At Prescott College, the term “student engagement” has a special meaning. It’s not just about students engaged in civic activities or service learning, although they are. It doesn’t refer to the wide variety of internship positions available that are filled quickly. Certainly our students are actively engaged in their classroom work—but student engagement at Prescott College means more than all of this.
The hallmark of Prescott College is experiential learning, a teaching philosophy that requires students to learn by doing. In nearly every class, faculty challenge students not only to engage their minds but also their actions as they become both mentally and physically involved in the learning process. In some sense, every course is a studio class where the students practice applying theory in the local community or in locations as far flung as Kenya, Costa Rica, Norway, Mexico, and dozens more. These locations become the students’ laboratories. As they engage situational issues in these “labs,” students bring to life the inter-connectedness of Prescott College’s motto: For the liberal arts, the environment, and social justice.
Every summer a group of students travels to Kenya to join the Maasai tribal people in building schools, constructing irrigation systems, and sharing cultural perspectives. Over multiple years, living among the tribe, our students have researched and constructed a court case to allow the Maasai to regain indigenous lands they lost to the government many years ago. The case is active in the courts as I type this essay and there is no doubt that the work of Prescott College students has changed the course of history for the Maasai people.
At our field station in Kino Bay, Mexico, students studying marine biology and sustainable ecology visit the local fisheries and venture out by boat to document dolphin, whale, and coastal bird populations and habitats on the Sea of Cortez. Much of this data and original research by our students has been used in the revision of Mexico’s fisheries laws and government recommendations for management of the region’s shrimp industry. In addition, students work with the Seri Indian tribe—a somewhat isolated indigenous people—teaching conservation and sustainability practices to help preserve their culture and native farming and fishing techniques.
Closer to home, creative writing students take a course in which they spend the first several weeks in the classroom preparing to spend the rest of the term as instructors sent out in pairs to various nonprofit agencies: senior centers, juvenile detention facilities, homeless shelters, and so forth, where they facilitate creative writing groups. At the end of the semester, budding writers from the agencies read samples of their work at a public gathering, each reader introduced by the students who mentored them. The event always proves to be powerful and deeply moving for both the student mentors and the novice writers.
All of our students take part in hands-on courses throughout their journey toward graduation, and each undergraduate’s education culminates in an applied senior project accompanied by an essay reflecting on their experience. Prescott College graduates have engaged in real life situations and gained the confidence and maturity, as well as the resume, to demonstrate proficiency in their field. They are distinctly prepared to make a positive difference in their local communities and in the world at large through pedagogy that goes beyond typical student engagement, in which true experience exists at the heart of education.