
- How can sharing experiences outside the classroom contribute to class community?
- How can shared discussions, presentations, or projects enable the experience outside the classroom to contribute to class community?
- How will the outside-the-classroom experiences become essential to a major course assignment so that these places and events become crucial sources in student work?
- How can reflections help students explore their experiences more deeply to provide a foundation for a specific major assignment for your course but also transfer to future contexts?
Tips for Connecting Place-Based Experiences to Course Goals
- Pre-reflection and Post-reflection: Students write before the experience, describing expectations about what the place or event will be like. The post-reflection then addresses what happened and links back to the pre-reflection, giving students the opportunity to analyze their preconceptions in relation to the actual experience.
- Pre-reflection and presentation: After writing pre-reflections, students give presentations that compare their expectations with the actual experience and analyze reasons for differences.
- Post-reflection and substantial class discussion: If students all attend the same event or visit different sites over the same few days that offer clear basis for comparison, post-reflections can be combined with an extensive class discussion in which students compare what they experienced and link details of those experiences to readings and course themes.