ABSTRACT
This chapter can be thought of as the record of a conversation between three educators: a professor, a doctoral candidate, and an administrator—all deeply interested in the transformational power of a college education on the students who experience it and all three working at the same institution of higher learning. We are regularly involved in undergraduate teaching, research on the impact that student–faculty interaction and the choice of pedagogies have on what and how learning takes place, and service to our communities beyond our work in the classroom. The conversation recorded on these pages began a few years before we focused our attention on the HERI data that is the subject of our present discussion. In each aspect of our professional lives (teaching, research, and service) we had the clear sense that, as one of our colleagues said, “there’s a lot of human flourishing happening around here.” What was not clear to us was whether or not this human flourishing could be quantified in terms of student learning outcomes. Borrowing an archeological metaphor used by others for research methods, we came to understand that our flashlights pointed in the right direction but we needed tools with which to dig. Then came the HERI data and we were handed our shovels and began our excavation.
