Experiential Learning Opportunities

The Value of Experiential Education

For decades UC San Diego has been committed to expanding experiential learning opportunities, to enrich undergraduate education. This is rooted in a long tradition of research on how people learn—from UC San Diego cultural psychologist Mike Cole’s foundational cognitive research on human development, learning and undergraduate instruction, and development of a “community station” model, to sociologist Bud Mehan’s award-winning design of informal K-12 environmental education in underserved schools, and the launch of the UC San Diego Preuss School, committed to this model. This tradition of experiential education thrives across the campus today, from Anthropology to Global Health, from Engineering to Urban Studies and the new Teaching + Learning Commons. All promote “learning by doing” and the enrichment of classroom learning with immersion in real-world challenges.

The Community Stations are committed to a model of experiential learning for undergraduates, and for the K-12 students who participate in our mentorship and environmental literacy programs.

Our internship programs for undergraduates immerse multi-disciplinary student teams in the UC San Diego Community Stations sites, and train them to analyze societal challenges through intersectional lenses, to communicate across disciplinary languages and knowledges, and to engage in collaborative problem-solving with each other, and with our community partners. Through this experiential model, our students become the civically engaged, problem-solvers of the future.

Our mentorship and environmental literacy programming for K-12 students is based on The EarthLab Method, designed by UC San Diego sociologist Bud Mehan, in collaboration with the nonprofit Groundwork San Diego and the San Diego Unified School District. It has become the experiential K-12 educational model adopted across the UC San Diego Community Stations.