by Tom Haines, MM

Our students come to our universities hoping to find something they can find nowhere else. They come to us with highly integrated life experiences that have already colored their worlds for better and for worse. Now, with neo-millennial students staring back at us with their expansive world views and expectations—our currently compressed classroom schedules put the highest priority on our in-class face time together. Each time we set foot in our classrooms, our students assess our relevance via their worldview (again for better or for worse.) These days, knowledge for knowledge sake seems out of date. Students know that with little or no effort they can obtain facts and figures online. If they get the notion that attending class has little effect on extending their knowledge base and has only a slight effect on their grades—then what’s the point? To satisfy their curiosity about their world, they’re just as likely to stay home and online. So what is it that they truly seek?

Students seek authentic, shared experiences. They inherently know when they have it even if they cannot tell us exactly what it is.

by Kevin Grace

When I teach a class, a song from The Who’s rock opera Tommy always seems to course through my brain.  In “Go to the Mirror, Boy,” an exchange between Tommy and the doctor results in lyrics most of us have heard at one time or another: “See me, Feel me, Touch me, Heal me.” Like those lyrics, it all comes down to “experiential” learning, our pedagogical emphasis on hands-on curricula.  For me, experiential learning boils down to putting primary documents—15^th century manuscripts, 17^th century rare bindings, 19^th century letters, early 20^th century photographs—into the hands of students so they can see them, feel them, and of course, smell them.