Nurturing Sustainable, Relationship-Rich Academic Environments
Not all experiential learning will be transformational for students. The University of Virginia identified three key attributes that distinguish life transforming educational experiences, including:
1. Students apply what they have learned through current or past coursework and other activities (e.g., co-curricular and extra-curricular activities) in real-world contexts where they can develop the skills and orientations that enable them to thrive.
2. A student’s experience in applying what they have learned in real-world contexts takes place in a collaborative environment in which interpersonal dynamics are an intentional part of the experience.
3. Students have the opportunity to deeply reflect on the experience at all points in the process, beginning with setting intentions from the start, and ending by taking into account what was learned both intellectually and personally through the experience and how those lessons will guide the student’s future curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities.
After identifying the attributes of life-transformative education, the team endeavored to expand and modify existing experiential learning efforts to be consistent with them. These included:
- The Internship Placement Program (IPP), an academic internship program that was reconfigured to include a 1-credit, ungraded course with the goal of providing attributes #2 and #3.
- The Thrive Grants Program, which supports instructors’ efforts to create transformative learning experiences tied to existing courses consistent with the three attributes. This program builds on the Course Design Institute (CDI) which helps faculty create rich, active classroom environments that support meaningful student learning via an intensive, multi-day, hands-on seminar focused on the iterative, dynamic, and scholarly process of learning-focused course design. The Thrive Grants Program incentivizes faculty – already committed to make important changes in their teaching – to create these experiences in their classes.
- Recognizing the correlation that community engagement and experiential learning during college has with thriving and well-being after graduation, the university worked to create additional community engagement courses. Practices in Community Engagement, a piloted 1-credit class, introduced students to theories and models of community engagement including, but not limited to, theories of equity, citizenship, human rights, advocacy and activism, civic leadership, social justice, civil discourse, and social capital. Students used an interdisciplinary approach to analyze and actively engage in principles and practices of community engagement through a local lens. For deliverables, students created a portfolio and reflected on the course’s materials and activities to help them integrate and synthesize content through a personal lens for enhanced meaning-making and understanding.
With a grant from the Coalition for Transformational Education, UVA’s Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) embarked on “Nurturing Sustainable, Relationship-Rich Academic Environments,” a project with three interrelated objectives: 1) nurture and align budding school- and university-wide initiatives aimed at engendering meaningful student-faculty relationships and supporting their evolution and expansion, 2) build the faculty’s capacity to serve as emotionally supportive mentors to students, and 3) create the institutional culture and structures needed to better support the type of life-transformative education that this grant initiative seeks to encourage. The research phase to better understand the current landscape of UVA programs aimed at fostering supportive student-faculty interactions and faculty who excel at building such relationships with their students.
