Ready for Take-off: Student-Led Experiential Learning through a Student Employee Orientation Project
Standing
Undergraduate
Type of Proposal
Visual Presentation (Poster, Installation, Demonstration)
Faculty Sponsor
Centre for Teaching and Learning
Proposal
On-campus student employment in higher education has been found to have a positive impact in the student’s success, specifically as it relates to student retention, academic achievement, and securing post-college employment (Kuh, Kinzie, Buckley, Bridges, & Hayek, 2006). However, the literature is scarce when identifying how on-campus student employment is leveraged to assist the student’s learning and professional development. The University of Windsor's work-study program, IGNITE, was recently redesigned to facilitate Experiential Learning (EL) opportunities by incorporating reflective practices and formative feedback opportunities. Building on the Ignite program and the literature supporting experiential learning theory as a useful framework in advancing learning (Kolb, 2014), a new student-designed high-impact collaborative project was created to assist with the orientation of new student employees at the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL). This project, created by CTL’s Learning Management System team, aims to incorporate principles of experiential learning in a student employee orientation program, which impacts both a student-co-creator and the student audience. In the creation of the program, we utilized literature review, inquiry, the author’s reflective self-study of her student-employment experience, and group collaboration. The framework presented by Lindsey & Berger (2009) that allows the students to frame, activate, and reflect on the experience informs the site's final design. The project is now in the deployment stage whereby the next steps will incorporate additional student feedback from new employees after they have actualized the orientation experience.
Location
Windsor, Ontario
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Grand Challenges
Sustainable Industry
Special Considerations
References
Kolb, D. A. (2014). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (2nd ed.). Upper Sadlle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
Kuh, G.D., Kinzie, J., Buckley, J.A., Bridges, B.K., & Hayek, J.C. (2016). What matters to student success: A review of the literature. Commissioned report for the National Symposium on Postsecondary Student Success: Spearheading a dialog on student success. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/npec/pdf/kuh_team_report.pdf
Lindsey, L., Berger, N. (2009). Experiential approaches to instruction. In: Reigeluth, C.M., CarrChellman, A.A. (Eds.), Instructional-design theories and models, Volume III: Building a common knowledge base. Routledge, New York, pp. 117–142.
Ready for Take-off: Student-Led Experiential Learning through a Student Employee Orientation Project
Windsor, Ontario
On-campus student employment in higher education has been found to have a positive impact in the student’s success, specifically as it relates to student retention, academic achievement, and securing post-college employment (Kuh, Kinzie, Buckley, Bridges, & Hayek, 2006). However, the literature is scarce when identifying how on-campus student employment is leveraged to assist the student’s learning and professional development. The University of Windsor's work-study program, IGNITE, was recently redesigned to facilitate Experiential Learning (EL) opportunities by incorporating reflective practices and formative feedback opportunities. Building on the Ignite program and the literature supporting experiential learning theory as a useful framework in advancing learning (Kolb, 2014), a new student-designed high-impact collaborative project was created to assist with the orientation of new student employees at the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL). This project, created by CTL’s Learning Management System team, aims to incorporate principles of experiential learning in a student employee orientation program, which impacts both a student-co-creator and the student audience. In the creation of the program, we utilized literature review, inquiry, the author’s reflective self-study of her student-employment experience, and group collaboration. The framework presented by Lindsey & Berger (2009) that allows the students to frame, activate, and reflect on the experience informs the site's final design. The project is now in the deployment stage whereby the next steps will incorporate additional student feedback from new employees after they have actualized the orientation experience.