Transformative Learning Through Engagement: Student Affairs Practice as Experiential Pedagogy

Jane Fried’s overarching message is that higher education is based on a profoundly outdated industrial model of the purpose and delivery of learning, and needs urgently to be changed. Student affairs professionals and academic faculty have become frustrated with the alienation of so many students from academic learning who cannot see its connection to their lives.
This book – addressed to everyone involved in helping college students learn – presents what we now know about the learning process, particularly those elements that promote behavioral change and the ability to place information in a broader context of personal meaning and long term impact. Central to Jane Fried’s argument is that learning must be experiential and engage students holistically; that it must be grounded in brain science and an understanding of the cultural drivers of knowledge construction; that academic faculty and student affairs professionals must cooperate to help students make connections and see the implications of their learning for their lives; and that the entire learning environment needs to be integrated to reflect the organic nature of the process.
A second purpose of this book is to enable student affairs professionals to articulate their own role in helping students learn. Student affairs, as a profession, has had difficulty describing its work with students as teaching because the dominant paradigm of teaching continues to suggest a classroom, an academic expert and a model of learning that is basically verbal and cognitive. Student affairs professionals who read this book will be able to understand and articulate the processes of experiential, transformative education to their academic colleagues, and collegially help design integrated learning experiences as partners with academic faculty.
The book concludes with a number of brief invited chapters that describe a few emerging models and programs that illustrate Jane Fried’s vision of transformative learning experiences

Jane Fried is a professor in the Department of Counselor Education and Family Therapy at Central Connecticut State University. She is the former coordinator of the Student Development in Higher Education master’s degree program. Dr. Fried is the author of Transformative Learning Through Engagement: Student Affairs Practice as Experiential Pedagogy and Shifting Paradigms in Student Affairs, as well as co-author of Understanding Diversity. She was also one of the primary authors in Learning Reconsidered 1 and 2 and has written several monographs on ethics in student affairs and student development education. She currently writes a blog, where her primary topics of concern are racism and transformative learning, and hosts diversity dialogues to support leaders in higher education who want to develop a deeper understanding of the ways that racism affects our society.

James E. Zull was Professor of Biology and of Biochemistry, and Director of The University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE) at Case Western Reserve University. After 25 years of research on cell-cell communication, protein folding, cell membranes, and biosensors, he turned his interest toward understanding how brain research can inform teaching. Building on his background in cell-cell communication, his experience with human learning and teaching at UCITE, and drawing on the increasing knowledge about the human brain, led to writing his acclaimed first book, The Art of Changing the Brain.

We deeply mourn the loss of author, teacher, and friend James E. Zull†.
†Deceased October 2019.