“If I Want to Feel My Feelings, I’ll See a Bloody Shrink”: Learning From the Shadow Side of Experiential Learning

This article discusses the value of learning from a psychodynamic approach to experiential learning. This approach is used to help students experience and understand the emotional and relational complexity of leading and managing within organizations. From this perspective, experiential learning means engaging with emotions and with embedded relations of power, to unsettle expectations of how organizations work. Here, we consider the professor’s role, which is to help students work with and through the emotional dynamics generated in work relationships, even when those dynamics are difficult to bear and the overriding impulse is to avoid or defend against them. In this way, students are being supported to better understand how organizations are emotional places, not how individuals within organizations can “manage” emotion.

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The Shadow Side of Teaching Classroom as Organization

Journal of Management Education ◽

10.1177/1052562918820552 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 43 (4) ◽

pp. 461-470

Author(s):

Stacie Chappell ◽

Debby Thomas

Keyword(s):

Experiential Learning ◽

Early Adopters ◽

Recommendations For Practice ◽

Shadow Side ◽

Initial Description ◽

Teacher Centered

Classroom as organization (CAO) is an approach at the extreme end of an experiential learning intensity continuum. While proponents suggest they would never go back to a teacher-centered classroom, CAO has not become widely adopted since its initial description by Cohen. We argue this is, in part, because of shadow elements that may discourage faculty in both initial adoption and persistence in the journey from novice to master. This article reports the authors’ reflexive process related to the shadow elements they encountered as early adopters of the CAO methodology. The article begins with a brief background on CAO, followed by a discussion of shadow elements that manifest at the student and faculty levels. We include our recommendations for practice.

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Afraid of the Deep: Reflections and Analysis of a Role-Play Exercise Gone Wrong

Journal of Management Education ◽

10.1177/1052562918802875 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 42 (6) ◽

pp. 772-782 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Vicki Fairbanks Taylor

Keyword(s):

Experiential Learning ◽

Learning Environment ◽

Role Play ◽

Emotional Responses ◽

Role Playing ◽

Emotional Reaction ◽

Emotional Reactions ◽

Negative Experience ◽

Ethnographic Approach ◽

Shadow Side

Experiential learning exercises have the potential to elicit emotional responses in students and instructors alike. This article takes an auto-ethnographic approach in detailing the author’s experience facilitating a role-playing activity that triggered an unanticipated emotional reaction in a session participant. In the narrative, the author connects her experience and response to the event to the shadow side of role-playing where the potential for harm to students and instructors may be present. The article explores how to create a learning environment capable of supporting students’ emotions as well as strategies that instructors can deploy to manage and learn from their emotional reactions. It concludes with a discussion of the steps one might take to re-engage with role-playing after a negative experience.

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Creativity or Cooptation? Thinking Beyond Instrumentalism When Teaching Design Thinking

Journal of Management Education ◽

10.1177/1052562918799797 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 42 (6) ◽

pp. 749-760 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Amy Zidulka ◽

Ingrid Kajzer Mitchell

Keyword(s):

Experiential Learning ◽

Design Thinking ◽

Teaching Design ◽

Shadow Side ◽

Oriented Approach

This essay frames design thinking (DT) as a form of experiential learning and describes what we, as DT educators, have come to consider its “shadow side.” We are concerned that, through uncritical promotion of instrumentalist approaches to creativity, DT classes unwittingly marginalize from the curriculum other forms of creativity, such as those that are rebellious and self-expressive. By drawing on existing critiques of the dominant creativity discourse, we explore what a more critically oriented approach to DT might look like.

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Community Involvement and Benefits From an International Service Learning Program

Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups ◽

10.1044/persp2.sig7.5 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 2 (7) ◽

pp. 5-12 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Lata A. Krishnan ◽

Christi Masters ◽

Jennifer M. Simpson

Keyword(s):

Service Learning ◽

Experiential Learning ◽

Community Involvement ◽

Learning Program ◽

Short Term ◽

International Service Learning ◽

International Service ◽

Short Term Study ◽

Service Activities ◽

Study Abroad Program

Service learning (SL) is a form of experiential learning in which students are involved in community service activities that are related to academic course objectives. A key aspect that separates SL from other forms of experiential learning is the mutually beneficial nature of the service activities. Much of the SL and international SL (ISL) literature has focused on positive learning outcomes for students, with much less focus on the benefits of SL to the community. Speech, Language, and Hearing Services (SLHS) in Zambia is an intensive SL short-term study abroad program. This paper describes the benefits to the community via the SLHS in Zambia program.

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