Liberal Arts Cooperative Education is a Unique Characteristic of Antioch College

Tensions exist between the personal and the curricular.

Liberal education permeates the Antioch Experience on campus and away from it.

Work is general education and specialized education.

Cooperative Education is a partnered arrangement framed by contract and covenant.

Reflection is the key to learning.

Learning is a community endeavor.

Whole Person Education

Arthur Morgan is often called the “father” of the modern Antioch College. This is probably because he set the College on a radically different educational approach when he became a trustee and later president of the College. Among his innovations in the 1920’s that continue to this day is the emphasis on a whole-person education. In keeping with the liberal arts that finds favor in general or broad education across a variety of scholarly disciplines, Morgan sought to address education to the person -- to the personal experience -- not only to the disciplines of study. Cooperative education engages so many parts of the human experience that it is an integral element in a liberal education.

Tensions exist between the personal and the curricular.

Co-op involves lived experience that occurs through the avenue of work on a job. No two students will have the same experience on the same job because the sense-making process involved is different for each of them. The whole range of complexities of human values, meanings and connections make co-op a distinctly personal event. Still, these experiences are incorporated in a curriculum and the integration of student co-op experience with student academic experience is a frequently cited value and goal of ours. Assessment of student learning brings to the surface learning achieved on co-op for examination and comparison. Students are important learning resources in their classes because of what they’ve seen and done on co-op. The investigative and analytical tools of scholarly life help students to more deeply consider work experiences and employing organizations. This dynamic tension between what is personal and what is curricular makes Antioch’s education different and powerful.

Liberal education permeates the Antioch Experience on campus and away from it.

Liberal learning is the gathering force for the many parts of a student’s experience at Antioch. Antioch’s program is comprehensive because it is a foundation of all that students do here from beginning to end. Even in the first and final years when formal co-op work assignments either lie ahead or are a memory, the influence of co-op as planning or as reflection is embedded in an Antioch education. Other schools offer one or two internships while students are enrolled. Typically, these are offered through academic departments with the administrative help of a placement office. These internships are framed in terms of what contribution this work makes to the field of study itself. Antioch’s vision is that work illuminates and contributes to and, in its partnership with academics, is a liberal education. This is an entirely different and less prescriptive approach to learning through work.

Work is general education and specialized education.

It’s easy to see connections between obviously linked fields of study and associated work. These are usually fairly simple one-to-one linkages. Education – schools. Literature – publishing. History – archives or museums. International Relations – the UN. And so on. Antioch views work experience in more sophisticated ways. There is nothing problematic about the simple linkages. These links are just that, simple. A more sophisticated view sees work as a means to investigate, test, compare, immerse, become, transition, etc. from place to place, field to field, endeavor to endeavor, question to question and context to context. Developing the intellectual, emotional and personal agility to make a place for oneself to live, learn and succeed as adults is the key to life-long learning and the ability to adapt successfully to unique and new conditions. The world changes rapidly. Students who learn how to manage the complexities of change and to learn from them will go well beyond survival – they will thrive in their lives. We have frequently encouraged students to understand this dynamic education in our co-op program through these kinds of questions:

What is it like to live as part of the work force?
Where can I locate myself as a member of a new community in terms of the social, recreational, religious, and ethical dimensions of life?
How do I relate to co-workers?
How do I deal with the limits of a particular job and with the finances of living independently in a new community?
Living in a new place, working in a new setting, reflecting and observing, how does the world look different to me?
Am I different in these different worlds?

Cooperative Education is a partnered arrangement framed by contract and covenant.

These partnerships involve a student and an employer, but more fundamentally, it is a contract between the College and the employer. Work is at the core of an effective co-op partnership. An Antioch education involves work that needs to be done and that falls generally in the range of a college student’s abilities. With some training and support from the employer, we want education to be found in doing well the work that needs to be done and benefits the employer and the organization’s mission. The employer-College partnership begins with an agreement to perform work that an employer has made available to Antioch students. The job becomes an educational offering and an educational resource. Antioch College is able to value, care for and nurture these educational resources through effective performance of students on the jobs, effective course instruction and ethical relationships. It is a community experience too. By this we mean that when students do well on the job, those students who will work for that employer later will benefit. This is because employer expectations are shaped by their experience with Antioch’s students, one by one. What we can accomplish in work and in education together is significant and impressive. So, the partnership is a minimally a trilateral one – student, employer, College and it is a complex web of obligations, aspirations, reciprocity and transactions needing regular and careful reinforcement.

Co-op has a moral dimension.

Co-op stories told by the students who lived them out abound with accounts of ethical and moral dilemmas. These emerge in the contexts of supervisor-student, between co-workers, in relations with clients or customers, between ideals and practicalities, between cultures and personal identities, etc. These are difficult situations sometimes, but we know from research done with Antioch students and alumni looking back on them that the greatest and most memorable lessons for life were found in these moral dilemmas. We lift them up as a part of the curriculum, not as a distraction from it.

Reflection is the key to learning.

Having a work experience without reflecting on its meaning, making sense out of the situation, interrogating the experience with the tools of scholarly and academic lenses produces little learning. Most college students work. Few college students, but all of Antioch’s students, employ the methods of reflective learning to their co-op work experiences. Reflection involves trying new or difficult things, taking stock of your personal response to what these endeavors and situations mean, figuring out why things happened as they did and lifting from a particular set of circumstances those principles or theories that, while born in the specific, are freed by you by making them part of what you know, believe, or can do in your life. Moving to more and more sophisticated levels of performance and reflection is expected. Typically a well-written paper on aspects of the work experience is required to earn credit. Students further examine theirs experience through a joint assessment of the paper with the co-op advisor. The intention of this crediting conference is to affirm what has been written. It is also to consider different avenues of analysis for re-examining the experience and the conclusions expressed about it in the co-op paper. More sophisticated and liberal learning requires re-consideration or re-examination of experience and conclusions. It is a constant process of experience, reflection, and reframing that leads to new plans to investigate, test, or try out new things. Once students gain proficiency in this process they are able to manage their learning throughout life. That’s the goal of an Antioch education.

Learning is a community endeavor.

Antioch has considered itself to be a self-governing community for decades and most course instruction has a community dimension to it. We are building Co-op Communities now where a critical mass of students, partnered learning community coordinators, constellation of jobs and a planned program of learning are located. Students will have coaching when they need and want it in locating housing, figuring out transportation, finding social outlets, getting involved in civic life, etc. We will also bring an academic component into the Co-op Communities. This feature involves developing an understanding of “place.” By this we mean many and different things – place as history, place as economy, place as political life, place as commerce, place as art, place as geography, etc. Knowing better where we are, who came before us, what complex networks of associations, resources and forces shape the location of our lives makes a community ours and we live there more respectfully, ethically and thoughtfully.

Composing a life at Antioch.

For a small college, Antioch’s offerings are rich and varied. Not bounded by the limits of the campus or bringing a host of people of various levels and forms of expertise opens us up to geometrically greater combinations of examples and meanings. Most of us “accidentally” find life work. Really, it’s more like we learn to understand the meaning of our lives so far; consideration and reconsideration of our options; exercising choices within options which in turn help us reframe the meaning of the past. It’s out of a process like that that we begin to find common threads, insistent forms of interest and engagement, skills we love using and so on. Antioch’s co-op program is like this. Composing a life is a high art that you will develop through co-op community experiences, challenging academic learning and experienced coaching by peers and guides across co-op employers, faculty and staff of the College.