The National Campus Voter Registration Project is an effort of 50 leading higher education organizations to increase voter registration and turnout among college students. Its slogan? Your Vote, Your Voice.
While it is a lovely slogan, it is exactly not true that "your voice is your vote." Your voice is your voice. Your vote is something else.
Here is what I mean. A voice is communicative. It expresses emotion, nuance, depth, and meaning. It can be used to build relationships, to extend discussions, and to solve problems. In a democracy, these things are hallmarks of civic engagement.
A vote is mute, in three ways. First, it is mute in its casting. The voting hall is politically silent--no signs, no speeches, no posters. And the voting booth is as well, since the main characteristic of the vote in the United States is secrecy--"the secret ballot."
Second, it is mute in its impact. Unless a voter decides to declare his or her vote, it is unknown. And even if it is known, a vote in itself is powerless. Voting isn't a race, with the first candidate past a certain number of votes declared the winner. And in our system, even tightly contested elections are almost never determined by a single vote, and when they are, no one knows whose vote.
Third, a vote hides meaning. The process of voting for a candidate is one of condensing a whole range of a voter's views, feelings, priorities, interests, and values into a single act that conveys none of them. Think about it this way. Does knowing that a person voted for a particular candidate help you know that person more deeply? Of course not, since what matters in knowing a person is not who they voted for, but why. Living in a state like Utah, I am confident that the vast majority of my neighbors will be voting for Mitt Romney. That tells me nothing about them, and does nothing to help us work together for good.
None of this is to say that voting is bad, or useless. Voting is a ritual, its silence is something that should be applauded, and the sense of duty that often drives it is a valuable thing in a democracy. And the overall uncertainty about the future that is bound up in the vote--uncertainty about the outcome of the election and its impact--is an important reminder of how modest we should be about predicting the future.
Nor is it to say that a voice is always a good thing. One need only recall all of the pointless "debate" and misleading rhetoric to know that. But only if after one takes the mute act of voting, one goes into public and private venues and explains that vote, does the vote do something for civil society. And at that point, it does so because of the voice, not the vote.
Showing posts with label student engagement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label student engagement. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Third phase civic engagement and the mission of American higher education
Let me argue that we have entered a third phase of campus civic engagement, one which most campuses are unprepared to face.
Though nearly every type of college or university in the US was born with a civic mission, by the late 1950s, many had abandoned that mission for narrower, more private ones.
Phase one civic engagement emerged with the campus-based rebellions of the late 60s and early 70s. It grew out of a critique of the higher education of the 1950s. That critique argued that colleges and universities were irrelevant unless they escaped the thrall of the powerful and reactionary. Instead, they should be sources for the creation of a just, egalitarian society. Though phase one grew out of student rebellion, its main supporters were faculty, who through the 70s and 80s built the intellectual apparatus that supports civic engagement--fields of research dedicated to understanding and overturning oppression and pedagogy that favors active or experiential learning.
Phase two adopted the pedagogy and theory of phase one, and adapted it to the civic landscape of the late 80s and 90s. Its thrust was institutional, and its goal was to build an infrastructure--centers, journals, conferences, and organizations--to embed service-learning and civic engagement into the life of the college. If phase one had been built on faculty members' desires to bring about radical change in politics, phase two grew out of staff and administrator desires to change students, who in the narrative of phase two civic engagement tended to be traditional full-time students who were disengaged from civic life and from learning. Service-learning thus became a tool to get students engage in learning by engaging in the community. Community leaders, who might have blanched at the theoretical radicalism of phase one, found phase two to be wonderful--a source of volunteers, project-doers, supporters of non-profits, and future interns, employees, and citizens.
Most campuses continue to practice a blend of phase one and phase two civic engagement. Faculty continue to push civic engagement as a tool for political change, staff and administrators continue to see civic engagement as a tool for learning through community-building, and the apparatus that supports these efforts continues.
But while campuses have settled in, students have changed radically. The proportion of traditional college students--full-time 18-24 year olds living on or near campus and away from their families--is in decline. So, too, is support for traditional approaches to higher education--approaches which seem to cost too much and lead to too few graduates. In their place is emerging a new civic context which colleges and universities ought to attend. Among the characteristics of the new civic context that matter for higher ed are the following:
But the more important question is not practical, and it does not have to do with students, but with institutional mission. If students are richly engaged in communities and only sporadically engaged in college life, and if this trend will continue into the future, how can colleges and universities make use of those changes to fulfill their own civic missions?
Though nearly every type of college or university in the US was born with a civic mission, by the late 1950s, many had abandoned that mission for narrower, more private ones.
Phase one civic engagement emerged with the campus-based rebellions of the late 60s and early 70s. It grew out of a critique of the higher education of the 1950s. That critique argued that colleges and universities were irrelevant unless they escaped the thrall of the powerful and reactionary. Instead, they should be sources for the creation of a just, egalitarian society. Though phase one grew out of student rebellion, its main supporters were faculty, who through the 70s and 80s built the intellectual apparatus that supports civic engagement--fields of research dedicated to understanding and overturning oppression and pedagogy that favors active or experiential learning.
Phase two adopted the pedagogy and theory of phase one, and adapted it to the civic landscape of the late 80s and 90s. Its thrust was institutional, and its goal was to build an infrastructure--centers, journals, conferences, and organizations--to embed service-learning and civic engagement into the life of the college. If phase one had been built on faculty members' desires to bring about radical change in politics, phase two grew out of staff and administrator desires to change students, who in the narrative of phase two civic engagement tended to be traditional full-time students who were disengaged from civic life and from learning. Service-learning thus became a tool to get students engage in learning by engaging in the community. Community leaders, who might have blanched at the theoretical radicalism of phase one, found phase two to be wonderful--a source of volunteers, project-doers, supporters of non-profits, and future interns, employees, and citizens.
Most campuses continue to practice a blend of phase one and phase two civic engagement. Faculty continue to push civic engagement as a tool for political change, staff and administrators continue to see civic engagement as a tool for learning through community-building, and the apparatus that supports these efforts continues.
But while campuses have settled in, students have changed radically. The proportion of traditional college students--full-time 18-24 year olds living on or near campus and away from their families--is in decline. So, too, is support for traditional approaches to higher education--approaches which seem to cost too much and lead to too few graduates. In their place is emerging a new civic context which colleges and universities ought to attend. Among the characteristics of the new civic context that matter for higher ed are the following:
- Student demographics have changed radically. There are more students of color, more low-income students, more first-generation students, more returning students--in short, more "non-traditional" students than ever before.
- These students are not disengaged from "the community" to use the language of phase two civic engagement. Instead, they have never left the community. Many live at home, and work, and have families, and maintain powerful civic and community commitments.
- These students do not have the time or habits of using phase two's infrastructures. They are often on campus long after the Center for Civic Engagement has closed, or they are rushing from class to work, without time to stop at the service project. In fact, group work, partnership building, and the rest of the pedagogical apparatus of active learning is a headache for them because they do not own their time. Learning takes place online as much as in the classroom, and reflection is a natural habit, one supported by facebook, instagram, tumblr, and twitter.
- These students are impatient with the radical politics of phase one, and with the traditional civic engagement efforts of phase two. The distinctions between school, work, community, and family life don't work for them, since those things do not fall into neat silos in their day-to-day lives.
- Instead, today's students are pragmatic. They will join coalitions with anyone. They are all leaders comfortable in leaderless efforts. They favor social entrepreneurship over traditional non-profit work, and boycotts, protests, petitions, marches, and occupations over voting and political parties.
But the more important question is not practical, and it does not have to do with students, but with institutional mission. If students are richly engaged in communities and only sporadically engaged in college life, and if this trend will continue into the future, how can colleges and universities make use of those changes to fulfill their own civic missions?
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Campuses and congregations; friendship and learning
Given the implications of his findings, you might think that the student engagement world would have given Robert Putnam's recent work on friendship and religious congregations some attention. In it, Putman and his co-author Chaeyoon Lim find that the more friends an active member of a religious congregation has in the congregation, the happier that person is. Neither the number of non-church friends a religious person has, nor that person's religiosity have the same effect on the person's sense of well-being. For this reason Putnam's advice to religious leaders is to pay more attention to church suppers than to the sermons offered before those suppers.
Putnam and Lim do not offer a hypothesis for why church friendships are "super-charged friendships" for actively religious people. But it would be simple to theorize two explanations: friendships cement one's feeling that one's chosen religious setting is the right one' and friendship reinforces the teaching in all major religions that loving relationships between humans exemplify the loving relationship between humans and their gods. These theories also explain why friendships and religious practice have much less influence on well-being for people who are only moderately religious.
I read about Putnam's study the same day I got a series of texts from one of my daughters saying how lonely she is at college. For her, the absence of meaningful friendships exacerbates the uncertainty she feels about her majors, the goals of her education, or the course of her future life. When you are uncertain about the path ahead and feel like you have few friends, loneliness is an impediment to learning.
Colleges and universities talk frequently about the interaction between people in different roles, but we pay almost no attention to the connections between friendship and learning. We tout, for example, small class sizes, the student/faculty ratio, research assistantships, group work, learning communities, as if interaction leads to learning and well-being. But interaction and friendship are not the same thing. Interactions are exchanges in one form or another--faculty member X shares information with student Y, who uses it in her research. But friendships are characterized not by interactions but by a certain sort of emotional connection--common interests, empathy, patience, humility, unguardedness, forgiveness.
We know relatively little about how those emotional connections relate to learning and well-being. But Putnam's study suggests that we ought to care. For there are meaningful relationships between being in the "right" place, friendship, and well-being. For educators who are concerned about retention, student engagement, learning, the discovery of vocation, and the creation of meaning in the lives of students, the question of how to identify, foster, and prolong friendships ought to be an important question indeed.
Putnam and Lim do not offer a hypothesis for why church friendships are "super-charged friendships" for actively religious people. But it would be simple to theorize two explanations: friendships cement one's feeling that one's chosen religious setting is the right one' and friendship reinforces the teaching in all major religions that loving relationships between humans exemplify the loving relationship between humans and their gods. These theories also explain why friendships and religious practice have much less influence on well-being for people who are only moderately religious.
I read about Putnam's study the same day I got a series of texts from one of my daughters saying how lonely she is at college. For her, the absence of meaningful friendships exacerbates the uncertainty she feels about her majors, the goals of her education, or the course of her future life. When you are uncertain about the path ahead and feel like you have few friends, loneliness is an impediment to learning.
Colleges and universities talk frequently about the interaction between people in different roles, but we pay almost no attention to the connections between friendship and learning. We tout, for example, small class sizes, the student/faculty ratio, research assistantships, group work, learning communities, as if interaction leads to learning and well-being. But interaction and friendship are not the same thing. Interactions are exchanges in one form or another--faculty member X shares information with student Y, who uses it in her research. But friendships are characterized not by interactions but by a certain sort of emotional connection--common interests, empathy, patience, humility, unguardedness, forgiveness.
We know relatively little about how those emotional connections relate to learning and well-being. But Putnam's study suggests that we ought to care. For there are meaningful relationships between being in the "right" place, friendship, and well-being. For educators who are concerned about retention, student engagement, learning, the discovery of vocation, and the creation of meaning in the lives of students, the question of how to identify, foster, and prolong friendships ought to be an important question indeed.
Friday, July 15, 2011
The role of consultants and vendors in enrollment management
One of the major differences between enrollment management and other parts of colleges is that enrollment management relies heavily on consultants and vendors to do its work. We develop prospects with help from one vendor, analyze data with another, use a third to develop our publications, and employ several others for smaller parts of our work. Consultants help shape our strategy, test our messages, and improve our workflow. And a great enrollment management consultant, Ian Symmonds, is my guide and mentor as I learn my way into this work.
None of this should be surprising. Enrollment management is a results-driven business that relies heavily on data to make decisions. And it is a business that has changed rapidly in the last 20 years. That change has made space in the market for businesses with specific expertise. And if those businesses can demonstrate return on investment, then it makes sense to contract with them, rather than expanding the college's fixed costs by hiring full-time employees to do that work.
One surprising thing about the field, though, is that consultants and vendors are also the source of most of the research about recruiting, admitting, funding, and enrolling students. Compare data about enrollment management with data about the next step in the student's experience--the freshman year--to see the distinction. Data about the views of freshmen comes out of the higher education research institute at UCLA. The epicenter of ideas about curriculum and retention in the first year is the first-year experience project at the University of South Carolina. And learning about the first-year emerges from peer-reviewed journals and academic conferences.
By contrast, summaries of research in enrollment management are more frequently compiled by vendors, as in the case of this report put out by Noel-Levitz. The best-known experts in the field are consultants, be it Symmonds or George Dehne. And the list-servs, best practices, and conferences are sponsored by companies who sell products and services to colleges and universities.
There are several reasons that this is the case. Enrollment management as currently practiced is new--perhaps only 20 years old. Therefore graduate programs that produce researchers in other fields haven't grown up yet in enrollment management. The rapid change in the field makes it possible for individuals or small consultancies to gather and distribute meaningful data. The competitiveness of the field, with dozens of colleges battling for top students makes practitioners less willing to share information among themselves. And the nature of enrollment management--as practice more than discipline or skill--means that campus-based professionals aren't situated in a position to make the sort of generalizations that are the basis of academic research elsewhere in higher ed.
One wonders what this means for the future of enrollment management. Will it eventually become an academic discipline with its own literature, faculty, etc.? Or will it leave the university entirely, and become an outsourced service in the way that food service, bookstores, and security are now?
None of this should be surprising. Enrollment management is a results-driven business that relies heavily on data to make decisions. And it is a business that has changed rapidly in the last 20 years. That change has made space in the market for businesses with specific expertise. And if those businesses can demonstrate return on investment, then it makes sense to contract with them, rather than expanding the college's fixed costs by hiring full-time employees to do that work.
One surprising thing about the field, though, is that consultants and vendors are also the source of most of the research about recruiting, admitting, funding, and enrolling students. Compare data about enrollment management with data about the next step in the student's experience--the freshman year--to see the distinction. Data about the views of freshmen comes out of the higher education research institute at UCLA. The epicenter of ideas about curriculum and retention in the first year is the first-year experience project at the University of South Carolina. And learning about the first-year emerges from peer-reviewed journals and academic conferences.
By contrast, summaries of research in enrollment management are more frequently compiled by vendors, as in the case of this report put out by Noel-Levitz. The best-known experts in the field are consultants, be it Symmonds or George Dehne. And the list-servs, best practices, and conferences are sponsored by companies who sell products and services to colleges and universities.
There are several reasons that this is the case. Enrollment management as currently practiced is new--perhaps only 20 years old. Therefore graduate programs that produce researchers in other fields haven't grown up yet in enrollment management. The rapid change in the field makes it possible for individuals or small consultancies to gather and distribute meaningful data. The competitiveness of the field, with dozens of colleges battling for top students makes practitioners less willing to share information among themselves. And the nature of enrollment management--as practice more than discipline or skill--means that campus-based professionals aren't situated in a position to make the sort of generalizations that are the basis of academic research elsewhere in higher ed.
One wonders what this means for the future of enrollment management. Will it eventually become an academic discipline with its own literature, faculty, etc.? Or will it leave the university entirely, and become an outsourced service in the way that food service, bookstores, and security are now?
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
In Praise of Business Education
These are, we are told, dark days for business education. The economic downturn has been laid at the feet of business schools too caught up in teaching theory to inculcate ethics. Employers complain that business schools fail to provide them with students who can complete the most basic tasks--writing clearly, speaking well, working with others. And most recently, business schools are bearing the brunt of the criticism growing out of Academically Adrift, which suggests that standards are low, teaching is poor, students are unmotivated, and that business fields have become the major of last resort for students hoping to slip through college without troubling themselves to learn.
As a historian serving for this year as the Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business at Westminster College, I have three responses to these complaints:
First, at least during my entire education career, business schools have been magnets for these sorts of complaints. My fellow history majors looked down their noses at business school students who just wanted to get through and get paid. Later, when I became a faculty member, my colleagues and I looked with jealousy at the big salaries paid to business school faculty and graduates. And we complained in the halls about the business students in our general education classes who could not find a passion for important things like the social history of British colonies in the Americas.
Second, many of the supposed faults of business schools--large classes, lecture-oriented teaching, disengaged students, shrinking amounts of homework--were not pioneered by business schools. Instead they are the creation of colleges and universities enamored of what John Tagg calls "the instruction paradigm"--an approach to education that focuses entirely on educational efficiency, or in other words, getting as many students as possible into and out of classes. Sir Ken Robinson's recent speech (made into a video that has gone viral) is only the latest demonstration of the soul-killing futility of such a model of schooling.
Third, these criticisms of business schools miss both the innovations in business education that are now leading change in higher education, and the new generation of business students who are transforming the goals and curricula of business schools across the United States.
Let me start with business students. While there are certainly students who have selected business because it is an "easy" major (in the same way that students fall into other "easy" majors--sociology, english, history--pick your favorite) the business students I have met at Westminster tend to be ambitious, focused, and intent on improving the world they find themselves in. Fifteen years ago when I started leading civic engagement efforts on college campuses, I was most likely to attract students from the social sciences. Today, those students come from business. They have discovered the transformational power of social entrepreneurship, they understand the way that the world is a complex system, and they believe that business fields are the ones best prepared to empower them (and their fellow-citizens) to respond to the economic, environmental, and educational crises before us.
Nor are all business students upper-middle class white kids intent on maintaining their status through high-paying jobs. Business is a field that attracts non-traditional students, first-generation college attenders, students of color, and others who are looking for a way to craft better lives for themselves.
In business schools that are paying attention to changes in education and the business world, those students are met with curricula and pedagogy that are as good or better than that found anywhere else in the university. Here is what I mean:
Outcomes--Many academic programs are designed around classes and then, almost as an afterthought, they add desired outcomes. Many business programs are designed with the outcomes in mind, and then the learning experiences are built to lead students to those outcomes. In the Gore School, our MBA was built after long conversations with alumni and local business leaders led us to agree on a set of outcomes. Then the courses were built to add up to those outcomes. The result is a curriculum that reinforces itself, where every class adds to student understanding of a range of topics, not just a single subject. When we have learned about gaps in student performance, as with writing a few years ago, we have adjusted the curriculum to respond.
More radically, in recent years we have created two project-based programs, where rather than taking courses, students work through a series of projects. Those projects lead them to the outcomes. The programs are competency-based. That is, students graduate when they can demonstrate competency in all of the program areas. No competency, no graduation. The result is programs where students can demonstrate their business acumen, not just demonstrate that they have taken courses on business topics.
Pedagogy--While many business (and non-business) schools use traditional lectures as their teaching method, more and more of them, including Westminster, focus on teaching that leads to learning. By this I mean that our courses require students to get a hands-on learning experience. They work through cases, do live consulting projects, build businesses, serve internships, and solve real-world problems. They can do this because their faculty are both academically qualified and experienced in the business world. Our students may not be able to rattle off complex formulae or theories at the drop of a hat. But all of them graduate with real experience in the business world.
Relationships--While it is not the case that small class sizes guarantee excellent learning, at Westminster we have been able to use small class sizes to build strong relationships among students and between students and faculty. The result is a learning environment where no student can hide, and where no student is ignored. This is good educational practice, to be sure. But it is also good business practice. In a work world where more and more jobs require people to work in teams, to respond to complex problems, and to innovate rather than replicate what has been done in the past, an education focused on ensuring both support and accountability is essential.
I do not mean to suggest that Westminster, or any business school, has "solved" the problem of business education. Nor do I mean to suggest that all of the critiques of business schools and business students are wrong. But I do think that the sort of education that good business schools provide their students is the sort of education that all students need. The proof, perhaps, is in the results. Last year, accountants with a Westminster undergraduate business degree passed the CPA exam at higher rates than students from any other school in Utah. Westminster's D.A. Davidson investment team consistently is one of the top five in the US at making gains in the stock market. And for the past two years, Gore School of Business seniors have significantly outperformed expectations on the CLA--the very assessment tool which has sparked the furor about business education in Academically Adrift.
These are small things all. And the number of students participating in each is too small to generalize about all Gore School of Business students as a whole. But at the very least they suggest that not all business education is broken. In fact, it may be very good indeed.
As a historian serving for this year as the Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business at Westminster College, I have three responses to these complaints:
First, at least during my entire education career, business schools have been magnets for these sorts of complaints. My fellow history majors looked down their noses at business school students who just wanted to get through and get paid. Later, when I became a faculty member, my colleagues and I looked with jealousy at the big salaries paid to business school faculty and graduates. And we complained in the halls about the business students in our general education classes who could not find a passion for important things like the social history of British colonies in the Americas.
Second, many of the supposed faults of business schools--large classes, lecture-oriented teaching, disengaged students, shrinking amounts of homework--were not pioneered by business schools. Instead they are the creation of colleges and universities enamored of what John Tagg calls "the instruction paradigm"--an approach to education that focuses entirely on educational efficiency, or in other words, getting as many students as possible into and out of classes. Sir Ken Robinson's recent speech (made into a video that has gone viral) is only the latest demonstration of the soul-killing futility of such a model of schooling.
Third, these criticisms of business schools miss both the innovations in business education that are now leading change in higher education, and the new generation of business students who are transforming the goals and curricula of business schools across the United States.
Let me start with business students. While there are certainly students who have selected business because it is an "easy" major (in the same way that students fall into other "easy" majors--sociology, english, history--pick your favorite) the business students I have met at Westminster tend to be ambitious, focused, and intent on improving the world they find themselves in. Fifteen years ago when I started leading civic engagement efforts on college campuses, I was most likely to attract students from the social sciences. Today, those students come from business. They have discovered the transformational power of social entrepreneurship, they understand the way that the world is a complex system, and they believe that business fields are the ones best prepared to empower them (and their fellow-citizens) to respond to the economic, environmental, and educational crises before us.
Nor are all business students upper-middle class white kids intent on maintaining their status through high-paying jobs. Business is a field that attracts non-traditional students, first-generation college attenders, students of color, and others who are looking for a way to craft better lives for themselves.
In business schools that are paying attention to changes in education and the business world, those students are met with curricula and pedagogy that are as good or better than that found anywhere else in the university. Here is what I mean:
Outcomes--Many academic programs are designed around classes and then, almost as an afterthought, they add desired outcomes. Many business programs are designed with the outcomes in mind, and then the learning experiences are built to lead students to those outcomes. In the Gore School, our MBA was built after long conversations with alumni and local business leaders led us to agree on a set of outcomes. Then the courses were built to add up to those outcomes. The result is a curriculum that reinforces itself, where every class adds to student understanding of a range of topics, not just a single subject. When we have learned about gaps in student performance, as with writing a few years ago, we have adjusted the curriculum to respond.
More radically, in recent years we have created two project-based programs, where rather than taking courses, students work through a series of projects. Those projects lead them to the outcomes. The programs are competency-based. That is, students graduate when they can demonstrate competency in all of the program areas. No competency, no graduation. The result is programs where students can demonstrate their business acumen, not just demonstrate that they have taken courses on business topics.
Pedagogy--While many business (and non-business) schools use traditional lectures as their teaching method, more and more of them, including Westminster, focus on teaching that leads to learning. By this I mean that our courses require students to get a hands-on learning experience. They work through cases, do live consulting projects, build businesses, serve internships, and solve real-world problems. They can do this because their faculty are both academically qualified and experienced in the business world. Our students may not be able to rattle off complex formulae or theories at the drop of a hat. But all of them graduate with real experience in the business world.
Relationships--While it is not the case that small class sizes guarantee excellent learning, at Westminster we have been able to use small class sizes to build strong relationships among students and between students and faculty. The result is a learning environment where no student can hide, and where no student is ignored. This is good educational practice, to be sure. But it is also good business practice. In a work world where more and more jobs require people to work in teams, to respond to complex problems, and to innovate rather than replicate what has been done in the past, an education focused on ensuring both support and accountability is essential.
I do not mean to suggest that Westminster, or any business school, has "solved" the problem of business education. Nor do I mean to suggest that all of the critiques of business schools and business students are wrong. But I do think that the sort of education that good business schools provide their students is the sort of education that all students need. The proof, perhaps, is in the results. Last year, accountants with a Westminster undergraduate business degree passed the CPA exam at higher rates than students from any other school in Utah. Westminster's D.A. Davidson investment team consistently is one of the top five in the US at making gains in the stock market. And for the past two years, Gore School of Business seniors have significantly outperformed expectations on the CLA--the very assessment tool which has sparked the furor about business education in Academically Adrift.
These are small things all. And the number of students participating in each is too small to generalize about all Gore School of Business students as a whole. But at the very least they suggest that not all business education is broken. In fact, it may be very good indeed.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Which exceptional students get our attention? Which deserve it? Why?
As Dean I met two types of students--super-achievers who because of their grades, or their interests or their insights have become prominent, and struggling students who because of their grades or their challenges have become prominent. Both groups of students share a characteristic--they become visible to administrators because they are exceptional and seek exceptions.
Colleges are good at working with the first group of students, and not always good at working with the second group. I have been wondering why that is. The answer is probably straight-forward--the first group of students are good at school and so are good at getting the attention of schools. But some of the reason turns on the ability of students to fit into standardized ways of working with them.
Take the curriculum, for example. High achieving students by-and-large flourish within the sort of curricula we offer--academic programs that include lots of pieces and require lots of student-directed choices about electives.
Or take policies on exceptions--high achieving students build connections with faculty who tend to be leaders, and who therefore understand things like exceptions policies, opportunities for withdrawal from academic programs, or ways to discover research or job opportunities. Struggling students don't routinely build connections with faculty (in fact they often say they don't want to bother their professors or ask for special help) and so when it comes time to seek some sort of leg up, they don't always get it. Instead, their interaction with faculty or administrators often comes ex post facto--the opportunity has been missed, the exception not granted, the course failed--and then the student wants to know why.
There are plenty of solutions to this set of problems, but the thing I am most interested in is how the sort of experiences we provide send signals to various types of students. As I suggested above, high achieving students work well in standardized systems--they learn how the systems work, and they learn how the system builds connections that can be then used to deal with exceptions.
Struggling or isolated students don't work well in standardized systems. Instead they work well in systems with two components. The first is perhaps obvious--personalization. Struggling students need individualized attention. Brochures mapping out the curriculum aren't particularly useful; personalized conversations with real human beings are.
The second is less noted--such students flourish in a school that values common experiences. Limit the curricular choices, or ensure that all students participate in learning communities, or require that all students read a particular book, or achieve a set of learning outcomes, and you establish a system that values common experiences. Note that common experiences are different from standard systems. In standard systems the focus is on the well-being of the system--completing or waiving prerequisites for example, or ensuring that students complete a particular number of credit hours. In a common system, all students are expected to have the same experiences.
There is a final point to be made--personalized and common experiences are deeply connected. Require all students to study abroad and they have both a powerful common experience--learning in a foreign setting--and a powerful personal experience--making sense of who they are by learning in a foreign setting. Put them in a standard system, and the range of personal learning decreases, because the point of reference is the requirement, the system, not the experience. And when all students have both powerful common and powerful personal experiences, the struggling student becomes center stage as a person, not just as a seeker of special favors from the administration.
Colleges are good at working with the first group of students, and not always good at working with the second group. I have been wondering why that is. The answer is probably straight-forward--the first group of students are good at school and so are good at getting the attention of schools. But some of the reason turns on the ability of students to fit into standardized ways of working with them.
Take the curriculum, for example. High achieving students by-and-large flourish within the sort of curricula we offer--academic programs that include lots of pieces and require lots of student-directed choices about electives.
Or take policies on exceptions--high achieving students build connections with faculty who tend to be leaders, and who therefore understand things like exceptions policies, opportunities for withdrawal from academic programs, or ways to discover research or job opportunities. Struggling students don't routinely build connections with faculty (in fact they often say they don't want to bother their professors or ask for special help) and so when it comes time to seek some sort of leg up, they don't always get it. Instead, their interaction with faculty or administrators often comes ex post facto--the opportunity has been missed, the exception not granted, the course failed--and then the student wants to know why.
There are plenty of solutions to this set of problems, but the thing I am most interested in is how the sort of experiences we provide send signals to various types of students. As I suggested above, high achieving students work well in standardized systems--they learn how the systems work, and they learn how the system builds connections that can be then used to deal with exceptions.
Struggling or isolated students don't work well in standardized systems. Instead they work well in systems with two components. The first is perhaps obvious--personalization. Struggling students need individualized attention. Brochures mapping out the curriculum aren't particularly useful; personalized conversations with real human beings are.
The second is less noted--such students flourish in a school that values common experiences. Limit the curricular choices, or ensure that all students participate in learning communities, or require that all students read a particular book, or achieve a set of learning outcomes, and you establish a system that values common experiences. Note that common experiences are different from standard systems. In standard systems the focus is on the well-being of the system--completing or waiving prerequisites for example, or ensuring that students complete a particular number of credit hours. In a common system, all students are expected to have the same experiences.
There is a final point to be made--personalized and common experiences are deeply connected. Require all students to study abroad and they have both a powerful common experience--learning in a foreign setting--and a powerful personal experience--making sense of who they are by learning in a foreign setting. Put them in a standard system, and the range of personal learning decreases, because the point of reference is the requirement, the system, not the experience. And when all students have both powerful common and powerful personal experiences, the struggling student becomes center stage as a person, not just as a seeker of special favors from the administration.
Friday, May 28, 2010
A libertarian/community organizing approach to student engagement
Libertarianism and community organizing are generally though of on opposite ends of some spectrum. But in key ways they are linked--particularly since both value (1) putting power in the hands of people to make the decisions that effect them most and (2) having those people be responsible for the results of those decisions. Together they might help higher ed with a constant problem: student engagement.
It is end of the year report time at Westminster, and when that time rolls around we always end up in discussions about resource allocation, resource use, and student engagement.
The issue is this: most co-curricular programs have at least some responsibility for student engagement and retention. So we always wonder whether the institution gets its money's worth from these co-curricular activities. One problem is that we do not have good metrics for this question. How would we know if we got our money's worth? Would it simply be measured by student retention? By the numbers of students who participate? By student testimonials? By the alignment of co-curricular activities with institutional mission? By student learning?
There is some effort in the field to respond to this question by focusing on the cost-benefit of first-year programs as they relate to student retention. By focusing solely on cost-benefit and retention, though, the Delta Cost Project's initiative overlooks some of the key goals of first-year programs--improving student learning, for example, or faculty development, or making meaning out of a messy curriculum, or a dozen other sorts of things that first-year (and by extension many other co-curricular) programs use.
We have other ways of trying to make sense of the value of co-curricular programs. Some mission-driven institutions mandate that all students participate in some co-curricular activities. Pepperdine University, like many other faith-affiliated colleges and universities, requires that students attend chapel every week. BYU-Idaho requires all students to have a student leadership opportunity. Cal State Monterey Bay requires all students to complete a community service project and take service-learning courses. We might call this a traditional or authoritarian model of student engagement, one that uses the power of the institution to shape engagement.
The default mode in higher ed, though, is a small "l" liberal approach. In it, institutions set up many engagement activities and each activity is responsible for persuading students that participating in its programs is a good thing. This approach places the onus for engagement on particular programs and their staffs. It tends to work fine with prosperous campuses ( so that questions about the amount of engagement caused by a particular program do not lead to questions about eradicating a particular programs) and with students who would naturally be engaged anyway, who take advantage of far more engagement opportunities than would naturally fall to them, all things being equal.
I am teaching a course on community organizing and social change right now. One of the tenets of most organizers is that responsibility for organizing and change lies not on the organizers themselves but on the community members. Our class talked about Myles Horton last night who made this a practice at Highlander Folk School. But the same approach runs through Saul Alinsky's work and that of many other efforts to support communities as they become engaged on their own terms.
This approach has potential in higher education as well, especially since we often proclaim that higher ed works with students to help them define and make sense of their lives as individuals and in community. Yet we rarely put the onus for engagement on students, preferring to have locate it either in the institution or in its programs.
But imagine, for example, that you gave every student a voucher (the libertarian part of the equation) each semester worth, say $5000 of engagement time--roughly their proportion of the overall spending on engagement activities. The student could use it to buy the outside of class time of faculty members, or to participate in programming run by a particular center, or to start her own initiative. Students who spent more than $5000 or less than, say $4000 would be penalized the following semester with a reduction in their engagement budgets.
What might be the results?
It is end of the year report time at Westminster, and when that time rolls around we always end up in discussions about resource allocation, resource use, and student engagement.
The issue is this: most co-curricular programs have at least some responsibility for student engagement and retention. So we always wonder whether the institution gets its money's worth from these co-curricular activities. One problem is that we do not have good metrics for this question. How would we know if we got our money's worth? Would it simply be measured by student retention? By the numbers of students who participate? By student testimonials? By the alignment of co-curricular activities with institutional mission? By student learning?
There is some effort in the field to respond to this question by focusing on the cost-benefit of first-year programs as they relate to student retention. By focusing solely on cost-benefit and retention, though, the Delta Cost Project's initiative overlooks some of the key goals of first-year programs--improving student learning, for example, or faculty development, or making meaning out of a messy curriculum, or a dozen other sorts of things that first-year (and by extension many other co-curricular) programs use.
We have other ways of trying to make sense of the value of co-curricular programs. Some mission-driven institutions mandate that all students participate in some co-curricular activities. Pepperdine University, like many other faith-affiliated colleges and universities, requires that students attend chapel every week. BYU-Idaho requires all students to have a student leadership opportunity. Cal State Monterey Bay requires all students to complete a community service project and take service-learning courses. We might call this a traditional or authoritarian model of student engagement, one that uses the power of the institution to shape engagement.
The default mode in higher ed, though, is a small "l" liberal approach. In it, institutions set up many engagement activities and each activity is responsible for persuading students that participating in its programs is a good thing. This approach places the onus for engagement on particular programs and their staffs. It tends to work fine with prosperous campuses ( so that questions about the amount of engagement caused by a particular program do not lead to questions about eradicating a particular programs) and with students who would naturally be engaged anyway, who take advantage of far more engagement opportunities than would naturally fall to them, all things being equal.
I am teaching a course on community organizing and social change right now. One of the tenets of most organizers is that responsibility for organizing and change lies not on the organizers themselves but on the community members. Our class talked about Myles Horton last night who made this a practice at Highlander Folk School. But the same approach runs through Saul Alinsky's work and that of many other efforts to support communities as they become engaged on their own terms.
This approach has potential in higher education as well, especially since we often proclaim that higher ed works with students to help them define and make sense of their lives as individuals and in community. Yet we rarely put the onus for engagement on students, preferring to have locate it either in the institution or in its programs.
But imagine, for example, that you gave every student a voucher (the libertarian part of the equation) each semester worth, say $5000 of engagement time--roughly their proportion of the overall spending on engagement activities. The student could use it to buy the outside of class time of faculty members, or to participate in programming run by a particular center, or to start her own initiative. Students who spent more than $5000 or less than, say $4000 would be penalized the following semester with a reduction in their engagement budgets.
What might be the results?
- Instead of a few students using a disproportionate amount of the engagement resources of the institution,the amount of participation in engagement activities would be roughly equal across all students.
- The institution could get a better sense of how students value particular engagement activities and thus do a better job of aligning resources with demand.
- Students, being responsible for their own engagement and with power over that engagement would develop both greater creativity and greater responsibility for their use of resources.
- Groups of students would organize themselves, bringing a much needed student perspective on the overall focus of institutions.
- Learning gets better, because engagement grows out of the students' passions as well as the institution's resources.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Student Engagement: Does Success Require Faliure?
In the 2009-2010 academic year we agreed that all entering students would have a mentor assigned to them. The mentor would be one of the student's learning community faculty members if the student was in a fall learning community. If not, the mentor would be an administrator. The entire senior administrative staff (including the President and Provost) participated as mentors--each assigned to 3 to 5 students.
The school year is mostly over, and reports are rolling in from the administrative mentors. Almost universally there have been frustrated by the failure of their efforts. Many students never responded to contacts from their mentors. Of those who did, only a few stayed engaged for more than a single meeting.
This result, and a decline in our scores on the NSSE "faculty/student interaction" index even while we are trying to increase it has led to some anguish on campus. These events have gotten me thinking that a campus trying to create a system that encourages all students to be engaged will necessarily have more and more failed interactions between faculty (and staff) and students.
Here is my thinking: engaging students depends on three things: offering a wide range of engagement opportunities, getting all students to participate in at least some of them, and ensuring that of the things individual students engage in, at least one of them turns out to actually engage the student (which in turn depends on a student knowing what they find engaging).
The paradoxical result of these requirements is that a good system of engagement--one that stands a real likelihood of engaging nearly all students--will be home to lots of failed interactions. The Center for Civic Engagement, for example, might host many service opportunities, but each opportunity will only attract a few students, of whom even fewer will stay engaged. We will work feverishly to connect mentors with students--but most of those efforts won't succeed because most students won't find meaningful connections with most mentors. We will let students form dozens of clubs, but only a few will flourish while most will limp along with a handful of participants, offering events that attract only a few students.
So, lots of failure, but the overall result at the level of individual students will be a system that is likely to engage them in one way or another.
There are two (at least) big implications of this fact: 1. anyone involved in engaging students will have to spend a lot of time managing frustrated "engagers"--those people whose efforts are rebuffed by students, and 2. any effort to assess engagement has to look at the system as a whole (is the system likely to offer engagement opportunities that will appeal to nearly all of the students who choose our campus?), and students as individuals (do most students find something--anything--that engages them?). Only after assessment at these levels does it make sense to assess at the program level.
The school year is mostly over, and reports are rolling in from the administrative mentors. Almost universally there have been frustrated by the failure of their efforts. Many students never responded to contacts from their mentors. Of those who did, only a few stayed engaged for more than a single meeting.
This result, and a decline in our scores on the NSSE "faculty/student interaction" index even while we are trying to increase it has led to some anguish on campus. These events have gotten me thinking that a campus trying to create a system that encourages all students to be engaged will necessarily have more and more failed interactions between faculty (and staff) and students.
Here is my thinking: engaging students depends on three things: offering a wide range of engagement opportunities, getting all students to participate in at least some of them, and ensuring that of the things individual students engage in, at least one of them turns out to actually engage the student (which in turn depends on a student knowing what they find engaging).
The paradoxical result of these requirements is that a good system of engagement--one that stands a real likelihood of engaging nearly all students--will be home to lots of failed interactions. The Center for Civic Engagement, for example, might host many service opportunities, but each opportunity will only attract a few students, of whom even fewer will stay engaged. We will work feverishly to connect mentors with students--but most of those efforts won't succeed because most students won't find meaningful connections with most mentors. We will let students form dozens of clubs, but only a few will flourish while most will limp along with a handful of participants, offering events that attract only a few students.
So, lots of failure, but the overall result at the level of individual students will be a system that is likely to engage them in one way or another.
There are two (at least) big implications of this fact: 1. anyone involved in engaging students will have to spend a lot of time managing frustrated "engagers"--those people whose efforts are rebuffed by students, and 2. any effort to assess engagement has to look at the system as a whole (is the system likely to offer engagement opportunities that will appeal to nearly all of the students who choose our campus?), and students as individuals (do most students find something--anything--that engages them?). Only after assessment at these levels does it make sense to assess at the program level.
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