Developing a Model for Culturally Responsive Experiential Education

Book excerpt: This book provides a new, empirically informed framework designed to equip higher education faculty with the tools to help students engage in humanizing, mutually beneficial, and anti-colonial experiential education alongside other students and communities around the world. The author maps the conceptual development of culturally responsive experiential education (CREE) as a novel framework, situated at the nexus of culturally responsive research methodologies, the Indigenous research paradigm, critical service learning, and critical pedagogy in experiential education. The chapters detail qualitative research findings from an undergraduate CREE program in rural Fiji to illustrate the implementation of the novel CREE framework and discuss post-program possibilities based on the research study findings. Situated in narrative inquiry, the book also includes interspersed participant vignettes in order to center student voices and illuminate the research study findings. With attention to themes including emergent critical consciousness, critical allyship, and personal journeys of decolonization as experienced through the CREE framework, it will be of benefit to both education scholars and higher education faculty interested in experiential education and culturally responsive pedagogies.