There have been a couple minor developments in relation to experiential education in Ontario that I thought were worthy of a blog post. This post is going to briefly overview both developments and give some analysis on what's occurring.
So exactly what is experiential education? Well, it's a buzzword these days at universities and colleges, but at the core experiential education or work-integrated learning is essentially the myriad of options available to secondary and post-secondary institutions to include various types of course offering that place students into workplaces or environments where practical skills can be utilized directly. Examples would be co-op programs, practicums (think social work or nursing), internships, or field work in the form of an archaeological dig - the offerings can be quite diverse.
The first development was the Business-Higher Education Roundtable, which is a offshoot of the Business Council of Canada, putting forward the idea that every university and college student should be participating in a co-op program, internship, or other form of work-integrated learning as part of their degree or diploma programs. The Business-Higher Education Roundtable's "plan" can be viewed here, but all it's essentially a glorified press release. I was on the CBC's The Current to discuss the plan, which you can listen to here or read the transcript.
The second development was from the Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel, which was set up by the Province of Ontario in 2015 to examine workforce transformation amid a period of rapid technological change. The Panel released its report to the Premier last Thursday. The report focused on six key areas: local partnerships; labour market information; experiential learning; promoting multiple career pathways; human capital investment; and, developing skills.
The aspect of the Panel's report that interests me is the recommendations around experiential education, which boil down to the following points: (1) expand specialist programs at the secondary level so that more high school students engage in work-integrated learning; (2) expand work-integrated learning at both the secondary and post-secondary level so that every student has engaged in experiential education by the end of post-secondary education; (3) develop a modernized apprenticeship system to integrate more young people into the skilled trades; (4) require businesses that receive funding through the Jobs and Prosperity Funds to provide experiential education opportunities; (5) encourage post-secondary institutions to provide longer co-op placements in the range of eight to twelve months; and, (6) ensure adult learners and mature students have access to experiential learning opportunities.
Both the plan from the Roundtable and the report from the Panel contain some interesting and even useful ideas for discussion. Certainly the Panel's report is more comprehensive in its recommendations, but where both the plan and report fall down is in providing specifics about how to achieve the goals laid out in each document. More troubling is that neither the Roundtable, nor the Panel acknowledge the deep structural problems that plague work-integrated learning in Ontario from the gendered regulatory environment that benefits young males to the utter absence of any employment standards protections for students to the lack of funding for high-quality experiential learning to the downloading of risk and training costs from corporations onto young workers.
The plan and the report are sophomoric efforts by individuals who don't fully understand the complexity of the problems they're attempting to address, to say nothing about the the fact that both documents reflect an extremely narrow, neoliberal, and corporatist interpretation of what secondary and post-secondary education should be and offer. Absent from both the Panel and Roundtable are the actual voices of young workers or students - this points to dual problems relating to legitimacy and intergenerational equity in that neither body could be bothered with engaging in adequate consultations with the very persons that will be impacted by any possible policy change.
I would give both the plan and the report more attention if I thought either set of recommendations had a chance of going anywhere, but with the current budget pressures there simply is no chance that universities or colleges are going to receive the necessary funding to expand work-integrated learning in Ontario. Certainly there needs to be a sea-change as to how Ontario (and Canada for that matter) approaches workforce development (just watch the documentary below for a primer), but neither of the documents reviewed here provides a logical way forward. For more of my writing on work-integrated learning and experiential education, see: here; here; here; and, here.
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