Most professors want students to leave their classes with more than just a heap of information; ideally the student has also been transformed in some way, has become more complex in thought and intention, has an understanding of the significance of what’s been learned, and has made some progress on a larger life path. As a Jesuit institution, Georgetown embraces these possibilities, all of which can be traced to the practice of Ignatian Pedagogy.
Ignatian Pedagogy is rooted in spiritual exercises devised in the 16th century by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, a community also known as the Jesuits. These exercises called for a cycle of experience, reflection, and action to help an individual uncover truth, grow closer to God, and take steps toward bettering the world. Although Saint Ignatius did not create the exercises with an intention of founding schools, his approach to pursuing truth has long been applied in Jesuit education in a form known as the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm. The idea in this paradigm is not to limit this kind of learning to special “Ignatian courses” but to consider the possibility that it might be relevant across a wide range of disciplines and classes.
The Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm is founded on the belief that education has to go beyond the mere transmission of information from professor to student. More than an exercise in memorization or a purely cognitive transaction, education is meant to be a transformational experience that affects the students on all levels—cognitive, certainly, but also emotional and behavioral. The student who has been through this kind of experience will have had old ideas unsettled in the service of developing a fuller understanding of self and the world, and in service of helping that world.
The process operates through a cycle, which, in its simplest form, works like this:
Ignatian pedagogy begins with experience; whether students are doing community-based learning or completing a math problem set or analyzing a text, they are meant to do more than absorb the facts surrounding what’s in front of them; they are meant to engage the material in a way that fully involves them. This means both cognitive and emotional involvement (what is this and how do I feel about it?); personal investment (what does this mean to me?); societal engagement (what does this mean to the world?); and behavioral investment (what does this tell me about what I should do?). In this paradigm, the process of learning is as important as the content of learning, or perhaps even more so.
The process continues when the experience ends, as the student engages in a process of reflection on the experiences and all the reactions it caused. This is an opportunity for deeper meaning to arise, and for the student to see which reactions were fleeting and which ones endure.
This is not reflection solely for reflection’s sake, however; the introspection is meant to lead to action. This “action” can involve choices about a variety of domains: the learning experience itself (e.g., picking an essay topic, taking on a certain issue to study further, etc.), the student’s personal life (e.g., implementing a solution for a personal problem, taking up an extracurricular activity, etc.), the student’s professional future (e.g., signing up for a related class, applying for a particular internship, seeking out information about one career or another, etc.), and, ideally—this is crucial in Ignatian pedagogy—the larger world. Specifically, it is hoped that real education will lead the student to take actions, large and small, to make the world a better place for all, and particularly those most in need.
None of these actions have to be permanent commitments. Indeed, each choice will of course produce an experience of its own—positive, negative, or (probably) more complicated—and after action the student is meant to seek out yet more experiences, which will in turn provoke reflection and further action, and so on, in an ongoing cycle of growth.
And this may go without saying, but the teacher has a crucial role in the process, calling on students to dive into the experience, to reflect, to take action; giving them opportunities to do all three, and modeling a serious engagement with the exercises.
How might these principles manifest themselves in a course?
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