Examining the Adult Learning in “Giving Back” Initiatives

Background

Adult learning is concerned with experiential learning, creating meaning, and formal as well as informal learning (Bennett & McWhorter, 2020; De Vito, 2009; Knowles, Holton & Swanson, 2005; Merriam & Bierema, 2014; Okojie, Okojie-Boulder, & Boulder, 2008). Because Service-Learning as an instructional method is “growing in popularity for giving back to the community while connecting the experience to course content” (McWhorter, Delello & Roberts, 2016, p. 80), it is ripe as an adult learning pedagogy since it allows for students to customize their own learning while experiencing and applying knowledge from higher education courses to a community context. Experiential learning “is one of the central concepts of andragogy” (Sato, Haegele, & Foot, 2017, p. 455). Also, experiential learning has been described as a “process of using life experience to internalize knowledge. Learning by experience works cyclically: one gains external experience, reflects on observations of that experience, forms new abstract concepts from that reflection, and reapplies what is learned to new experiences” (LeBaron, Runyan, Jorgensen, Marks, Li, & Hill, 2019, p. 436; see also Kolb, 2014).