Service Learning: A Refreshing, Different Teaching/Learning Experience
Robert Cunningham – University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Are you tired of "same-old, same-old" in the classroom, of students who sit in the back of the class and text? Try a new challenge! Try motivating both you and your students by service-learning—either as a stand-alone class or as a component in any PA class. In this session I will describe how I got started, student responses, what we both learned, and traps to beware.
The Potential of an Unbundled Executive MPA Based on the Principles of Experiential Learning
Richard Orman – Barry University
“….for things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”(Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, c. 350 BCE.) Thus, experiential learning is as old as learning itself. At a time when many experts in higher education and others have opined that we have to change something, perhaps unbundling utilizing experiential learning is one way higher education can be extended to many. Unbundling means to disregard the stacked way we award degrees and the silos of disciplines. The tools for unbundling higher education are found in the literature of experiential learning. “While there are several models on how experiences are transformed into learning, David Kolb’s four-stage model (Kolb, 1984; Baker & Kolb, 1990), based on the precepts of Dewey, Piaget, and Lewin, is most frequently used in PLAR experiential learning portfolio programs to explain this phenomenon.”(Brown, 2011). The purpose of this paper is to report the innovative approach to an Executive Master of Public Administration being developed by Barry University’s PACE (School of Professional and Career Education). Guided by the universal competencies provided by NASPAA, PACE is proposing an executive master of public administration without regard for previous degrees or disciplines that will attract many in the public service for whom they had to learn to do them by doing them.Room: Phillips Hall233
