Message From the Editor in Chief

All those who work or have worked in formal education recognize, at some level, the name and contributions of John Dewey—those graduating from a School of Education at university, even more so. John Dewey has inspired and influenced educators for generations with his prolific works of some 20 books and many articles. Dewey can be considered a modern-day scholar (he received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1884) but with a big difference, given his range of interests—not so much specialization. Dewey’s interests included philosophy, psychology, politics, social theory, education theory and pedagogy, and morality (Gutek, 1997).

Truth be told, reading the works of John Dewey is no easy venture. His first major project in philosophy was expanding thought in the American established philosophy of pragmatism. Pragmatists believed that the meaning of a statement is the practical results in experience that we would expect if the statement were true. Dewey believed that philosophy traditionally had been too contemplative and passive; therefore a better philosophy of living would be one that can demonstrate that the thought project works—that it is practical. He ascribed to a naturalistic empiricist approach to thought and inquiry. The subject and object in experience should work together to create an epistemic truth (Dewey, 1973).

One very powerful principle held by Dewey, and one we as educators can take to heart, is that truth is about what is workable for the time, and we should be prepared to change what we consider what works (Russell, 1945). Therefore it is incumbent on us as educational leaders to keep up with the latest research and studies via their subsequent articles, books, and manuals used to disseminate new findings in education theory and pedagogy.

Some may still claim that the technology (in the traditional sense) of teaching (Kegan & Lahey, 2001), especially as it relates to higher education, has not changed much since the invention of chalk and the chalkboard. Similarly, we hear time and again that we no longer need to be the “sage on the stage.” Agreed. What may be even more interesting, liberating, and useful to our students than the technological advances is experiential learning (Kolb, 1984). The types of experiential learning are growing, but a list that we propose in the journal comprises the following:

These are all challenging learner activities to plan, implement, and most important, to evaluate How do I know what they learned from the experience? What is even more challenging in some experiential learning activities is the temptation that the activity is so creative, unique, or special that students de facto learned something. How could they not take away something from this exciting and wonderful experience?

One has to be impressed with those among us who dedicate time and effort to conduct a good evaluation of an experiential learning activity or project. For example, Savard (2011) reports on his study of the impact of international immersion programs on undergraduate students. His question, one common to those taking students on international immersion programs, is while students claim the experience “changed their lives,” he wanted to know at a much deeper level what factors contributed to this and how the experience changed their lives. He devised an assessment strategy to give greater evidence as to the impact of immersion programs among 316 student participants from 13 colleges and universities in the United States.

In one experiential learning experience I had with students, I have to say it delivered much more than I anticipated for both students and faculty. The place, time, and event (literally) were remarkable to begin with. To top off a course on “perspectives on disability,” we took 10 students to the Paralympic Games held in London in September 2012. This certainly had the makings for a life-changing experience for our students. Several came back and changed their majors; some committed to more volunteer work or honed their research interests—but most important they looked at the issue of “those with a disability” in a way unlikely to have occurred in the classroom and with our many readings.

As a group we learned that we were not watching a “sub-par” athletic event overshadowed by the Olympic Games, nor were we watching people with disabilities playing sport. We were watching athletes who saw themselves first and foremost as athletes (Gambescia, Knowles, & Pollak, 2012). During this weeklong and intense observation with these students, the concept of “otherness” (Ryan, 2012), as it relates to these athletes, began to dissipate from our minds.

What was more startling to me was on the plane ride home from London to the United States, I began to think what this experience meant on how we view athletics in general, not simply the comparisons between the Paralympics and “regular” Olympics. During the course and prior to the trip to the Paralympic Games, we read articles about how scholars and participating athletes and organized disability groups viewed the Paralympic Games movement (Brittain, 2010; Gilbert & Schantz, 2008). The experience brought new meaning to me about human performance in sport—the ability to go faster, higher, and be stronger. Furthermore, a radical idea occurred to me! I am now starting to challenge why we have gender-specific competition in elite sport, especially in noncontact sports (Gambescia, 2013). With just a few months of study of the Paralympics and a powerful experiential learning project, I am able to appreciate human performance in sport without parameters or qualifiers of the corporeal. So many “barriers” have been broken in sport; it seems that it may be time to consider mixed competition at the elite level—especially in noncontact sports. I am convinced that this idea, as radical as it may seem to many, would not have occurred without this experiential learning opportunity. I have encountered few, even among elite female athletes, who think this is a good idea, but I think of what John Dewey asked of educators— to be open to the inevitability of change and be willing to challenge and test the long-standing traditions and values we encounter in life (Hildebrand, 2008).

In this issue of Pedagogy in Health Promotion is a set of experiential learning ideas for a range of formal learners from undergraduates, to MPH, to doctoral students. Massengale, Strack, Orsini, and Herget (2016) implemented a photovoice project for undergraduates to give them an authentic learning experience to help them engage in advocacy and civil discourse related to the health of low-income residents in a community. An added step in their work was to have residents of the community under observation review the students’ work and give feedback to the students.

While not a large study, Sudha and Morrison (2016) studied a handful of students to examine whether adding on gerontology content to an international health–focused service learning course would “spark interest” in further study in gerontology and “gero-focused careers” among their graduate students in a community health education track. Their motive for the study, and one we have to hope gets more attention, is that there is a dearth of graduate programs in public health education with aging concentrations, despite the many reports of people across the world living longer and the aging of our populations.

Nadimpalli, Van Devanter, Kayathe, and Islam (2016) share that CBPR work can be conducted with doctoral students. While CBPR is quite involved, they make a case that public health education specialists need not wait until they work several years in the field but can benefit from this experience as graduate students.

The message here is not that most of us are not aware of and enamored by the benefits of experiential learning but that it takes hard work to implement high-quality experiential learning opportunities and even more work to evaluate them and to capture the latent benefits of these special educational opportunities.