Santa Clara University

A Message from the President

I want to welcome you to PRAXIS, the central, comprehensive source of information for experiential learning opportunities available to students at Santa Clara. Research shows that experiential learning is one of the best, if not the best, path to learning that continues throughout your life. It also reinforces the importance of being engaged with the world in this time and place.

Experiential learning helps you to integrate theory and practice, classroom and world, learning and living. It contributes both to preparation for careers and to becoming engaged, responsible citizens who will advance the greater good of an increasingly diverse society. When you add our faith commitment as a Jesuit, Catholic university, the benefit accrues not only to you and our communities, but also for the greater glory of God. As a pedagogy it provides an ideal path to achieving the ideal of educating leaders of competence, conscience, and compassion, Santa Claras vision of Jesuit education.

I encourage you to explore and utilize this resource and to take advantage of the opportunities it provides.

Rev. Paul Locatelli, S.J.
President, Santa Clara University

What is Experiental Learning?

Experiential learning enables you to apply what you have learned in the classroom to a different setting.

Whether through campus leadership, community-based learning, internships, or any of the other forms of experiential learning, a critical process takes place that has the power to transform you.

It begins with you becoming engaged in a concrete experience. At night, during study breaks, with friends, or even while working you are reflecting on this experience, actively thinking through it and drawing your own conclusions about what you have seen and heard.

Out of this reflection you consciously or unconsciously form impressions, concepts, and ideas about your experience. When you apply these new ideas to your experience in this way, the experience changes. It then generates new reflections, which in turn gives rise to new concepts and ideas, which are applied to the experience again, thus changing it and you once again, and so on.

"Students...must let the gritty reality of this world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering, and engage it constructively. They should learn to perceive, think, judge, choose, and act for the rights of others, especially the disadvantaged and the oppressed." (Rev. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J.)

PRAXIS is a term that has long been used to reflect the personal and social transformation resulting from experiential learning. It is therefore most appropriate that it serve as the title for this resource for the Santa Clara community.

Integrated Education

An integrated education is one that encourages students to seek connections between different ways of knowing and being in the world, between different forms of knowledge within the established disciplines, and between new knowledge and that which preceded it. (Stategic Plan 2001)

PRAXIS is a direct reflection of Santa Clara University�s strategic vision to educate men and women for competence, conscience, and compassion - qualities that are developed, nurtured, and ultimately serve to influence the society in which we live. (Stategic Plan 2001)

This directory is intended to serve as a first step in the process of helping you to "make connections among different forms of knowledge, faith, understanding, and experience so that you may ultimately relate what you learn to how you live." (Stategic Plan 2001)

PRAXIS will assist you in choosing the ideal experience to develop and refine your capacities for critical judgement, dialogue with others, ethical decision making, achieving new skills, respect for diversity, and leadership in service to others.

You will discover that cultural learning and understanding take place as you become personally engaged with others in cultures and experiences that challenge your assumptions, attitudes, and behavior.

It is this participation, standing with and listening to others so as to see from a new perspective, that is an essential component of an integrated education. "When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change."