Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 24, 2013

Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting

Town-Gown Partnerships
Experiential Exercises for Education in Social Innovation

Experiential education produces numerous benefits to students in terms of higher order thinking skills such as the ability to evaluate, analyze, and synthesize information (Illeris, 2007; Ives & Obenchain, 2006; Lidon, Rebollar, & Møller, 2011), engagement (Baker & Comer, 2012), and work-readiness (Jollands, Jolly, & Molyneaux, 2012). Partnering with community organizations provides a means to create experiential education opportunities for students. In this symposium, we discussed three examples of experiential education to promote learning around themes of sustainability, providing a brief outline of the activities, the intended outcomes, and the lessons learned from our experiences. We concluded with a meditation on the importance of working with community partners and managing expectations so that students, the community, and the institutions gain the best possible outcomes when creating town-gown partnerships for sustainability education.