Point: Counterpoint

No Credit Is Due

Experiential Learning Must Be Its Own Reward

By Ken Lewandoski

We all agree that various types of learning grow out of experiencing a culture other than our own. Much of it doesn’t take place in the classroom--in fact, it cannot take place in a classroom. I applaud the effort and ingenuity that has gone into enhancing this kind of learning. Analytical notebooks, required journals, field books, field placements, and the like encourage self-reflection, contextualization, and awareness of cultural detail.

There can be little doubt that the skills and knowledge students gain abroad not only make them more interesting people but also better students--with longer perspectives and deeper insights--whose analytical judgments are sharper and more nuanced.

Where Peggy Pusch and I might part ways (see “Where Credit Is Due,” March/April 1997) is over the issue of awarding (or recommending) academic credit for the experience of study abroad. Here, I contend, the underlying assumptions are fairly suspect. Awarding academic credit for experiential learning does a disservice to our institutions by undermining academic rigor. Academic credit requires formal assessment, and experiential learning does not lend itself to valid measurement of the student’s grasp of an academic discipline.

In the broadest sense, “experiencing” something is essentially visceral, rather than intellectual. One person can extol the virtues of apple pie and revile cherry pie; the question is, how do we assess those disparate “experiences” of pie in terms of the limited meaning of academic credit. In my view, we can’t. It is next to impossible to determine the quality of a student’s experiences (or even whether the student had an experience at all or merely faked having one) and come to an accurate, valid assessment of that experience in the context of an academic discipline (which is where academic credit lives).

Evaluating Study Abroad

Typically, programs require students to amass a body of written work (journals, notebooks, etc.), composed of a variety of responses to questions posed in advance, and write self-reflective prose, fiction, letters home, etc. The assumption is that these texts can be evaluated. But when pressed on the criteria for evaluation, what is most frequently offered is quantitative measurements (length, amount of detail, number of entries) rather than qualitative ones.

What appears to be assessed, consequently, is the ability of the student to articulate his or her experience, an assessment that would parallel evaluating a student’s experience of apple pie by his or her detailing the texture of the crust, the firmness of the apples, how this pie compares to others, etc. This response may tell us something about the student’s ability as a writer but not about his or her ability as a piemaker, pie historian, pie sociologist, or pie economist.

More importantly, it provides us with no solid criteria by which to judge one student’s experience of the apple pie against that of his or her peers. These efforts, while purporting to provide a method for evaluating experience, in fact measure a skill (writing). They do not provide a basis for awarding credit in an academic discipline--unless, of course, one wishes to award writing credit.

Again, what is at issue is not whether experience can inform a student’s approach to academic issues but, rather, whether one can assess such experience accurately. The award of academic credit ultimately depends on a judgment about the student’s intellectual grasp of material, not their--equally valid--visceral response to it.

No one would have difficulty pointing out analogous situations that do not result in students earning academic credit but which are nonetheless extremely valuable: editing or writing for the student newspaper, doing community service, participating in student government, or playing intramural sports.

Without flirting with reductio ad absurdum, one could employ the arguments underpinning the award of academic credit for experiential learning to a whole host of unwholesome activities. One could say, for example, that a student using drugs could gain a broad interdisciplinary knowledge (pharmacology, criminal justice, dialectology, sociology, economics), learn about a culture other than his or her own (the social dynamics of gangs, prison populations, 12-steppers), and practice a range of skills that may serve him or her well after college (price negotiation, phlebotomy, plea bargaining, interstate/international commerce).

A frequently heard argument for internships is that businesses are asking for students with practical experience. Finally, it comes down to which god we serve--knowledge or commerce.

Subverting Higher Education

If we subvert academic rigor by awarding credit without valid assessment, if we pose arguments that suggest any experience may be worthy of the imprimatur of our institutions, if we serve commerce rather than knowledge, we belittle the goals and play into the hands of those currently attacking the ideals (not to mention the funding) of higher education.

Buying into these arguments also does a disservice to our profession in the long run. There’s no need to repeat the long and tortuous history of the struggle to counter the impression that a term or year overseas is “easier” than on-campus work, that it is (in the worst light) no more than a term off or a variety of the nineteenth century Grand Tour.

Similarly, there’s no need to remind ourselves of the long and ongoing struggle to convince departments or other institutional offices to accept credit from study abroad programs (especially those transferring from other institutions). There is a need to suggest that arguing for academic credit for experiential learning, in the context of dubious academic rigor or valid assessment, can resurrect the very prejudices we’ve worked so hard to dismantle.

Another argument one hears for experiential learning--that students are demanding such experiences and credit for them--damages our profession by suggesting that we are pandering to student demand at the expense of academic rigor. This suggestion is doubly dangerous as it reinforces both the prejudice we worked so hard to overcome and the perception that ours is a commercial rather than academic project.

Preparation, Not Presentation

Certainly, as noted above, the capacities for self-reflection, contextualization, and attention to detail that students acquire through nonacademic experiences inform traditional academic work in significant ways. Yet all of these abilities are but a preparation for the more difficult regimes of sustained, focused, systematic research and the construction of a persuasive, coherent presentation of that research in a formal essay or lab report. Where the danger lies, then, is in according the preparation and the work itself equal value. By elevating the former we devalue the latter and thus convey to our students a lesson that will serve them quite poorly both in academe and in life.

Furthermore, awarding credit for experience fosters a whole set of questionable values and expectations. The most pernicious of these, perhaps, is that everything worth doing should have an explicit “pay-off.” If one argues that the time and effort students devote to community service, to volunteering, to gaining practical skills in the workplace through internships should carry the reward of academic credit, one runs the risk of undercutting the very values one holds dear and hopes to inculcate--namely that these activities are good in themselves and are worth doing for the joys and pleasures of helping others or of bettering oneself. It reinforces the misguided notions we often encounter in the regular classroom--that the time devoted to a task is somehow related to its “value” and that hard work is always officially recognized and rewarded. Whatever principles of altruism that may once have motivated these activities are canceled by the sharp cries of “What’s in it for me?”

At the end of the day, then, it is vitally important that the profession continues its efforts to incorporate experiential learning and internships into the structure of study abroad programs. But, as we lay ourselves down to sleep, we should practice saying these words: “While a good many things are very much worth doing, only a few are worth academic credit.”

KEN LEWANDOSKI is Director of Off-Campus Study at Colgate Univ., nearly half of whose graduates have studied abroad.