Bridging Classroom and Career
with Experiential Projects

Maggie Grady: 0:03

Welcome to the Teaching Table, a monthly podcast that explores the vibrant and evolving landscape of teaching, learning and technology in higher education. Hosted by the University of Buffalo's Office of Curriculum Assessment and Teaching Transformation, otherwise known as CATT, and supported by the Gentile's Excellence in Teaching Fund, this podcast is dedicated to highlighting the journeys toward educational excellence. I'm your host, maggie Grady, a learning designer in CAT, and today I'm thrilled to be joined at the table by Dr Mara Huber, who is recently appointed Senior Director for Instructional Innovation and Transformation for the Office of Curriculum and Assessment and Teaching Transformation. So welcome to CAT and thank you for joining us on this podcast.

Dr. Mara Huber: 0:48

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited and looking forward to the conversation.

Maggie Grady: 0:53

So, Mara, recently you joined, as I mentioned, CATT as the Senior Director of Instructional Innovation and Transformation, transitioning in from Experiential Learning Network or ELN. Separately, CATT and ELN have worked to create impactful learning experiences for both students and faculty, aiming to support their pedagogical growth and prepare them for future endeavors. So naturally, it made sense to combine CATT and ELN and bring you on board. So can you share a little bit with us about the development of the collaboration and its goals?

Dr. Mara Huber: 1:32

So we had really focused on building out ELN as an opportunity to engage students in high impact experiential learning. B ut, as you said, there is a whole side of creating those experiences and leveraging the tools and resources that we built, and I think this focus on instructional innovation for transformation is becoming more and more critical to the work of the university but also the communities that the university touches through engagement, and so I'm really excited to build out this other facet of experiential learning and really collaborating, I think, with the departments and the faculty to do this important work.

Maggie Grady: 2:21

So, with the increasing emphasis on experiential learning as a pathway to postgraduate opportunities, it is becoming clear that grades and degrees alone are no longer sufficient. They need a little bit more. The students do. Could you explain how and why students can distinguish themselves from other candidates, whether they are pursuing jobs, graduate school or competitive internships?

Dr. Mara Huber: 2:46

Oh, there's so much to unpack. I think this focus on skill and competency development is so important across a number of different dimensions that all sort of come together. So, for students, they are looking to show, in addition to their coursework and their grades, what they can do, right, and what they have done, and that comes in the form of these skills and competencies, but also these high-impact experiences that connect with the needs and expectations of audiences, right? So, absolutely, jobs, but also internships, competitive internships, scholarships, fellowships, graduate programs. Students are really looking to showcase their undergraduate experience and so, from that standpoint, we know that skills in competencies are developed through applied experiences, not traditional learning, right? So I'm not saying that they need these in place of courses, but they certainly need them as part of their undergraduate education and they're looking to have that integrated.

Dr. Mara Huber: 3:57

They don't want everything extra. On the other hand, while students are doing these experiences, they have the opportunity to engage with partners, they have the opportunity to tackle challenges, learning that the learning is enhanced when students are connecting with real people and addressing challenges that are compelling and aligned with their personal interests and stories. So you start to see that this space of high-impact experiential learning and specifically project-based learning is literally a laboratory right to design these exciting opportunities that have multiple impacts and multiple benefits for the student, for the faculty and their teaching, for departments, for the university and for the communities. And, if you want to take it all the way, which I do, to the planet. Right, because all of this maps to climate action, it maps to sustainability, so why not go for it?

Maggie Grady: 5:09

I love that you're preparing the students for their next chapter, whatever that chapter is. Right, so that's awesome. I love that. So, moving on to, you and your team developed the ELN model for experiential learning which features PEARL projects and digital badges.

Dr. Mara Huber: 5:38

So when we sort of dug into the challenge of supporting students in wherever they wanted to go with experiential learning, we needed a framework that was really flexible right. And so PEARL started out as an engagement framework and it really was built around the idea that we wanted to support students as they were engaging with faculty in any type of project, internship, research, service. It really didn't matter. While they were engaging, we wanted to support them in working through all the different aspects of experiential learning. So PEARL stands for Prepare, Engage and Add Value, Reflect and Leverage. It's a process, right. So as students were working with faculty, they could work through these PEARL modules and do some reflection, really develop narratives and do the work around getting the most of their experience. So PEARL was built out for students, but we know that faculty play so many important roles in both structuring the experience and supporting the experience, and so PEARL is also a framework to help design high-impact experiences and integrate them into courses, and so we work with faculty and we will work more with departments and faculty to use that tool.

Dr. Mara Huber: 7:07

A third aspect of PEARL which I would like to highlight is that, at the same time, it supports dynamic assessment in ways that we have never really even thought was possible.

Dr. Mara Huber: 7:19

So, as students are working with faculty in courses or co-curricularly, going through projects and working through PEARL modules, on the back end we can study their growth, we can see how their skills and competencies are developing and we can actually look at the impacts on success and retention, which is becoming so critical. And we can even, through digital badges, which you mentioned, follow their progress into the world of work and look at professional mobility, look at professional success and, for the first time, we can really have a through line from instruction to learning, to assessment, to progress monitoring, and we can optimize all of this so that we can help our students take their learning as far as they can go, for their benefit, but also for the benefit of communities, society, economic development, however we want to sort of map this work, which is all very exciting. So PEARL turned out to be quite a powerful tool and we're still learning all the ways that it can be used, as our partners start to use it all over the world.

Maggie Grady: 8:30

So I do love how we're going to help the faculty as well as help the students just better prepare our future leaders. I'll call them. I like to refer to our students as that, so could you provide some practical examples of how the ELN model and the PEARL projects have been implemented in educational settings?

Dr. Mara Huber: 8:48

So the ELN model launched in 2019. And if you get on and sort of look at the ELN website and the project portal, you'll see about 300 projects listed and they're all listed with faculty mentors. So we have been working with faculty and departments to integrate projects within courses. So I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to start with one that is a little surprising. Faculty often assume that this only works with these small, heavy lift, boutique-y types of courses. Right, there's a little apprehension that this is such a heavy lift. So I want to give an example of a really sort of big multi-section course, and that is a technical writing course that's offered as part of the environmental studies major that every student has to take. And so for several years, the ELN has been working with different faculty to support an experiential learning module as part of their course, and so they had an assignment that was always there to have students develop a proposal using a methodology, and they would focus on a theoretical organization to do that. But we wanted to introduce engagement with an actual organization because we know that students benefit, right, so we've worked to introduce local nonprofits dealing with sustainability work and also global nonprofits from our global partner studio from West and East Africa dealing with sustainability. We've given students the background and then we've coordinated Zoom calls with those organizations and so, rather than doing a theoretical proposal, the students actually do their proposal based on the needs and challenges of that particular community and their proposals are given to the partner who then can leverage those and build on those for their own work. And then students can build on those modules to do ELN projects and earn badges.

Dr. Mara Huber: 11:00

We've also worked with architecture faculty Chris Romano recently, who led a study abroad trip to Tanzania focused on engaging with one of our partners. And our UB students actually participated in a build of a water tank using a soil stabilized brick press, and our UB students have the same brick press at UB so they can actually engage in equitable collaboration and work together. So there's an example of an entire course, a study abroad course built around a project. So imagine, PEARL pre-trip is the preparation, focuses on getting context. The trip is the engagement. They come back and do their project to add value, and then their reflection and leveraging involved developing multimedia presentations and a particular student continued with the work and is doing graduate studies around that. So you can do small little PEARL projects and modules. You can do entire classes. You can do internships, research, independent studies, interdisciplinary projects around minors, majors. From a design standpoint, it is incredibly versatile, which makes it really exciting, and it really supports innovation, which is what this is all about, right.

Maggie Grady: 12:40

So if there's a project already in place and the class has already graduated or the student has already graduated, can an incoming student pick up on that and continue that?

Dr. Mara Huber: 12:54

That is sort of the holy grail right, like we talk about generative projects and the idea of building on faculty engagement, student engagement. That is really exciting for our partners because partners are really looking to leverage what UB has to offer in terms of our students, local partners and global partners. So the idea of having classes continue to build is particularly exciting and there's also the opportunity to build on individual digital badges right? Stacking badges to these higher level competencies as well.

Maggie Grady: 13:34

So I think you've shared already, but are there any other stories or impactful projects that you can think of that ELN and PEARL models have already been in place and you can share with our listeners.

Dr. Mara Huber: 13:46

So we have so many examples of students who have leveraged projects. We know through the letters of recommendation that we're asked to often give to students, but also seeing their trajectory, the opportunity to really have something that they can show for their efforts is quite compelling. So we have a student who leveraged her work in Tanzania and is continuing with graduate studies. We have students who have decided to go on to medical school. Many of these students are actually highlighted.

Dr. Mara Huber: 14:27

I should mention we have a new book that's coming out and it includes case studies of some of our partners and our faculty and our students, and so the students, I think, are taking this work in really exciting directions, and we also have data that suggests that what's so impactful for the students, in addition to the experiences, is the mentoring. So our students report that the mentoring they get and the personal connections they make with faculty when faculty share their connections and their expertise can be really impactful. As well as connecting with the communities and the organizations. Our students are really looking to figure out their own stories right and to figure out their own interests and goals to clarify, and all of that work that can be done through engaging in these projects can be quite impactful for the students, I'm sure.

Maggie Grady: 15:30

So how do the ELN and the PEARL models foster essential soft skills such as the critical thinking, the reflective thinking, problem solving? It sounds like all of that's incorporated, so can you expand a little bit about on that?

Dr. Mara Huber: 15:48

Yeah, it's really interesting because competency development, as I said, is really tied to reflection and setting intentions. One of the you know, one of the concerns that faculty and departments have is that mentoring and supporting all of this can be quite a big lift, right. And it's hard for faculty to do all of that in addition to teaching their content area. Because PEARL has been turned into these modules, the online modules that are supported through the ELN, faculty don't have to do all of that right. So we will and we do work with faculty to integrate PEARL into their syllabi, but in doing so, the students actually get to work through the ELN to do those modules. And so PEARL and ELN are such a beautiful marriage because once the project is developed, once the syllabus includes that, the students can work through the ELN to do that reflective work, to do that alignment and mapping work and narrative work. And yet everybody's working together. So when the student finishes their project, that actually gets uploaded as evidence as part of the ELN system. So the student is going through PEARL modules, they're self-assessing on competencies, they're reflecting on their story, they're submitting their evidence. At the same time, the faculty is vetting the evidence right, doing it as part of an assignment, making sure that they have it right and in the end the student gets that badge. So it really is a natural pairing.

Dr. Mara Huber: 17:38

What has been missing is that support on the design. ELN does that work. But ELN is really focused on the student experience. It's focused on supporting the student, giving the student support and resources. So this ability for us to focus on supporting faculty in using PEARL, but also departments and programs, we really are going to have this complete package all the way from instruction to learning, to assessment and connecting it out to external opportunities that the university and different programs are interested in leveraging.

Maggie Grady: 18:25

So you touched base already on how CATT can support faculty, so can you talk a little bit more about our goals and how we can actually support that if the faculty say "Yeah, this sounds perfect. I want to do this. How can they get involved? How can they be trained, if you will, or taught to

Dr. Mara Huber: 18:40

Well, I think you know we really look forward to having a suite of offerings that will include more you know, workshoppy types of opportunities. I think there's a lot of interest in the design work and I know that's something that I enjoy doing. It's consultative, it's sort of helping the departments clarify what their strategic interests are and then designing projects that are going to elevate their areas of focus. Projects can vary tremendously, so as we have more examples from faculty, we will also be showcasing those and really creating a forum for those who are using this model, both at UB and internationally, because it's being translated both locally and internationally. I think it's really important to create a community of practice so that we can innovate together, because this is really sort of a new and different way of supporting experiential learning and also bringing in AI, which is really exciting. That's another area of innovation that we're really investing in. Other areas like GIS mapping, story maps, PEARL is really versatile and so, as we identify areas of interest, we can really, I think, utilize these tools in exciting ways.

Maggie Grady: 20:09

I agree, I agree, I'm looking forward to it. Ok, so wrapping up our conversation, these questions aim to help one dive a little bit deeper into the ELN and the PEARL models to enhance teaching and learning. Before we conclude, is there anything else that you would like to share with our listeners, perhaps any final thoughts, insights or advice on how they can effectively implement these concepts into their own educational settings?

Dr. Mara Huber: 20:39

I think I would like to encourage us all to be bold. It is a time to be bold with experiential learning and to dream a little bit bigger in terms of what we can offer our students. I think as a research university, we have tremendous relationships, expertise, and all of that is a playground for students. I think we also have to really seize the moment and innovate in this space. I think it is a huge mistake when I see institutions leave experiential learning up to outside vendors or outside individuals right or organizations. I think it's really our work to design high-impact experiential learning and help students leverage it and help them develop those narratives and connect it with our degrees and coursework. So I'm really excited. You know UB has been a leader in experiential learning. It is happening in such exciting ways across the university. I think you know this is really an opportunity to work collaboratively with our programs and our departments and our faculty to really leverage this new paradigm and see what we can do together.

Maggie Grady: 22:01

So thank you for joining us today at the teaching table and thank you, D r. Huber, for joining us to discuss experiential learning and how the PEARL models can help our faculty prepare students for post-graduation opportunities. Be sure to connect buffalo. edu/catt, that's c-a-t-t, or email us at ubcatt@buffalo. edu, and thank you.