As the financial hardship of rapidly accelerating student loan debt grows, the value of higher education has increasingly come into question. Research indicates that college graduates will earn significantly more income during their lifetimes than others without a college degree. But with the current and near future economy limping along in political chaos, will tuition-paying graduates land jobs, good long-lasting jobs with benefits? Are tuition-paying graduates prepared to make a world of difference? In short, is there an acceptable return on their heavy investment?
With the Millennial generation, many of whom are college graduates finding themselves unemployed, underemployed, employed in service industries outside their major or minor areas of expertise, or engaged in unpaid volunteer internships, there is uncertainty and uneasiness. Were they told how bad the job market is by university officials? How were they expected to repay college loans with no jobs upon graduation? Were they taught the right lessons by university faculty?
These are weighty questions with no easy answers. In light of America’s steadily diminishing standing worldwide in math and science student proficiency, high tuition and other costs to attend college—coupled with poor job prospects, a crisis in higher education looms. Looking at the fundamentals, perhaps a soul-searching discernment of how best to prepare learners to succeed in an uncertain future should permeate university thinking, financing, and pedagogy. As a step in the right direction and now in vogue, “flipping the classroom” is one such change tactic being tried.
In flipping the classroom, what used to be the content “lecture” during class is learned at home on students’ smartphones or personal computers by watching teacher-created short videos or other YouTube videos such as those available via Khan Academy and similar online educational entrepreneurs. Students learn new content online at their own flexible schedule, within the parameters of the course. And what used to be “homework” as assigned problems is now performed in class with the teacher offering more personalized guidance and facilitating interaction with students, instead of lecturing. In class, learners do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates to facilitate discussion and understanding.
This technique rejects the lecture format of a know-it-all sophist pouring knowledge into empty kettles sitting passively in seats of obedience and conformity. Instead, it embraces interactive dialog among learners and learning facilitators, each bringing new content along with his or her life and learning experiences, thoughts, ideas, and evidences to discover new, often more practical ways to apply existing knowledge in mastering concepts and solving current societal problems. As a breath of fresh air, flipping the classroom has the potential to invigorate learners and teachers alike with better educational outcomes and societal benefits.
Extending the learner’s experiences beyond flipping-the-classroom tactic may hold promise for even greater educational and societal reward. By sending students out into the real world through community service-learning projects, participatory outreach experiences, and practical, applied research activities, students enter the classroom with heightened awareness of pressing real-world challenges and direct, first-hand evidence and insights for developing potential solutions of benefit to their communities and society. Sharing and listening to these personalized student experiences in the classroom can result in a rich, vibrant learning environment with improved retention and application of their education. Henry David Thoreau, a Harvard dropout like Bill Gates, was the original American education advocate for “flipping the classroom”—big time.
Thoreau suggested that insights from Nature—from immersion in, direct observation of, and reflection on lessons learned from Nature—are essential. From his Walden; or, Life in the Woods classic first published in 1854, Thoreau wrote in the chapter on Economy:
“I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.” -p. 39
“The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. “But,” says one, “you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?” -p. 40
“Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father?” -p. 41
As our indigenous brothers and sisters, ancestors, and non-human relatives know, Nature is the best teacher. Similar to Thoreau’s and indigenous peoples’ mandate to learn from Nature in the field, GEM-funded practical, applied research, service learning, and participatory, real-world experiential projects for its student learners, collaborators and community-based clients are at GEM’s core. GEM’s educational mission was founded on this same Nature’s Way philosophy: pioneering and applying practical learning methods and technology to solve natural resource problems by linking faculty, students, and citizens worldwide. GEM has deployed many students, often overseas, to work side-by-side villagers, in-country students and faculty members of collaborating foreign universities, and non-governmental organization staff and trainees on natural resource issues of local importance. GEM provides education to overcome “nature deficit disorder” by not only flipping the classroom, but turning it inside out, like Thoreau and our American Indian and Alaska Native brethren have done for a long time.
Simplify, simplify,
Prof. Victor D. Phillips, GEM Director
GEM Education Center Blog 