Reimagining Higher Education for Democracy
To address the urgent challenges of our times—climate change, humanitarian crises, political polarization, democratic diminishment, and global disruption—the primary aim of American higher education must go far beyond career preparation. To meet this moment, educators must use the curriculum, the campus, and their community relationships as a crucible for preparing engaged, informed citizens to contribute to a representative democracy. This aim is especially vital for adult learners since these students are prone to integrate personal, professional, and vocational experiences into their educational pursuits.
Beyond the Lecture Hall: Why Experience Matters
Classroom instruction, while foundational, cannot solely foster democratic competencies. Democracy, after all, must be practiced—not just studied. Experiential pedagogies, such as service-learning and community-based research, foster such practice. They immerse students in real-world environments that require them to work collaboratively (not hierarchically) with local community members and neighbors to explore and, ideally, mitigate real-life problems. Such mitigation is not an academic or theoretical endeavor; it’s a concrete one that sharpens critical thinking and encourages civic engagement in real-time and long after the activity concludes.
Why Adult Learners Thrive in Experiential Learning
Drawing upon the philosophies of John Dewey, a pioneer of progressive education, we recognize that adult graduate students are exceptionally suited to translate academic theory into lived practice. With years of finessing workplace dynamics; navigating complex health systems in the provision of child and parent care; and participating in community groups, HOAs, church and temple councils, adult learners have had practice living, working, and leading many of the institutions that are part of our democratic country. Often, these individuals do not simply absorb knowledge; they actively reshape it through reflection and engagement.
Service-Learning: Building Relationships, Not Performing Charity
In my professional journey, I’ve consistently advocated for service-learning that centers on mutual respect and shared goals. When integrated into academic instruction with structured reflection, service-learning becomes a reciprocal partnership—not an act of charity. It allows students and community members to co-create solutions to community-identified needs.
Service-learning helps students investigate the root causes of societal challenges—the foundational issues that make the service necessary in the first instance. Importantly, it also reveals the messy, long, and non-linear nature of societal change. Graduate students, armed with analytical tools, applied methodologies, and enriched by life experience, are well-equipped to face these complex realities with resilience and enthusiasm.
Community-Based Research: Humanizing Knowledge Production
Community-based research (CBR) typically augments the time spent with books, laboratories, and case studies with time spent in community collaboration. CBR democratizes the production of knowledge, acknowledging that insights from lived experiences can be as valuable as academic theory when confronting real-world issues in real-time. For adult learners, CBR reinforces agency, cultivates humility, and prompts a vital realization: theories that look elegant on paper can unravel in practice.
CBR nurtures empathy and deepens understanding of the intricate social, political, and cultural structures that influence communities. It reminds us that lasting solutions are rarely declarations or prescriptions from above. They are co-created through messy, iterative processes that depend on collaboration and deep listening.
Educating for the Common Good(s): The Role of Graduate Programs
When graduate programs incorporate experiential learning, service-learning, and community-based research, they cultivate lifelong learners who are not only professionally capable but also civically committed. These learners emerge as reflective practitioners prepared to think about, talk about, and enact a more equitable, inclusive, and democratic society.
Final Thought: Democracy Lived, Not Lectured
Democracy can be taught, but not lived in concrete classrooms, synchronous seminars, and asynchronous arrangements. To “do” democracy students must live it, model it, succeed within it and fail from it. To prepare this country and the world for the next generation of leaders, academic programs must give adult students the opportunities to “do” democracy. Chances are, they will be able to “do it” as well or better than the leaders of this generation.