Abstract
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
When we were newer instructors, even early in our doctoral programs, the question of balancing course content with student learning processes was never a factor for us to consider in course development or delivery. Content, of course, was king: A frequent lament from colleagues was that there was so much to cover and so little time in the semester to do so. Some 20 years on, we find still that content-related issues remain the dominant conversation when preparing and facilitating courses. How can I possibly fit in all the important foundational stuff and still have time to cover the newer research? Should I do all the chapters in the textbook? How can I choose?
As experiential educators, not to mention JME editors, we find the relative lack of attention to student learning process in these considerations both curious and alarming. Related scholarly fields of inquiry, education per se and management education in particular, have discovered a lot about how students learn and what they retain—and it is not the content many of us seem to hold so dear. The power of a learning process is, to paraphrase Maya Angelou, the ability to make students feel connected to core concepts and later recall that connection when it matters.
The importance of this insight for student learning is now juxtaposed with a wave of technology-driven educational innovations. As massive open online courses (MOOCs) and providers such as Kahn Academy firmly embed themselves as educational options, content is now commodity. Traditional authoritative sources like Encyclopedia Britannica have given way to online options, and Wikipedia’s stunning quality and accessibility (Casebourne, Davies, Fernandes, & Norman, 2012) caused Microsoft to abandon its Encarta encyclopedia product in 2009. We have heard many of our colleagues dismiss these types of online education providers as clunky or impersonal, citing the low course finishing rates as evidence that soon they will fade away as a failed experiment. And, when students’ research papers utilize Wikipedia as the main reference source, we too have rolled our eyes.
But to be so dismissive is missing the point. Right now, mass content providers and quick online resourcing cannot approximate relational learning or the spontaneity of an experience, whether in class or outside of it. They cannot build a co-learning community, where what Parker Palmer calls relational trust allows both our students and us to encounter learning in fresh, emotionally rich ways (Palmer, 1998). Some researchers have even found that the chance to enrich a student’s worldview and challenge them to become their best selves happens only when we engage their emotions (Epstein, 1994). Given the state of teaching and learning at which we find ourselves, the value to student learning that we provide is grounded firmly in the process of experience and the concomitant shared journey of sensemaking. That is our gem, our ace in the hole, but it will certainly not last forever. Technology catches up, and there is enormous incentive to make education better, more accessible, and less expensive than ever before. Someday, technology-based education may also take up the experiential banner within which we now wrap ourselves; indeed, former JME Editor Jon Billsberry wrote provocatively about the evolution of MOOCs and what their developmental trajectory could mean for management educators (Billsberry, 2013).
In This Issue
We consider it one of our editorial responsibilities to be acolytes for sharing the power of experiential learning process within our professional communities—a responsibility we hope you share. Readers of JME, and those who utilize our authors’ thoughts and innovations to improve student learning, are already part of the revolution that will inevitably overtake higher education. In this issue, we share innovative work based firmly in new ways of understanding and using process in a learning environment. Culbertson, Fullagar, Simmons, and Zhu examine how Csikszentmihalyi’s oft-cited concept of flow affects student performance when considering flow in a social context. One of the aspects we appreciated about this article is the authors’ deep and interesting discussion of their nonsignificant results for their hypothesis testing—not often seen in top-tier journals. Mitchell, Parlamis, and Claiborne examine how and why faculty rebuff the very online learning tools discussed above, and utilize a robust change management model to decrease defensiveness and move faculty toward increased pedagogical options. Their description of the trans-theoretical model of change should prove valuable in a variety of contexts where readers may encounter resistance to embracing new modes of learning.
Bravely grounding service-learning in a context relatively new to service-learning (Asia), Stanley Snell, Chan, Ma, and Chan share their experiences in developing student leaders. Those authors share a sensitivity to differences in learning norms that includes make-or-break success factors easily overlooked in North American learning environments. A “road map” will allow other readers to both understand their decisions and import into their own course designs what is helpful for similar contexts. In another “roadmap”-based article, Kaplan and Renard share their experiences in giving up power and control in that most central of course tools—the syllabus. Not always sunshine and butterflies, Kaplan and Renard help readers anticipate and effectively manage issues associated with cocreating course structures.
In this issue, too, three Resource Reviews give fresh life to often hum-drum aspects of learning. Jean-Francois Coget introduces us to Haiku Deck, an alternative that “fixes” a key criticism of PowerPoint—too much stuff on a slide. A disciplined and elegant tool, Coget shows how Haiku Deck uses imagery and few words for maximum learning impact. Daniel Jenkins reviews Fink’s (2013) edition of Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. A holistic resource, Fink’s book moves from learning objectives to assessment, and everything in between. Finally, Kempster, Turner, Heneberry, Stead, and Elliott share how a time-honored child’s toy engages our emotions and imaginations. Finger puppets can hold perhaps an unexpectedly broad set of uses for management education, detailed by the authors.
We invite you, as always, to engage with these articles and share in the wonder of students’ discovery.