S8 E3: In This Grad Program, Students Earn University Credit for Their Life Experiences

Joe Cronin [00:00] – All of a sudden you’ve got this deeper reflective piece. And there are different schools of dance. There is a theoretical piece. All of this is graduate credit worthy, but what happens in higher ed is we mask what those practices are. And that’s because we like the idea that whoever’s instructing a course should have the upper hand. My whole position on all of this is that not only am I a co-learner, I’m a learner. I wanna learn what the students know. I want their wisdom.

Jasper [00:36] – This is the Seed Field Podcast, the show where Antiochians share their knowledge, tell their stories, and come together to win victories for humanity. I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk. And today we’re joined by Joe Cronin for a conversation about what counts as education and what happens when students are able to claim the growth experiences that naturally occur in the course of a human life, from a career change to an experience of oppression, and bring it into their graduate studies, not just reflecting on what they learned, but also earning credits towards their degree. I’m speaking here of what’s sometimes called prior learning credits. You may have heard about these sorts of programs. At many universities, if you’re a new student, but you previously studied somewhere else, there’s often a way for you to bring some of those credits from your previous institution and to count those credits towards the new degree you’re studying for. In fact, here in the US, many colleges let first-year undergrads claim advanced standing if those students took AP classes during high school and then passed the relevant AP tests. And these programs really are wonderful. They let students claim their previous work and they help them finish their programs faster, often saving a lot of money along the way. But what if you didn’t have the chance to take AP classes? Or if you didn’t study for a year at a different institution? The usual way universities treat students in this position is to say, “You didn’t take the right kind of class, so of course you’re not going to get any credit. You just start from square one.” And this makes some sense. But when you think about it, even when we’re not in school, we are often learning things. We learn new skills on the job, we take on new roles at home, and we have to master a new body of knowledge. When life throws things at us, we learn and we grow. And here at Antioch, we have a longstanding tradition of working with students to explore those learning experiences too, and to award them credit. This has actually touched my own family. So it’s a topic near and dear to me, and I’ll just tell the story very briefly. In the 1980s, my dad, who had dropped out of college a decade earlier, had gotten really into making maps. He became a cartographer. And at first he made them by hand with an airbrush and a straight edge. But soon he ended up joining the first wave of people making maps on computers. These interactive maps got called Geographic Information Systems, or GIS. My dad was relatively young and relatively smart, and soon he ended up working in a lab at UC Berkeley. And he even started giving lectures there. And at that point, the university found out that he didn’t even have a BA. His career started being held back, even though he had all this experience and was good at what he did. So he ended up actually coming to Antioch. This was back when we had a San Francisco campus. And he got a lot of credit, both for his previous college credits, but also for this time he’d spent learning about maps and GIS. He took a few more night classes, and he ended up graduating, finally, with his BA. So in a real way, this changed the course of my family’s life. Today, I’m super excited to talk about this practice at the graduate level. In Antioch’s Individualized Master of Arts program, there’s a longstanding practice of awarding credit for prior learning. And there’s a rigorous process of documentation and reflection that students go through before they get that credit. So I’m excited to learn more about this. And I think we have the perfect person to have this conversation with, Joe Cronin, who’s here in the studio with us today. Joe is a writer and teacher. He’s a professor of humanities here at Antioch. And he’s been here since 2003 in a variety of roles. Most recently, he redesigned and relaunched our Individualized Master of Arts program. That launched in 2019. And since then, he’s served as chair of that program. And he’s currently the director of prior learning assessment. Joe, we’re super excited to have you here in the studio today and to learn more about all of this. Welcome to the Seed Field podcast.

Joe [04:40] – Thank you, Jasper. I appreciate the kind introduction. So lots to share about prior learning and the Individualized Master of Arts, which has been around since the 1950s at Antioch. And lots of aspects of prior learning assessment that we incorporate into our program.

Jasper [05:01] – I’m excited to unpack all of this. Before we get to all that though, I wanna make sure that we take a moment to disclose our positionality. This is something that we do, especially when it’s relevant to the topic we’re discussing. And because our conversation today is going to touch on how education has traditionally excluded whole groups of people and whole types of experience. I think it’s important to know what kind of experience and what groups we belong to as the people talking. So I’ll go first. I’m white, I’m a cis-gendered man. I’m queer. I’m not living with a physical disability, but I do experience anxiety and depression. And I’ve been lucky to receive a lot of therapy to learn to manage those ways that my brain works. I have a college degree and a master’s degree, and I have steady housing and steady income. Also maybe relevant, I have a two-year-old child. So I have had to learn a lot of new skills in the last two years. I’ll toss it over to you, Joe. As much as you’re comfortable, can you share your position?

Joe [06:01] – I’m Joe Cronin. I want to introduce myself as a socialist since the age of 16. I’ve been fighting for human equality that whole time in different ways. I do come from some privilege. I have a college degree from Williams College. I got my master’s degree at Columbia University, and I then went to the University of Cincinnati where I got my doctoral degree. So I’m very privileged educationally. I come from a large family where there’s 11 of us. So I think that’s a big part of who I am. I have a stepdaughter who’s been like a daughter. I’ve known her since she was age three, and she has two kids. So I’m a grandpa, and I’ve got a son who is in his 30s as well, and I’m very close to them. [] – Thank you for sharing also your political affiliation or orientation to the world and how you understand things. I do think it would be useful to let listeners know a little bit more about the Individualized Master of Arts program if they don’t. So yeah, tell us what the Individualized Master of Arts is as well. [] – In fact, what our students do is they design their own degree programs in one of two areas. We offer an MA in the social sciences and an MA in humanities, and I am a professor of humanities. So the students who come in in areas like philosophy, and we get quite a few of those, by the way, literature, writing, history, cultural anthropology, religious anthropology, and I could go on and on about traditional humanities disciplines. This is pretty much an interdisciplinary degree that they put together themselves with some help. So I like to refer to that as structured individualization. And I won’t go into the Jungian roots of the term individualization, but really it has to do with the full expression of who we are as human beings. And so we challenge students to create a program that dares themselves to be a better version of themselves and to try to get what they aspire to be in life right now, and to actually not only study, but to do, because to do is to know, as Plato said.

Jasper [08:33] – I love what you said about the Jungian idea of individualizing, of sort of like figuring out your own identity, your own place in the world, separate from the pack or the herd or the mass of society and maybe the paths that are pre-made, these sort of like, I’m pre-law, I’m going to law school, I’m going to become a lawyer. It’s like there was never a need for any creativity necessarily on that path, but if you’re figuring out your own, and this is where I think maybe some examples would be useful, that you’re individualizing the degree, so you’re creating like an MA in peace studies if you’re interested in peace and in promoting that. And that’s really what you wanna study. You don’t wanna get an MA in political science, you wanna get an MA in peace studies. And I know that’s from a specific example, but yeah, what are–

Joe [09:19] – No, no, that’s exactly right though. To take it even a step further, one might wish to be a writer, but I think as we both know, there’s all types of writers out there. So what kind of writing do you wanna do? We have a student now who wants to do specific types of professional writing. And we can accommodate that because number one, we have faculty who can help design courses or work. We have courses that are being offered and other programs that students can take. And we also allow students to, and in fact, we demand that they learn how to design their own courses and write their own syllabi. And the thing is, is we demand of our students that they learn how to write a syllabus right at the beginning of the program so that they become familiar with not only, it’s so different when you do that, right? When you are in charge of writing the learning outcomes, the course description, coming up with the course materials, right?

Jasper [10:22] – Yeah, and determining the rubric that you’ll be graded by.

Joe [10:25] – Well, we do have common rubrics, but we also have them fill out a course schedule. We have them determine what kind of assessment they want to go through, because we have many students who self-identify as neurodivergent. And for some, doing, for instance, oral traditions, works more comfortably than doing written traditions. So, we allow them to have kind of mastery, not only of the what, but the how of their own learning. And so, in my mind, this is one of the most innovative programs that any, and this program has been around since the 1950s. So, you know, it’s not a new thing, but in this day and age, it’s so rare to see people having the freedom to design their own work. Now, having said that, that freedom does encompass a serious responsibility. And that responsibility isn’t about things that others are telling me, for instance, if I were a student, that I must do. Those things tend, in fact, to be slightly easier. It’s easier to just follow somebody else’s lead sometimes. It’s harder to say what I want, right? I’m in my, you know, seventh decade on this planet, and it’s still very difficult for me to say to myself, what do I really want out of this? I think we all face that.

Jasper [11:56] – Yeah.

Joe [11:57] – You know, what do I want out of this? You know, it’s a really difficult question.

Jasper [12:01] – No, that feels super relevant. And it feels like a degree where you’re forced to encounter that question and try to resolve it again and again, hopefully with somebody holding your hand, actually sets you up for the rest of life, perhaps better than a degree where you’re just, you’re given all of your outcomes and learning goals and everything else from the moment you step in the gates.

Joe [12:26] – It’s a radically different thing to say, what do I want to learn and how do I want to learn that? It does open up all kinds of freedoms, but we don’t make it necessarily easy, but we do help students along throughout that process.

Jasper [12:42] – Yeah, but difficulty is not the bad thing, necessarily, in education.

Joe [12:45] – No, no.

Jasper [12:47] – So within a self-designed degree, are students, first, they’re determining what they’re going to be studying and then they’re considering if they have prior learning assessment. Is that the order that this goes in?

Joe [13:00] – What we do is we have the students, first of all, they have to be able to transfer the credits in, because these count on their transcripts as transfer credits. Our programs are 36 credits. So if a student does prior learning, and let’s just use that hypothetical example, and Ottoman history, let’s just call it that, they bring in six credits through prior learning portfolios. Those six credits would have to appear in their degree plan. Now, they may appear as electives, and in some cases, that’s perfectly fine, because 36 credits gives us enough latitude that, yeah, we don’t need all 36 credits to apply toward Ottoman history. They may be in, I don’t know, sculpture, or they might be in something else, and they would just be treated as electives then.

Jasper [13:59] – Yeah, I love this example. I wonder if you could share with us some other examples of actual students who’ve applied prior learning credit towards their degrees.

Joe [14:08] – I’ll give one example that just comes to mind. A student who wanted to do something that isn’t ordinarily offered in school systems. She did a couple courses in one of our sex therapy programs, okay? And what she was interested in doing is working with K through 12 children on sex education. And the thing is, we have very poorly formed sex education programs in our school systems. And this is a problem she identified. Through her own experience in the world. And so she came to us to learn more about, not just sex therapy, which she got in some of her Antioch studies, but also about sex education. And so she did some individualized courses on how to do that, especially in today’s world. I don’t like that phrase, today’s world, but nevertheless, in a world where gender fluidity was not commonly thought of, it wasn’t ever addressed in the school systems, it certainly is being shuttered or is being shut down or silenced.

Jasper [15:26] – Yeah, we’re recording this in early 2025. So it’s an era where anything to do with trans identity is being villainized or strongly discouraged at the federal and many state levels.

Joe [15:39] – Right, so what many of our students end up doing is creating their own, not only degree programs, but we always ask them to figure out how to apply their learning. Okay, so now you’ve got a great theoretical construct here. Go do it. Go do it in the world.

Jasper [16:01] – Yeah, for real.

Joe [16:02] – Use this program to actually do this. That particular student works in a school system as a sex educator.

Jasper [16:11] – That’s great.

Joe [16:12] – Because she was able to convince school administrators of the need of her ability to deliver that. And she also got the concept from actually doing the work.

Jasper [16:25] – Yeah, so she had been doing work in schools and had realized there was this strong need. She came to the IMA. She said, “I’m going to create a program “that’s all about sex education, “exploring it from different angles, “finding people to work with “so that I can just laser focus on this.” And was she able to bring in her prior learning from being in the schools?

Joe [16:46] – Yes, I mean, her prior learning came from educational experiences, both as a mom and as a teacher. What we frequently lose track of in higher education is the power of self-reflection. Plato claims that knowledge is recollection. I entirely agree with that. So if you think about prior learning that way with us, is it’s sort of like taking your own life experience and learning how to reflect on that experience and then generate meaning out of that, write about it and document that experience. All of these prior learning assessments require documentation ’cause you have to show that you’ve met the learning.

Jasper [17:33] – Yeah.

Joe [17:34] – It’s not just telling people you’ve met it. There is a part for that. We call that the narrative, but it’s also showing them. So in your father’s case, if we could go back a step, he needed to be able to show people that he did GIS mapping. And many people don’t know what that is, but we would have to find an outside evaluator who did know what that is, right?

Jasper [17:59] – Yeah, so when he demonstrated his competency, there was someone qualified to say, “Yes, this is not BS, this is the real deal.”

Joe [18:07] – Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Jasper [18:08] – I wanted to pull out something you said. So you were giving this example of this woman who did sex education and you said she’d drawn from her work experiences, but also her experiences as a mother.

Joe [18:20] – Yeah. 

Jasper [18:22] – And I’m very interested in the ways that this practice of prior learning assessment, of documenting what we’ve learned and of eventually transforming it into something formally accepted by a university, by part of our system of higher education and giving you like a formal degree. I’m super interested in the way that you can take things from people’s lived experiences, but this like knowledge and learning that isn’t usually acknowledged or seen by higher education. Like being a mother, as a parent myself, I’ve been experiencing just how much you learn. And some of that is reading books and taking classes. And some of that is just lived experience, but there’s no like master’s degree in being a parent.

Joe [19:09] – Yeah. 

Jasper [19:10] – And so, yeah. Could you talk a little bit about the ways that this can–

Joe [19:13] – Yes, most adults pack in a lot of life experience, but what they don’t have is the ability to reflect on that experience and learn from it. That’s the power of this degree plan and it’s why it fits so well into the IMA. So through the prior learning process, what we tried to do is we try to first of all, identify what people know. What have you done that you think is graduate credit worthy? And in some cases, people don’t often recognize those things right away, but it may be the spaces you grew up in. It may be your experiences with your own family. It may be the experiences in your own neighborhood. To understand how, and remember I said at the beginning of this that I’m a socialist and I don’t disguise that from anybody. That’s just who I am. But what I have always fought for is equality. And what does that really mean? Well, it means fighting against those who are constantly repressing us. So you take a 30 year old adult who comes from a marginal position in life and you give them the ability to think about and radically critique their own life experience and begin to describe the ways in which they’ve experienced repression. Really powerful stuff comes out, really powerful.

Jasper [20:49] – And what you were saying about having students, asking them to think back on their own experiences in this prior learning process and reflect and take the chance to think about what the big moments of knowledge and transformation are in their past to figure out where the problem is that you wanna answer.

Joe [21:09] – And to come up with my own language for it, right? Some students favor oral traditions, some students favor dance traditions. We’ve had students who were dancers, several, who in fact, for their capstones would dance. And you can video capture that and they can describe what they’re doing. And all of a sudden you’ve got this deeper reflective piece and there are different schools of dance. There is a theoretical piece. All of this is graduate credit worthy, but what happens in higher ed is we mask what those practices are. And that’s because we like the idea that whoever’s instructing a course should have the upper hand. And my whole position on all of this is that not only am I a co-learner, I’m a learner. I wanna learn what the students know. I want their wisdom. It’s powerful to me to see their full re-humanization through the educational process. And we’ve got various models of self-actualization and so on and so forth. But I think that to really be your truest self and to be the most powerful human being you can be, you need to be able to do it. And somebody needs to be able to see, feel, hear, sense, and appreciate what that means. So that’s where I come from as an instructor is I wanna learn from you. 

Jasper [21:47] – That’s beautifully put, Joe. Yeah, I love that. And it makes me think like the individualized part also allows the instructor and the institution and just like society to learn about other places where maybe there should be effort being expended to learn about subjects. And I think about definitely the most famous graduate of the IMA, José Ramos-Horta, who graduated, I believe in the late ’80s. And I had the chance to profile him for the Antioch Alumni Magazine a couple of years back. And the very pocket history for listeners who don’t know is he’s the current president of Timor-Leste, the state that’s also known as East Timor. I got to learn about his studies in the IMA where he was able to identify some of his own advisors. So Noam Chomsky was one of his instructors. And reading his thesis, I was like, wait a second, I read his address when he won the Nobel Peace Prize. And it turns out he had laid out all of the ideas that he would later talk about in his Nobel address in his Antioch thesis in peace studies. And that to me just like spoke about how powerful it could be to give somebody the chance to study exactly what they wanna study. He didn’t wanna study political science. He wanted to study peace studies. I mean, you may have something to say about that, but I actually wanted to ask about the conflict resolution programs that you were telling me about when we spoke before. 

Joe [24:11] – In terms of the conflict resolution, it’s true that that’s one of the programs that came out of the IMA, which is kind of an incubator for different programs. Because what happens is you get a number of students who begin to study something and begin to unlock its potential. And soon enough, you’ve got enough of a mass of people that you can put together a program. So we had so many students in the IMA interested in peace studies that it eventually turned into a program that got the name of conflict resolution. And most of the students in the early mid ’90s came from South Africa. They were working on the truth and reconciliation commissions. So, you know, the IMA has always had this international component. It began in the 1950s as a correspondence program. They were doing classwork by letter writing, you know, in the 1950s. So it was always sort of pushing the boundaries of innovation back then. And that’s the value of the program. And that’s the value of giving people who push boundaries the freedom to realize the potential in pushing those boundaries. Amazing things come out of that. Again, we had several graduate programs that evolved out of that in the ’90s and 2000s.

Jasper [25:40] – Yeah, and maybe there are students pursuing individualized degrees today that will actually lead the way. And other people will say, “I wanna study that too.” And we could see it happen again.

Joe [25:51] – We had a number of students just a couple of years ago who were interested in studying psychedelics and the power of psychedelics at liberating human potential and overcoming all kinds of mental health constraints. And, you know, there’s still quite a bit of work to be done in that field. That’s one example of where the IMA students have led me into something that I might’ve known a little about, but it’s like a lot of work on doing research, on documenting, on finding mentors, on all kinds of things about learning about how to translate psychedelics into a mental health practice, for instance. And, you know, that doesn’t make them doctors. Nobody’s suggesting that, but it does give them kind of some degree of credentialing. They get a master’s in social science. They’re not getting an MD, so don’t worry if you’re hearing this and thinking, “Oh, wait a minute. “They’re certifying doctors in psychedelic drugs.” No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying they’re doing research on the power of psychedelics in a program of healing, mental health constraints, or mental illness in some cases.

Jasper [27:14] – They’re exploring it as an academic subject. Well, we’re almost out of time, and I wanted to ask you one last question, which was just to kind of expand on the idea of prior learning credits, prior learning assessment, and that education can really be tailored to each student in a way that is not just kind of like selfishly, you know, serves that student’s ego, but that challenges them to find what can propel them forward in their life. Do you see this spreading through society, or do you have hopes that it will?

Joe [27:51] – I don’t know about that. The people who undergo the kind of work in the IMA are rare individuals. It’s not for everybody, and I don’t think it would ever become for everybody because the kind of work you have to do isn’t the kind of work everybody is willing to put in necessarily. And of course, I mean to take nothing away from nursing programs or, you know, any other kind of psychology programs for clinical psychologists, et cetera, et cetera, you know, like those are all incredibly valuable in and of themselves. What I do think is important though is translating your life experience into the struggle for social justice, you know, because that’s what really each one of us needs to do. And what I find among the IMA is these are individuals who may not realize it yet, but these are leaders. These are people who want to take on more challenge. They want to not only challenge themselves, but challenge the world. What do I have to bring to the table to do something about it? That’s what I hope spreads out from the IMA, that we begin to plant the seed that each one of us is part of the solution if we choose to be, and we have to choose to be.

Jasper [29:13] – I love that. That’s a great place to end this conversation. Thank you so much, Joe, for coming on the podcast today.

Joe [29:19] – Thank you, Jasper. This was really, you’re a wonderful host, and I appreciate the fact that you’re doing this. Beautiful podcast, thank you.

Jasper [29:29] – You can learn more about the Individualized Master of Arts Program through its program page on Antioch’s website. We’ll include a link to that in our show notes. And I’m also going to link there to my profile of José Ramos-Horta, the IMA alum who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and who is currently serving as the president of Timor-Leste. I’m also going to link to a profile of a more recent IMA alum, Emma Lombardi. This is a really great piece of writing, and it explores how Emma used the IMA to reconnect with her indigenous roots. She now works as the Culture and Language Programs Manager for the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians Culture Department. And for anyone considering Individualized Study, I think both of these alumni profiles offer really interesting stories. To find these show notes, you can look beneath this episode, but we also post them on our website, theseedfield.org, where you can also find full episode transcripts, prior episodes, and more. The Seed Field Podcast is produced by Antioch University. Our editor is Nastasia Green. I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk. Jen Mont is our web content coordinator. Stefanie Paredes, Lauren Arienzale, Dani LaPointe, and Liza Wisner are our work study assistants. We received additional production help from Karen Hamilton, Melinda Garland, and Laurien Alexandre. Thank you for spending your time with us today. That’s it for this episode. We hope to see you next time. And don’t forget to plant a seed, sow a cause, and win a victory for humanity. From Antioch University, this has been The Seed Field Podcast.