Student groups urge changes in core curriculum - News

From last Thursday's The Santa Clara... Student groups urge changes in core curriculum - News: "...several groups, including Feminists United, the Women's and Gender Studies Club, the Ethnic Studies Club and the Multicultural Center, are planning to give students the chance to voice their opinions in an upcoming panel discussion.... The discussion will address ethnic and women's and gender studies in the core.The student-led panel discussing proposed core requirement changes will be held Monday, March 6, at 5 p.m. in the Kennedy Commons."

Do we need to go back to 1599 to plan for the future?

This is a question that some of us will find an answer to. Perhaps very few of us though... only those brave enough to attempt a reading of the Ratio Studiorum of 1599: the Order and Method of Studies in the Society of Jesus, which is the document that guided Jesuit education in universities for centuries. Boston College's Digital Archive has a nice website with commentary and English translation. My dialup connection is too slow to access the file, so I'm off the hook for tonight! Instead, I'll finish watching the Brazilian film City of God, as close to the gritty reality of the poor as you can get with Goodfellas-style camera technique.

NYT's John Tierney's view on Summers and Harvard

In John Tierney's view in his New York Times column, Harvard faculty didn't buy the "assessment and continuous improvement" trend that Summers was trying to promote because they are (1) lazy, (2) don't care much about student learning, and (3) care a lot about denigrating the U.S. (his sly, "they don't teach the American Revolution, they teach a class that treats simultaneously the American and Haitian revolutions (how dare they!)"comment). The column is more interesting for its discursive strategy than its possible factual basis (how would Tierney know what Harvard faculty thought?) and reveals Tierney to be more post-modern than the faculty he criticizes... post-modern in the way Tierney would use the term, that is.

What a diversity requirement should not be?

University of Nevada-Reno has a diversity requirement that blends international with ethnic studies with disability studies... too broad? The learning objective for the requirement is: "to prepare and encourage our students to acquire what has been called intercultural competencies (foreign language acquisition and cultural sensitivity)." This is not the currently faddish language of assessment of student outcomes- the class prepares and encourages just by being a class. What measurable result is to be attained?

Core curriculum at Rhode Island College

I'm visiting Rhode Island College, participating in a mini-conference on Darfur. One of the organizers is my old friend Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, and turns out she was in charge of reorganizing RIC's core. They came up with an interesting hybrid model: four courses that everyone has to take, and then a set of distribution requirements. Turns out that one of the four core courses is more like a distribution requirement, illustrating nicely the institutional problem of designing a core but then not necessarily having the right incentives in place to have it remain a "core"... "It's growing," is the comment of one RIC prof. I was chatting with.

Harvard's hot water core curriculum and other things education...

Richard Bradley, who was an editor at John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s magazine George, blogs (Shots in the Dark) about education issues at Harvard (he has a book Harvard Rules)... there lot's of interesting gossip, and more than enough marinated tofu for thought... especially now that Harvard President Larry Summers appears to have resigned today.

Edwired...

I'm reading a fascinating blog called Edwired. A George Mason Univeristy history professor. Great stuff about the end of the "course" when students now have the technology to podcast and podview lectures. Who will be the first innovator?

Uh oh... modern languages don't have a friend in Derek Bok...

Bok is decidely anti-language. Read on it's own, his chapter on "preparing for a global society" might not appear that way, but in contrast with what has come before, we finally arrive at something he doesn't think is worth promoting. I like the general drift of Bok's book- if you are serious about curriculum reform, then you don't just start and end with the aggregated preferences of a faculty committee. You should start and end with education research. What does the research say? Does the research support a proposed curricular innovation? Now the problem with this is that in many disciplines, the research is not definitive (Reagan's old wish for a one-handed economist comes to mind). Why would that be different in the discipline of education research? So, Bok presents studies suggesting that requiring foreign languages maybe need not be a priority. But after the diversity chapter debacle, now I no longer trust that he has properly sounded the research... I am quite sure there is more to learn.

What does Bok favor instead? A good course introducing students to the international world. Who can be opposed in principle -- though very hard to standardize across instructors. And, by the way, there seems to be no research-evidenced results presented by Bok indicating that something like that is more effective than language instruction.

Bok- something tells me to stop trusting this guy...

I'm reading the chapter on diversity, and I keep bumping into something called a "Third World Center" that "blacks" want on college campuses. Hello? A quick internet search reveals that there are 779 websites mentioning "Third World Center" in the education domain .edu.... (the two prominent ones seem to be Brown and Princeton, hmmmm...). Meanwhile there are 219,000 websites refering to "Multicultural Center"... So, if Bok is this parochial on diversity, why bother reading the rest of the chapter? Because I have to- guilt compunction? So the rest is predictable, bordering on inane. He's losing credibility fast.

Preparation for Citizenship...

That is the title of Ch. 7 in Derek Bok's book, Our Underachieving Colleges. I am beginning to feel a little frustrated.... some fallacies of composition are troubling me. Colleges aren't doing enough to promote good citizenship; college education is key; more college education for citizenship would promote better citizenship. But, gee, over the last 40 years vastly more Americans have gone to college, yet Bok's empirical assessment of citizenship is that there isn't enough. So... perhaps college education (no matter how much citizenship training is or is not involved) actually has little to do with citizenship outcomes. The problem is also that the outcome of interest is not carefully defined in a measurable way. Evoking Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone-- there Putnam selected a group of civic indicators important in the past and showed how they had declined. Selecting civic activities that were unimportant in the past would (more likely) mean that they had now increased.

Also, I am concerned about the general paradox of the book so far (remember, though, I skipped the intro and am digesting the marinated tofu). Bok so far has been nicely consistent- every chapter shows that the outcome is not improving, and every chapter shows the scientific studies about how the outcome might be improved. But there is no comparative assessment (maybe later?). In other words, we seem to be heading in the direction of having ten things that can be improved (all with associated costs) but little sense of which things are most cost effective. Is there are bigger bang for the buck in preparing for citizenship, or preparing for diversity? So far Bok seems to be saying that the bangs are all positive. but the magnitudes matter much.

I say this noting that the first such assessment enters the stage as a throwaway comment on p. 188: "It is surely odd to require all students to take courses in the sciences or study a foreign language while taking no steps to ensure that they have enough knowledge to understand the basic problems and processes of their democracy." A truism, but Bok aspires to more. He would be the first to say that colleges have indeed taken many steps, so it is not about "no steps" but about "more steps." It is fair to ask whether there scientific evidence that it is "odd."

Building Character as part of curriculum, broadly speaking

I'm continuing to read Derek Bok, now on chapter 6, entitled "Character Building." Santa Clara is in an enviable position here- I think! I have to believe that many of our students self-select precisely because they already have through high school an above-average sense of moral awareness and reasoning, and their parents probably do too. Many of the faculty also take moral issues more seriously, and integrate them more frequently into their daily life. After two or three years, most faculty, and even some students, come to appreciate the Jesuit nuances of what are otherwise platitudes: "discernment", "solidarity", and "whole person". I'm curious whether the national survey of faculty actually shows this for Santa Clara- something to look up.
Regardless, as Bok (predictably) points out, there is always room for (much) improvement.

Aside: Is there going to be something that our underachieving colleges do too much of, and should do a little less of? Faculty already working too much- they should spend more time with their families!? Too much good food service? Too much broadband? Too many units required for graduation?

Some good suggestions throughout... useful "to do" list for university administrators. (E.g., when was the last time coaches were given a pep talk to let everyone on the team play because winning isn't everything...? Well, more like: winning through cheating is no victory.) Setting an example is important, suggests Bok. It does make me think that the Jesuit character of the university is somewhat abstract- students do not get too many profiles of present and living Jesuits and the moral examples so many strive to set. Ask a typical student: Who's a famous Jesuit? Response: None? Exceedingly moral people aren't famous?

Bok does have some straight talk about the role of cheating and faculty/administration response. Definitely something to monitor closely with students. But straying a little far from curriculum issues.

Last note: A little David Brooks bashing in this chapter. Good. I find him a willful perpetrator of "massive unsubstantiated generalizations." (Here, that colleges do little about moral reasoning, which, as Bok points out, is a baloney statement- most colleges do far more than they used to.)

What does Costa-Gavras have in common with Derek Bok?

Watched Costa-Gavras film 'Z' last night, and read Bok's chapter on critical thinking. As Costa-Gavras points out in the director's commentary on the DVD, the film was an expression of hate against the Greek colonels who took power in 1967 - the "imbeciles". Shouldn't critical thinking at a Jesuit, Catholic university be intended in part to prevent people from accepting "imbeciles" in power? The film does a great job of presenting the rhetoric of the colonels- for God and country. Could their rhetoric withstand a healthy does of critical thought? (Rhetoric of the leftists, however, is left unexplored.) Worth remembering that in most countries of the world students (in Burkina Faso, the high school students!) are typically the first to question the rhetoric of oppression.

So what does Bok have to say about teaching critical thinking? A bit more than teaching English composition. Active learning is what Bok believes is clearly important. Teachers simply have to get away from the one hour lecture, and use classroom time to stimulate group work and discussion. He give three wonderful examples: Halloum and Hestenes who find that understanding of physics principles advances little in the standard physics course; Triesman who finds that group problem-solving is extrememly effective; and Mazur who required advance reading and left classes for very structured discussion.

After two chapters (4 and 5), I think a theme is beginning to emerge: focus less on changing curriculum and more on changing courses. Use educational research to improve teaching. The neglectful zookeepers of the present should not be entrusted with new animals.

Good news for English composition - Derek Bok's "Our Underachieving Colleges"

I've started to read Bok's book, Our Underachieving Colleges, and skipped the introductory chapters and went right to the marinated tofu (as vegetarians say). Chapter 4, entitled "Learning to Communicate," offers Bok's thoughts on the importance of English writing and composition in the curriculum. I do not need to be convinced of the importance of writing well, nor of the difficulties in teaching composition. I was a little startled by Bok's insistence (three separate times) that correcting grammar mistakes is "discredited." Should the period go in or out of the apostrophe? Is it better to not correct grammar mistakes? Could writing be improved without any attention to grammar? Is grammar something one learns on one's own? Similarly glib was Bok's solution to the problem: have a "facultywide forum"and find out what your goals are in teaching writing (p. 97). (Just 7 pages later, he notes that in the related field of oral communication one could never get a consensus on an ideal curriculum (p. 104). So much for the forum idea.) Then initate a process to weed out bad teaching of English composition (outmoded practices must be extirpated). Then add a lot more resources. Well, this isn't very useful advice: "Pay attention and work better!" One begins to wonder what the budget for implementing the rest of the book is going to look like...

Just finished reading Louis Menand's article (in links section)

Menand's cogent sociological explanation of how "The Marketplace of Ideas" has evolved (in the humanities) is convincing without being overbearing. He makes too much of what he calls postdisciplinarity- the status in the humanities of having lost one's disciplinary way (his example is the English professor's de rigueur second book on the history of carrots). Coining an unneeded word, there. The important thing is to get beyond a politics of resentment on university campuses (pithily summarized as "when women and nonwhites came into the system, traditional notions of scholarly rigor disappeared"), especially perhaps in the humanities, and to see that larger forces are shaping university curricula all over the country, and that change on one's own campus is not due to an obnoxious empire-builder or a loudmouthed activist.

At the end of the short article, he introduces the university as a counterweight to what he calls public culture. He does not explain what public culture is (we know it when we see it?). I guess I am less convinced that we have a single public culture that needs a counterweight of an institution that is the collectivity of universities. Silicon Valley in particular seems to consist of a myriad of different public cultures, reflected partly and differently by its universities.

Creating a new core curriculum

Welcome to the blog site of people interested in a new core curriculum for Santa Clara University, a Jesuit, Catholic University located in Silicon Valley.