Critical Experiential Learning

In recent years, universities have engaged in reforms in undergraduate education to prepare graduates for the new economies of industrialization 4.0. The reforms seek to shift from teaching students to absorb knowledge and become disciplinary specialists to treating students as co-creators of knowledge imbued with the independent drive for continuous learning and innovative adaptation. These reforms have taken on greater urgency given the rapidity of AI adoption. These reforms are being implemented through key organizing ideas such as critical thinking, interdisciplinary teaching, experiential learning, global citizenship, and social impact. Ironically, the state’s drive for higher education reforms motivated by the need to respond to new articulations of capitalism are converging with the critical pedagogy seeking to awaken the humanity oppressed by capitalist alienation. Can the progressive aims of critical pedagogy to cultivate socially conscious graduates seeking to be changemakers to better the world for the marginalised square with the objectives of the state and its corporate universities to foster entrepreneurial agents of capital? Recognizing the important connection between experiential learning and the teaching of the sociological imagination on a global scale, our panel seeks papers to (1) better theorise experiential learning as a pedagogical method for raising critical consciousness and the self-actualisation of students that also promote social impact; (2) to better conceive critical experiential learning in order to avoid it becoming extractive educational tourism; and (3) rethink the decolonising of the teaching of sociology from the epistemological focus towards the grounded ontology of practice in real-life experiences with others.