REAL initiative

What is REAL?

REAL's mission is to answer how VCU can guarantee every student an academic experience that involves hands-on learning activities directly relevant to realizing their personal and professional goals.

To our students, its the university's promise to engage you in meaningful, hands-on work that builds both your professional and personal identity.

For our faculty and university professionals, it is a promise to support you as you create unique ways to provide these types of meaningful experiences for our students.

What REAL means in practice

REAL is not a hard reset, nor will it have a negative impact on the faculty, programs and projects already engaged in experiential learning. Instead, it’s an intentional organizing of the types of career-building and civic-minded activities that VCU already does well, providing an anchor for all the university's experiential education activities, including research, study abroad,service learning, practicum and internships.

In practice, REAL means:

• New or improved curricular elements to ensure adherence to best practices
• New or improved tracking of experiential learning across the institution
• Bringing an equity lens to experiential learning through information sharing and student exposure to tailored experiential learning opportunities

REAL does not:

• Increase student’s time to degree
• Increase student’s debt load

REAL types

A wide variety of academic activities qualify as a REAL experience, many of which already occur throughout the VCU curriculum:

Recent news

A collection of recent articles about REAL:

• Making reflection real: Hands-on workshop illustrates the importance of reflective pedagogy
• Experiential learning the focus of first-ever REAL poster session
• Lessons learned from the Feb. 28 REAL town hall
• Universitywide initiative to boost experience-based education gains momentum (VCU News)
• Making REAL progress: Group to guide experiential learning initiative holds first meeting
• Photo gallery from the Dec. 3 REAL Summit with Dr. Tia McNair