Create Learning Impact through Projects

Education has a Social Action Purpose

“There is an interesting world right outside the School and University gates that you can actually learn about, and learn from, and make a significant difference in.”

According to John Dewey (1938), the entire purpose of education is “to nurture individuals to discover their full power and potential”. He later added that “…it’s not enough for a man to be good, he must be good for something.” And the thing he must be good for is to contribute to the community, to the social order, and to the lives of others in some meaningful way. Eleanor Roosevelt (1930) had earlier argued that the full power and potential of individuals is best demonstrated in good citizenship

Universities and schools can fulfill the desire to have morally responsible, civically engaged graduates. Undergraduate education should integrate cognitive skills and disciplinary knowledge with moral and civic learning, helping students develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to become active and responsible citizens of a multiracial and multicultural society. Knowledge and skills are, however, only useful when used and applied in action for the community.

For Dewey, education should be conducted in a way that is socially responsible to the present and the future. In order to achieve this, schools must move beyond the formal and rigid modes of traditional education. However, schools should not be simply reactionary and relinquish reasonable management control over education. Rather, teachers and professors should understand and apply the theory of experience from the principles of continuity and interaction to guide curriculum development to obtain a progressively developmental series of experiences.

Teaching, as the noblest activity of the university, is also the process tool to engage students intellectually in the broadest possible manner. The university is the place for meditation, contemplation, and wisdom, and not just for the busy activity of knowledge acquisition. The structure of the curriculum, including case studies pedagogies and Socratic-type tutorials, must be oriented toward the learning goal of engaging professors and students in those forms of analytic reasoning and inference that a heightened sense of curiosity entails.

The impact of scholarship and learning on society will require evaluating both teaching quality as well as the quality and quantity of research, together with other contributions to knowledge, including practice and service to the community. The minds and motives of professors, teachers and students, administrators and policymakers, and parents can and will influence the most enduring impact on human action.

The creation of impact begins with a curriculum that is committed to the kind of learning that leads to action. Action defines impact. Every program and course must therefore be concerned with the outcome of responsible action, where integrity and compassion combined in students and professors to produce innovations and action programs.

THE E-PROJECT

An entrepreneurship project, or E-Project, is an example of the kind of Reality-Learning that prepares students and leads them to purposeful social action.

Entrepreneurship training aims to develop an innate sense of sharpness for opportunities, which is that intuitive belief that questions the notion of certainty, definitiveness, completion, and absolute. Entrepreneurs are people who are often uncertain about things, who see chaos, contradictions, paradox, ambiguity, and silence as integrated into the human condition. Like the poet Jorie Graham (1997), they consider “error” as the choice method — “a wandering toward truth” — in creating their very own passage to a life of certain happiness and self-actualization, as they become the best that their human and spiritual potential will permit. Entrepreneurial values empower entrepreneurs to reach out beyond their grasp relentlessly.

In the E-Project, students stumble into repeated “failures” as they learn how to connect ideas, knowledge, and experience into reflective practice. The E-Project requirement of “patentable” innovations joins students to the larger society. When students actively engage in the issues involved in transforming their ideas to innovations that are both marketable and commercially feasible, they learn that they can also make an impact on the lives of others in need. During the process, they first gain a sense of empathy for others and later a needed sense of accomplishment in implementing meaningful change in the public domain through their successful innovations.

The E-Project nurtures in students greater mutual respect for people outside the university. This “outdoor” learning also teaches students that there is a “public” that has to be engaged and shaped, that their involvement can have a positive impact, that civic participation is part of learning, as a prelude to impactful social action. In an age of heightened cynicism, the promotion of entrepreneurship can restore a sense of practical idealism that is critical for building a civic sensibility among young people.

It is this aspect of “get your butt out there and dirty your hands” involvement required by the entrepreneurship project that creates pride and a sense of responsibility towards the larger community. Isolation from the larger world is “the principal obstacle to education for public life” (Farland and Henry, 1972).

The process of the E-Project teaches individual students how to work together in a group for a common goal. It causes all involved persons to put aside their differences, and act as if they are true citizens participating in a really beneficial project for their community.

Throughout the E-Project, students developed the capacity to analyze, to invent, and to create, as well as the capacity to cooperate, to understand and listen to others, to resolve conflicts, to work in teams, and to contribute communally. Indeed, an educated person is one who can use these abilities effectively.

This experience in community learning is essential in the education process toward becoming active citizens. The project activities of transforming ideas into innovations, researching patents databases, co-ordination with vendors for components and parts, and negotiating with approving authorities for permits, …etc provide opportunities for students to take a fresh look at their community and become involved in the changes that are and can happen there, which is just outside their campus’ gate.

The E-project hopes to develop in students, regardless of their career choices, a sense of ownership and the ability to engage responsibly in their communities. The E-project cultivates the students’ community consciousness, as well as equips them with the skills they need to act out their newfound conscience. It is when students take responsibility for their community and the larger society that they truly become active citizens. In interacting with the world outside the campus, they will develop the character traits — honor, pride, and responsibility, among others — that define them as true citizens of society (Guarasci and Cornwell, 1997).

The aim of education should be to produce individuals able to think for themselves and who do not merely follow what someone else has told them. And the way for teachers and professors to accomplish this is to concentrate on what anthropologist Ashley Montagu (b. 1905) called “the drawing out, not the pumping in”.

Teaching should excite a youngster’s natural curiosity. Instead of giving ready solutions and answers, teachers and professors should raise questions. Perhaps, job interviewers would one day ask graduates not “how much do you know?” but “how many questions do you usually ask in class?”

Students, who generally lack soul and passion for things outside the syllabus of examinations, are often dull and show little curiosity about things, events, and happenings in their proximate communities and the world. This lack of curiosity, according to Eleanor Roosevelt, in young people also meant the lack of imagination and complete inability to visualize any life but their own; and they could not, therefore, recognize their responsibility to their less able and less fortunate fellows in society.

“Our curiosity will in fact carry us out of our homes and out of ourselves to a better understanding of material things, and would also make us able to understand one another. It is curiosity which makes scientists willing to risk their lives in finding some new method of alleviating human suffering, often using themselves as the best medium of experimentation. It is curiosity which makes people go down under the water to study the life on the floor of the ocean, or up into the air and out and over new and untried trails to find new ways of drawing this old world closer together”, said Eleanor.

It has been repeatedly said that education should begin after schooling has been completed. This is plainly wrong. Real education begins and does not stop at school, and the proper role of the school system is to prepare the human mind for lifelong learning. “You cannot teach a man anything”, observed Galileo, “you can only help him to find it within himself”.

The truth is that one does not obtain an education in a classroom: one merely learns how to become educated. Only the person himself, in the long run, can acquire education substantially. In fact, the word “educate” comes from the Latin “educere”, which means “leading out” the student into a wider world of knowledge.

It is by stimulating a yearning for learning in general that professors and teachers can perform their greatest service to those in their care since a yearning for learning will drive the endless quest for contributions to one’s life and to impact others around us.

The art of creating true impact is ultimately measured by the significant difference one makes in the lives of other people around us, and in service to the society, community, and the nation.

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