Mind the gap! Developing the campus as a living lab for student experiential learning in sustainability

Abstract

This chapter develops a new approach to experiential learning for sustainability and will be of interest to those seeking a baseline for the distinct conceptualizations of experiential learning and their impacts on matriculating (or matriculated) students in the longer term. College campuses are communities unto themselves and, as with communities everywhere, confront the challenges of becoming sustainable. Students attend college to learn and become knowledgeable in their chosen fields, but, perhaps with the exception of research labs, rarely have the opportunity to apply their skills to authentic or “real world” problems—experience that would allow them to become adept at both technical and cognitive process skills needed after graduation. This is especially true for projects focused on sustainability, which require multidisciplinary perspectives and interactions and thus are difficult to launch and complete. We suggest that the college campus is an ideal “living lab” that not only allows students to encounter and think about complex and wicked issues, but also to define actionable opportunities and address really-existing problems through collaborative projects that materially contribute to the sustainability of a real-world system. Pedagogy supporting “experiential learning” can play a critical role in teaching sustainability concepts and practices and thus in bolstering the Campus as a Living Lab agenda. However, we find competing or ambiguous definitions of experiential learning in the literature and no complete framework for its application in sustainability praxis. This chapter reports on research into sustainability pedagogy and assessment of the educational opportunities in experiential learning at the University of California, Santa Cruz, based on campus efforts to become a more integrated sustainable system. Accordingly, we first unpack terminology applied to “experiential learning in sustainability” from multidisciplinary and multi-departmental perspectives. This review of selected literature combined with data accumulated from students and program facilitators compares and contrasts both the historical significance and current practices of experiential learning to provide a more explicit framework for its implementation in sustainability as part of a coordinated network of distinct living lab entities. We then employ this framework to discuss a “critical gap” in college curriculum that was exposed during our investigation into the efficacy of these projects and programs at UC-Santa Cruz that may be inhibiting student preparation and their ability to contribute to the campus achieving sustainability benchmarks. Finally we propose that this lacuna can be mended by working towards a strategic integration of key experiential learning activities earlier in an undergraduate’s career.