I was halfway into my sustainable agriculture lecture at UC Santa Barbara on an otherwise pleasant February afternoon when I heard the sound no teacher wants to hear: one of my students, in the back row, snoring. Loudly. I decided to plow ahead, even as other students turned around and erupted into giggles. Finally, someone shook the offending student awake, and class proceeded.

Later that week, a teaching assistant approached me to explain how bad the snorer felt about the incident. It wasn’t that the student was uninterested or found my lecture boring, the TA explained; they just struggled to stay awake through such a passive and sedentary experience. It wasn’t the content of my class that was the problem. It was the format.

The longer I’ve taught (this is my 11th year as a professor), the more I’ve leaned on experiential learning: hands-on activities that get students out of their seats and engaging all their senses and capacities. Even as universities in my state are signing deals with tech companies to bring free AI training to campus, I see students clamoring for something else: meaningful in-person experiences where they can make strong connections with mentors and peers.

As I’ve redesigned my classes to integrate more field trips to local farms, volunteer work with community organizations and hands-on lessons focused on building tangible skills, I’ve found that students work harder, learn more, and look forward to class. Instead of just showing slides of compost, I bring my students to our campus farm to harvest castings (nutrient-dense worm poop!) from the worm bins. Instead of just lecturing about how California farmers are adapting to water scarcity, I take students to visit a farm that operates without irrigation, where we help prune and harvest grapes and olives. Long wait lists for these types of classes indicate that demand is far greater than supply.

I’m a proponent of experiential learning in almost every educational context, but there are several reasons why it is particularly relevant and essential this school year.

For one thing, generative AI has upended most traditional assignments. We can no longer assume that writing submitted by students is indicative of what they’ve learned. As many of my colleagues have found out the hard way, students are routinely completely unfamiliar with the content of their own papers. In this environment, there’s a real advantage to directly supervising and assessing students’ learning, rather than relying on proxies that robots can fake.

Second, today’s young adults face an uncertain economy and job market, partly due to AI. Many employers are deploying AI instead of hiring entry-level workers, or simply pausing hiring while waiting for markets to settle. As instructors, we must admit that we aren’t 100% sure which technical skills our students will need to succeed in this rapidly evolving workplace, especially five to 10 years down the road. Experiential learning has the advantage of helping students build the timeless, translatable skills that will AI-proof their employability: teamwork, communication, emotional intelligence and project management. As a bonus, community-engaged learning approaches can introduce students to professional settings in real time, ensuring a more up-to-date and relevant experience than any pre-cooked lesson plan.

Finally, and not unrelated to the above two points, Gen Z is experiencing a mental health crisis that inhibits many students’ ability to focus, set goals and develop self-confidence. There is nothing quite like putting a shovel and some seeds in their hands (preferably out of cellphone range) and watching them build a garden with their peers. The combined effect of being outdoors, digitally detoxing, moving about, bonding with others, and feeling a sense of accomplishment and making a difference is a powerful tonic for rumination and constant online isolation.

The field of environmental studies lends itself to outdoor experiential learning, and this has long been a key component of courses in ecology and earth science. But this approach can be quite powerful across the curriculum. I’ve known political science professors who take students to city council meetings, historians who walk students through the streets of their city to witness legacies of earlier eras, and writing instructors who bring groups of students to wild spaces to develop narrative essays on site.

With support from my department, I’m grateful to be able to teach an entirely experiential field course — but I’m equally excited about integrating modest experiential elements into my 216-person lecture course. Even one experiential assignment (like attending and reflecting on a public event) or hands-on activity in the discussion section can catalyze and deepen learning. 

To be sure, effective experiential learning is an art form that requires significant investment of time and energy from the instructor — and often from community partners as well. This work needs to be appropriately valued and compensated, and off-campus experiences require transportation funding and careful planning to ensure student safety. But the payoff can be the most meaningful and memorable experience of a student’s academic career. Instead of snoozing through a lecture, they can actively develop themselves into the adult they wish to become.

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Liz Carlisle is an associate professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project.

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Travel industry site Skift has hired Adriana Lee to cover travel technology and artificial intelligence.

Previously, she covered tech and its impact on fashion and beauty at Women’s Wear Daily, and what everyone from the consumer to the developer needs to know at multiple tech sites, including ReadWrite and Techno Buffalo ES.

Lee was also managing editor at Today’s iPhone.

She is a graduate of George Washington University.