Dr. Eatman engages the crowd with his keynote address.
Bringing together university faculty members, instructors, and graduate students interested in experiential education pedagogy, a research team based in The Office of Regional and International Community Engagement (ORICE) at UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs held its Scaffolding Experiential Education Symposium on August 26.
The event featured social scientist and publicly engaged scholar Dr. Timothy K. Eatman as its introductory Keynote speaker. Dr. Eatman currently serves as the Inaugural Dean of the Honors Living-Learning Community as well as Professor of Urban Education at Rutgers University-Newark.
In a presentation that was equally as informative as it was engaging, Dr. Eatman drew from his expertise working in higher education with diverse groups of students to transform the audience’s perception of experiential education. The talk, titled “Beware the Shrinking Imagination”, explored how academic institutions can be strengthened to meet the demands of supporting strong democracy in the 21st century through community-building.
Woven with powerful anecdotes throughout, Dr. Eatman called attention to two questions around which his talk was structured: how we can bring academic institutions into the 21st century, and what kind of institutions are commanded by a strong democracy. Dr. Eatman continued to delve into guiding principles such as imagination, equity, and accessibility, and reformative concepts such as the five senses of engagement– hope, history, passion, empathy, and planning. These ideas, in unison with community organizing principles, are instrumental in creating democratically-empowered students who can access their fullest potential through experiential learning.
Dr. Laurie McNeill (Associate Dean, Student Success from the Faculty of Arts) opened the symposium, welcoming Dr. Eatman to UBC.
The talk, like much of Dr. Eatman’s research, was founded on challenging ideologies of inequality in its many forms. The audience was not only invited to engage with Eatman’s ideas at face value, but to contemplate the deeper structural inequities to which they are bound.
For further engagement with his work, Eatman has authored numerous publications and continues to present his ideas to academics around the world. A compilation of his works can be found on his website, including research, keynotes, and workshops.
This symposium was hosted by ORICE to serve as a platform for sharing experiential education approaches, discussing challenges, and celebrating successes. This event built upon a study that the research team has been conducting on experiential education in large junior-level courses, funded by the “Advancing Education Renewal” (AER) program through the Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic. Members of the research team include Dr. Siobhán McPhee, Dr. Katherine Lyon, Dr. Neil Armitage, Tamara Baldwin, Lorenia Salgado-Leos, Assem Zhaksybay, Valeria Perez and Naomi Hudson. Read more about ORICE here.
