Scholar-Practitioner Exploration of EL Access and Definitions

There has been a long-standing societal push to diversify the student body of colleges and universities by improving access to higher education. Along those lines, increasing access to a greater range of students and practitioners through the diversification of their membership bases is also an expressed goal of the experiential learning professional societies. Overlaying this charge with the Society for Experiential Education's (SEE) initiative to revisit the defining features of experiential learning (EL) creates an opportunity to consider how definition interacts with access to the field (i.e., whether definitional clarity promotes opportunities to the uninitiated). To address this challenge, we employed a scholar-practitioner research methodology exploring the question, how does the definition of experiential learning affect access? This process involved each author addressing three related questions individually before we compared responses and analyzed our data. We found differences in perspective (e.g., administrative, educational, and learner) and differences in needs (e.g., immediate need for funding to pay for additional EL-related expenses and need for data to show that EL works). Given these findings, we recommend pragmatic approaches and a systems approach to understanding definitions. Clarifying these differences may help bridge discrepancies in espoused theory and theory in use, thereby increasing opportunities to access EL through definition.