The Life Transformative Education Task Force
The Life Transformative Education Task Force at UConn launched in 2019 to work towards a culture and infrastructure that ensures every UConn student has the access and encouragement necessary to engage in their education as a life-transformative experience. With a recognition that life transformative educational experiences exist in abundance and that individual professors and programs are deeply committed to this type of educational experience, the task force laid out a grand challenge to effectively extend and scale life-transformative educational experiences to every single undergraduate student by their graduation.
The Task Force brought together faculty and staff to envision a transformative process in relation to campus culture; beginning with Cultivate, a large online workshop. Cultivate was developed to create a space to inspire, develop, and empower Life-Transformative Educators at UConn. The workshop brought together over 150 colleagues, effectively bridging faculty and staff to discuss the ways to expand and add upon the high-impact work already happening in the LTE space across all of UConn campuses. Participants in Cultivate were utilized in an exploratory mentoring project to help support students through the pandemic, and as ambassadors for LTE who can help further engage their colleagues across the University.
Several pilot projects were launched through the LTE Task Force. One, the Designing Purpose Through Service Learning project, brought a design thinking approach to creating experimental, yet viable, ways to exponentially grow LTE opportunities at UConn. Service learning provides opportunities for the “real-world” experiential learning that is a cornerstone of LTE. The pedagogy of service learning is ideally suited for students to explore purpose. Working with community partners on projects that meet the needs of these partners means that students can easily identify the value of the work they are undertaking. Students develop agency through opportunities to formulate their own ideas in projects focused on a particular community need. In the process, they are able to see how they can create positive change. This type of course also provides opportunities for reflection, which helps students further develop their identity as engaged citizens in relation to the community(ies) they are working with.
Faculty, staff and students involved in UConn’s service-learning programs were led through a design-sprint process (several days of focused work with a group of stakeholders led by one or more facilitators trained in design thinking) aimed at promoting purposeful experiential learning through a significant expansion of service-learning opportunities for UConn students. Priorities of the design sprint included finding ways to support greater service-learning opportunities for students at regional campuses which have lower retention and graduation rates, higher populations of minoritized and first-generation students, and fewer opportunities for academic enrichment and support; supporting faculty members in STEM fields to effectively engage the in the reflective assessment elements of service learning; and ensuring the development of modular and professional development content that would allow faculty to be confident in facilitating best practices that maximize the LTE potential of service learning.
This design sprint was informed by prevailing design thinking practice, with methodology focusing the experimental attention of stakeholders on solutions that are viable, scalable, and sustainable for social and institutional contexts in which UConn’s service learning programs are implemented. Following the sprint, a document of ideas generated and prototyped in the design sprint was used to create a two-year project plan. The LTE Core Team then partnered with the UConn Office of Outreach & Engagement to implement this plan.
- Several pilot projects were launched through the LTE Task Force, including a mentoring program for students who are identified as at-risk of discontinuing their education in which faculty and staff volunteers are paired with students to help them navigate challenges impeding their success.
- Following the design sprint, a document of ideas generated and prototyped in the design sprint was used to create a two-year project plan. The LTE Core Team then partnered with the UConn Office of Outreach & Engagement to implement this plan.
