Practical Learning Strategies
Connecting Arts’ Disciplinary Learning to Students’ Futures.
Help students see how classroom learning can be applied in other contexts, including in workplaces and in the community.
Arts Alumni Engagement and Arts Work Integrated Education, in partnership with Arts ISIT, the UBC Career Centre, and the Centre for Teaching Learning and Technology offer a collaborative, interdisciplinary team to support Arts faculty members interested in exploring and designing discipline-specific learning experiences for your teaching practice.
Our work is informed by examples from current UBC Arts faculty members and best practices. We bring experience and contacts with alumni and professionals working across a wide range of sectors and roles both inside and outside UBC, offering you an easy starting point for this kind of curricular innovation.
By integrating practical learning and connections with alumni in the classroom, we directly support faculty to further connect course concepts and professional skills, helping student build towards their futures.
Benefits of embedding practical learning within courses
Our recent 10+ Year-Out UBC Faculty of Arts Alumni Survey suggests that alumni wish that they had been better equipped to communicate their skills and the strengths of their Arts major and degree when they graduated. By integrating practical learning and connections with alumni in the classroom, we directly support students to connect course concepts and professional skills.
Access
Makes practical learning more accessible and inclusive for all students
Enriched Learning
Enriches the learning and understanding of course concepts and helps students achieve course and program learning outcomes
Student Recruitment
Attracts students to learning your discipline and helping them see how they might leverage their classroom learning to build meaningful lives after graduation
Getting started:
- How might I engage alumni in course activities?
- How might I design assignments that teach transferrable skills?
- How might I integrate career skills/tools in my course?
- How might I develop student workplace competencies (team work, presentation skills, peer to peer learning).
- How might I develop collaborative learning …?
- Develop effective groupwork activities.
- How might I help students reflect on their learning?
- How might I bring could technology and tools support practical learning outcomes (ePortfolios, UBC Blogs)?
- How might I include bootcamps or hackathons in my class?
- How might we purposefully enhance student competencies and transferrable skills in our Program/Major?
- How might I bring disciplinary linked EL into our Program/Major?
- How might I bring applied research into our Program/Major?
- How might we include capstones in our Program/Major?
- How might I apply for funding to support…?
- ePortfolios: provide a platform for students to illustrate connections between experiences outside of the classroom and course concepts.
- UBC Blogs: a simple and creative way for students to share their work and demonstrate their learning publicly
- Reflective Activities (Canvas Assignments): journaling or collaborative reflection assignments allows students to articulate and explore the real-world application of academic concepts
- Examples include Telling the Story of Your Arts Degree in a Job Search and Job Search Skills with an Arts degree
- This includes TLEFs, SoTL or other teaching and learning related funding when practical/career learning/alumni component is being considered.
How are instructors using practical learning in their courses?
Practical Learning: Hands-on Preparation for Careers in Writing
In my teaching, practical learning is less discussion around abstract theory, and engaged with more concrete elements....
Practical Learning: Engaging Community
Students are interested in applying economic research in a way that mirrors potential career paths. Community engaged...
Practical Learning: Alumni Interviews
I think that the students have this very linear idea of what a career looks like, and...
Practical Learning: Information Curation for a Public-Facing Website
The learning objective is to have students curate real-world information relevant to public policy. The skill they...
Practical Learning: Bringing Alumni Expertise into the Classroom
The idea is to connect students directly with alumni from a whole range of different working situations and...
Need help?
Our team offers a range of support:
- Consult + educational design (30 minute initial conversation; any follow-up to be determined by you and the staff you meet with)
- Facilitation in the class
- Connection to networks
- Recommendations to the literature/toolkits