Learning Reconsidered 2: A Practical Guide to Implementing a Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience

by ACPA

More than 10,000 copies of Learning A Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience are in circulation on college and university campuses worldwide. The publication has been used as an invitation from student affairs educators to their colleagues in other sectors of their institutions to engage in dialogue and planning for institution-wide student learning outcomes. It has become a frequent focus of professional development programs and workshops, and is the topic of many student affairs presentations. Learning Reconsidered 2: Implementing a Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience is a blueprint for action. It shows how to create the dialogue, tools, and materials necessary to put into practice the recommendations in Learning Reconsidered . This companion book brings together new authors, discipline-specific examples, and models for applying the theories in the original publication to move beyond traditional ideas of separate learning inside and outside the classroom.

88 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2006

Reviews

[Joseph Pastina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good follow-up to LR1. This book adds practicality and application to the principles discussed in its predecessor.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Through a fluke of interlibrary loan, I wound up with Learning Reconsidered 2 before I could put my hands on the original Learning Reconsidered, so my experience is backward from what the authors intended. I’m not entirely sure that matters, however, as the editor’s introduction refers to this as an “amplification” rather than a follow up, and I certainly got the impression that the authors used the majority of the book’s 88 pages to simply rehash their original work.

The short-short version (the book itself is really already the short version) is that learning works best when it’s holistic, and reinforced by experiences outside of the classroom. In order to support holistic learning, student affairs representatives must first determine what the desired learning outcomes of the program/institution they support are, and then develop activities that support those outcomes. I’m presuming much of the step-by-step process of figuring out what the outcomes are is recapped from the original volume; Keeling’s intro specifies that the distinction between LR and LR2 is the focus on implementation. This would lead one to presume that there would be a few in-depth case studies contained here, carefully parsed to best demonstrate how different types of organizations implement activities gauged to support learning outcomes, but one would be wrong. There are lots of generic, sweeping statements, and a handful of examples described – mostly in chapter 10, and mostly in only a paragraph or two – and while those may be helpful in generating ideas, they hardly illuminate the process.

LR2 is a bit on the vague side, and certainly a bit more than vaguely soporific in its writing style, but it does at least offer a brief overview of the goal of creating a holistic student experience. If you’re looking for specifics on implementation, however, you’ll need to look elsewhere.