Addressing the Hunger for Experiential Education and the Financial Literacy Deficit: An Application of Community Engaged Learning

The Inspirational Paradigm for Jesuit Business Education (IAJU, 2020) is an educational model that inspires students to be champions of human development and to prepare them to lead in a more inclusive and just world. Experience-based learning is identified as one of the “hungers” or “desires” that Jesuit business schools aim to cultivate in their students. This paper illustrates an application of experiential-based learning via a community engaged learning (CEL) project that was centered on financial literacy. The project, embedded in an Economics class, enabled over 20 Seattle University students understand and disseminate financial literacy knowledge within their local community. The tenets of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP) viz., context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation guided the design of the CEL activity.