Northeastern Voice

For Greene, experience counts

Northeastern, said Jack Greene, "still flies the flag of co-op and experiential learning very high."

He's proud to be maintaining that flagpole. Greene's affiliation with Northeastern began 40 years ago, as a co-op student in the College of Criminal Justice.

He's been dean of that college since 1999, and recently took the added post of special adviser to the provost on experiential education. Now the latter role is expanding, and Greene will become full-time vice provost for experiential education, coordinating both the logistics for and the academic research on integrating classroom learning with real-world experience.

"It's a very exciting opportunity — to try to link together the many experiential components of Northeastern," said Greene, who formally begins his new post in mid-February.

"Northeastern was firmly built on cooperative education. We expect that we will continue to have the lion's share of our work in the cooperative education arena. But there are other opportunities that can benefit from the relationships that cooperative education has created for us — with employers, with governments, with civic groups," he said.

Citing President Joseph Aoun's "keen" interest in international experiences, Greene said among his priorities will be working to create "experiential platforms in cities around the world." That means, he said, finding ways to connect co-op jobs with study-abroad or even distance-learning possibilities, potential faculty research centers, housing and even groups of alumni to provide social networks for students on site.

The current freshman class, Greene noted, is the first bound by the university's new core curriculum, which requires an experiential learning component. Co-op, except in certain cases, has always been voluntary, so "it's the first time that the university has stated that as a requirement."

Those students, in part, will help Greene decide the future of the university's experiential program. He said he will "engage our student body early and often and in as many ways as possible" to help set a course.

But he'll also be coordinating faculty efforts to research and define the benefits of experiential learning.

"President Aoun challenged the university ... to be the intellectual leader" on experiential learning, Greene said. That includes "building out models of learning, models of faculty development."

"There's a huge intellectual component to this process," he said. "This is not vocational (education) ... We're not training people for today's workplace. We are providing students with learning experiences so that they can survive in multiple jobs and careers that they will have over their lifetime."

Listen to a podcast of the Voice interview with Jack Greene at http://www.northeastern.edu/neuhome/videos/jackgreene.mp3.