Why do fields of higher education vary so greatly in the amount of experiential learning typically offered to students and the pedagogies used?
To give one example, the use of simulation is widespread and well-studied in nursing, but less so in pertinent fields such as business and legal education. Currently, there is a clear impetus for development in some fields and barriers in others. Fields such as nursing have professional associations that require extensive, evidence-based, and well-funded experiential learning programs. The impetus for simulation itself in nursing and other health professions has come about for a variety of reasons, including concerns about cost and patient safety.
Barriers in some fields may include educational traditions within the field that are less committed to empirical approaches, the requirements of some professional regulators that may exclude new and innovative approaches, and perhaps the perception that one's field itself is more “theoretical” than “practical”.
However, across the higher education sector, there is a growing recognition that experiential learning has the power to revitalize and deepen students' understanding, attributes and skills, despite the inevitable differences in subject content and the nature of practice and research within disciplines.
There is much to learn from established practices in other fields to promote better experiential learning, and there is also the question of how to incorporate experiential learning into multi- and interdisciplinary approaches.
Clear Influence Lines
My own 25-year career has been dedicated to clinical legal education (CLE), where students learn by identifying, researching and applying knowledge in environments that replicate the world in which law is practiced.
The very name “clinical” alludes to its origins in medical education. Nearly 100 years ago, in opposition to American law students learning exclusively from the printed legal opinions of judges, Jerome Frank asked, “Why not a clinical legal school?” The impetus was the free clinics that were set up in medical schools to ensure that medical students and their teachers learned through actual patient care, not just theory.
This inspiration led to almost every law school in the US now offering free legal services to their students through CLE, and in the UK 72 law schools have registered over 153 legal clinic activities. I and many other clinical legal educators also continue to draw inspiration from health education in areas such as simulation, problem-based learning, and standardized patient/client training and assessment methods.
So it's clear that an entire field could be influenced by the approach of another field – ideally it shouldn't take more than 100 years – but there are many similarities between the medical and legal professions, and it's clear that law could adopt an approach from medicine.
Sharing toolkits
But there is much to learn from practice in other fields. We can and should look beyond fields similar to our own, where we clearly need to develop similar skills, such as the ability to build trusting relationships with medical patients or legal clients. Less obvious, but with great potential, is the potential for experts in these fields to turn to people who are more immersed in the creative process.
An innovative collaboration between Northumbria University's School of Design and School of Law highlights the impact of integrating different disciplines of study. Kayliegh Richardson, a CLE colleague from the School of Law, worked with Angelika Strohmayer, a colleague from the School of Design, to present a toolkit they co-designed with colleagues and participants. The toolkit offers insights for designing, facilitating and reflecting on creative group interventions for women involved in the criminal justice system.
This included a storytelling-based activity where participants created characters to engage in a quest where they could plot a goal and a path to achieving that goal in a safe space. The storytelling template encourages participants to visualize their journey and the challenges, fears, and successes along the way. And we adapted this quest to allow law students to consider the goals and journeys of their legal clients and to reflect on their own learning goals and experiences. We learned that this form of storytelling and visualization has the power to unlock thoughts and emotions, something that traditional “lawyerly” approaches to written reflection often fail to do.
This made me realise how much there is to learn from approaches in fields that at first glance seem very different to my own, and the benefits of teaching and research in a much more interdisciplinary way.
Both structure and culture
There are different ways to break down barriers between disciplines. Some are experimenting with interdisciplinary modules, where students and researchers bring together different expertise to tackle problems that require interdisciplinary solutions. Other institutions are setting up interdisciplinary schools with courses and programs dedicated to this kind of experiential learning.
My design and law colleagues developed the storytelling approach through initial encounters and work in one of Northumbria’s interdisciplinary research themes, so part of the solution may come from encouraging and encouraging academics to think beyond collaborative research into the realm of teaching.
Ultimately, the way forward seems to be both structural, in terms of creating curricula and spaces for interdisciplinary experiential learning, and cultural, in terms of promoting networks and ways of working that encourage and motivate researchers and students to collaborate and learn from each other.
And opportunities to learn from each other are certainly increasing: an event hosted by the Institute for Experiential and Skills Based Learning (IESBL) on 20 September aims to explore how we can learn from different disciplinary approaches, and how we and our students can collaborate experientially across disciplines, to act, learn, reflect, explore and construct new knowledge.