Doing, Contemplating, and Becoming

This is a particularly pragmatic time in America (which is saying something, since the nation has always prided itself on its pragmatism). In higher education this means a turn towards "education as doing." Whether it is service-learning, undergraduate research, or any of another dozen reforms, hands-on learning is the rage in the classroom.

The focus on doing shows up in mission statements and institutional goals as well. Westminster, like most other institutions of higher ed, has campus-wide and program-specific learning goals. Most of them promise that students will be able to do certain things upon graduation--think critically, for example.

Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that many more faculty members hope that their students will learn how to be "agents of social change" than who think that students ought to study the classics. The Chronicle article sets the debate up as one between "doing" and thinking, and then trots out the usual suspects to argue about whether the favor for social change is evidence of a leftward lean in higher education.

Who cares? The question isn't about the politics of doing in education, but instead its goals. After all, conservative institutions and liberal ones both try to distinguish themselves by highlighting how well their students do things.

This talk by Barry Schwartz on practical wisdom, and this article by David Loy on the intersection of social change and personal development, make the same point--that our mistake is to assume that you can either learn to do something or you can learn about it. Instead doing and contemplation have to go together. When they do, the result is competent people who are also good--moral, humble, brave, wise. Otherwise we develop either technocrats or narcissists. We've enough of both.

Rating Open Learning Sites

Bryce Bunting's comment on my last post asked about the potential impact of open-learning sites for faculty roles and the traditional practices of higher education. There are few more important questions out there right now. The economy and the shortcomings of higher ed make it seem like colleges and universities 20 years in the future may be radically different than they are today. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, though there are no guarantees that higher ed will be better--it could become much worse at supporting the sorts of learning that lead to economic well-being, civic engagement, and an ability to face up to the big questions of life.)

If open learning sites are going to be significant players in remaking higher ed, it seems they would need to have four characteristics:

1. A wide range of content, put together in useful chunks. (A whole semester's course in one file--too much. One primary document--too little.)
2. A structure that makes the site easily searchable, and useful for the expected audience. Faculty want different things than students from sites like these. Faculty may want to select content to spur conversation; students to provide answers to questions. (At least if the use of current online resources is any guide.)
3. An acknowledgment that much of the learning that takes place in higher ed happens outside of the formal curriculum. The sites need to be amenable to use by staff and administrators, and the content needs to be separable from individual courses.
   
4. The potential for change. Do the mission, content, and organization of the site support active learning? Does the site attend to the ways that learning takes place out of class? Is it possible to craft new approaches to the curriculum, or to the whole institution from the site? If so, then they have a high potential for change. If not, then they are nothing more than online versions of textbooks--a good thing to be sure, but not great.

Over the next few weeks I'll be rating open learning sites. If you know of some that you would like to have me look at, or even better, if you'd like to rate some yourself, let me know.

Front-loading faculty work

In a recent exchange on the value of on-line repositories of learning modules (like MIT's OpenCourseWare or Rice's Connexions) Michael Bassis, Westminster's President wrote that were he teaching sociology, he would use these sites as a source of content, so that he could use more of his time to facilitate learning, especially by mentoring students.

His ideas got me thinking about how regular use of sites like this would change faculty roles, and what could be done to the structure of higher ed to make possible those sorts of changes (and the improvement of learning that they promise).

I'm particularly interested in the structural changes that would make all sorts of active learning more likely, not just the use of digital repositories. It occurs to me that many of these reforms (service-learning, problem-based learning, learning communities, building a course from a digital repository) shift a substantial amount of faculty work from during the semester to before the semester begins. You have to build partnerships, design complex problems, mesh syllabi, discover the electronic resources well before the first day of class.

If it is true that active learning requires much more advanced preparation, then one thing higher ed could do is change the calendar, so that faculty are present on campus for a month before fall semester begins (not three days as is the case at Westminster), and that they have a month between the end of fall and the beginning of winter semester. Anything less means that faculty exploring active learning methods are doing it on the fly, and that they are tempted to fall back into lecture/discussion at the the first sign of real difficulty.

Defending the classroom: thinking and passion

A friend and former student Derek Bitter posted a comment to my previous thoughts on the classroom. He is a serious reader, and a grad student at St. John's College, one of the few places in America whose curriculum focuses on close reading and discussion of the Canon. In response to my question about defending the classroom he wrote:

Many of these educational reforms, or additions is really what they are, will teach students to do certain things. And so I think what needs to be defended about the classroom is that it is a place, but not the only one or the main one, where students are taught to think. Not about anything specific, but just to think. Whether or not this happens is another topic, but classrooms should be seen as a place where students learn to think and find that it is a worthwhile thing to do.

I love this defense of the value of thinking in the classroom. I'm particularly taken with its unadorned praise of thinking--not "critical thinking" or "integrative thinking," just thinking. (This is not to say that all education ought to be about thinking, just that there ought to be a place whose purpose is to do that.)

Another part of the classroom that deserves defense is the way that it can be home to what Westminster calls in its Core Values "Impassioned Teaching." In my experience, teaching that includes passion (or learning provoked by it) can flourish in the classroom, where the power of ideas and personality get focused. I've done a lot of "supporting learning" in my day--service-learning, problem-based learning, student-led discussions, etc. But the place where passion joins them is in the classroom, where eloquence can join wisdom and result in something inspired. (Which is something that, for all their virtues, most educational reforms can't produce.)

Defending the classroom

I've just returned from the Association of American Colleges and Universities annual conference in Seattle. As usual it was a good conference, filled with people making earnest efforts to improve American higher education. I was struck, though, at how many of the presentations (including mine) were about ways of improving education that have very little to do with what goes on in the classroom.

It isn't an earth-shattering realization to note that lots of the big reforms in higher ed are targeted somewhere beyond the classroom. Learning communities focus on structure, service-learning on outside-of-class activities, undergraduate research on work in labs and libraries. All of these things have implications for the classroom, but they make those implications indirectly, sort of like tending your garden by making sure your nursery carries better seeds.

Why is this? I'm not one to say that the classroom is simply an artifact of industrial-style education that ought to be pitched out. But at the same time many of the justifications of the classroom that jump immediately to mind are really about efficiency--in delivering content, encouraging conversations, even establishing spatial relations between people. As such, they are defenses of a vision of education that no longer persuades me. (Se John Tagg's The Learning Paradigm College for a strong critique of the industrial model.)

Certainly the classroom will continue far into the future, given the thousands of schools that have it as their central design feature. So it seems worth the effort to craft a defense of the classroom, especially one that goes beyond ease of content delivery. What is it about the classroom that ought to be defended? And how can that defense be used to improve learning?

One place to start is with the physical space itself. Nearly every major religion sets aside certain spaces for ritual activities. In many ways the classroom plays that role for education--it is (or at least could be) a place for communion between people seeking learning. A professor at Naropa University told me how at the beginning of each semester she sweeps her classroom, carefully arranges its chairs in a circle, leaves a gift for each student on his/her seat, and then invites the students to enter the room and begin the class. The idea is to define the classroom as a place set aside for learning, much like a chapel is a place set aside for worship. Not a bad idea, especially if one of your goals is to make the classroom seem like something other than an education factory...

Nudge

I just finished another book that (mostly) isn't about education but which has important implications for higher ed. The book is Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler.

Sunstein and Thaler start by drawing a distinction between Econs--the ideal human being who appears only in economic theory--and Humans--real people. Humans tend to make a lot of decisions that aren't in their best interests because they don't fully understand the implications, or they used outmoded heuristics, or because the decision systems available to them don't help.

S and T propose a regime of "libertarian paternalism" to help these people while not diminshing their freedom (much). Libertarian paternalism relies on "nudges" to encourage people to make good decisions without forcing them to do so. And one of the most important nudges is to set up the default option in any complex decision process so that it does good for the decider.

For example, a surprisingly high proportion of people fail to sign up for retirement plans at work, even though the employer contributes the bulk of the money to it. S and T suggest that to get past this problem, the default ought to be to sign all employees up for a plan that invests retirement funds into a balanced portfolio. People are absolutely free to opt out, but if they don't they will--lo and behold--be saving money for retirement.

Colleges and universities, by and large, are places where both libertarianism and paternalism exist in a quiet but consequential state of war (in part because they assume that students are simultaneously Econs and Infants.) The libertarian part of a campus might tell students that they are welcome to sign up for whatever classes they wish (after all, we don't want to act like their parents, do we?). But after a period of libertarianism, the students run up against paternalism--the requirement, for example, that students must have an exact mix of courses from the right disciplines and with the right number of credit hours in order to graduate. The result is that college students take far longer than necessary to graduate, costing them thousands of dollars in excess tuition not to mention the opportunity cost of being in school instead of the workforce.

A libertarian paternalist approach to this problem would ensure that students are automatically enrolled in courses that will get them to their desired goal (a degree in history, for example) in an educationally sound and efficient manner. If they wish to diverge from that path, they are welcome to without penalty. All they have to do is meet with an advisor and make the change.

The result would be both a smoother, more integrated educational experience and more frequent contact between students and advisors--both good outcomes.

(S and T, by the way, have asked people to compile their favorite nudges. To do so just go to www.nudges.org)

The Big Questions in Higher Education

Peter Ingle posted another great comment, this one on the "common and custom" post from a couple of weeks ago. Here it is:

Gary, I think what we know about learning is up in the air. We have data that says we need to meet individual needs. We have data that says social learning is best. We have data that says students prefer to progress at their own rate. So what we "know" about learning can fit these 2 platforms, and others. My 2 cents...

Peter is right of course. Too often I and others in higher ed talk like we know how to bring about learning. The challenge is implementation, but the end is clear, well-defined, and easily explained, we imply. (Of course this is a bugaboo for K-12 folks also, where set curricula and standardized exams subsume the question of what learning is into a debate about which test is best.) But Peter instead asks us to consider what learning actually is.

He has made me wonder what the other big questions are in higher ed--the ones that we ought always to think about because they are too important to assume that we already know the answer. So, here are a few "big questions", at least in my mind:

• What is learning?
• What does attending school add to learning? What does it take away from learning?
• How does an educator think about the needs/desires/interests of individuals versus the needs/desires/interests of groups, especially those groups larger than the class?

What are the other big questions?