Change in higher education

A nice article by Daniel Yankelovich in the Chronicle of Higher Education outlines some of the interesting forces at work changing the university in the United States. In particular, his point about the increasingly non-traditional student- the student who combines working and studying over a longer period of time, and who makes life-vocation choices at 30 rather than 20, suggests the increasingly desirability of college as a place of experimentation and methods-learning (learning to learn) rather than place of imparting vocational knowledge... But at the same time, Yankelovich laments the low numbers of engineering graduates... how to reconcile those two?

Nicholas Kristof on study abroad...

A great column on getting a real education... in Chad.

"Universities are — oh so slowly — recognizing that they need to prepare students to survive globalization. But most overseas studies programs are both too short and too tame. They typically involve sending a herd of students for a term in France or Italy, where they study a little and drink a lot together, amid occasional sightings of locals. That's why I bring up Ndjamena, this dusty capital of one of the poorest countries in the world. A student living independently here could learn French and Arabic, and would emerge with a much richer understanding of the world than could be taught in any classroom."

He goes on to announce a contest where he will take a university student on a foreign reporting trip... will an SCU student win?

School uniforms?

I am in Oxford for the biannual conference of the Center for the Study of African Economies... great fun! Met some people I have been reading and got to hear some nice papers and get comments on my own research on the impact of libraries. One paper in my session was on the impact of distributing school uniforms to students in Kenya... 4.5% increase in attendance, fairly cost-effective way to get extra schooling. Apply to SCU?

The conference is at St. Catherine's college, a very new part of the the Oxford conglomeration. The buildings were designed by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen... I find them quite striking, for all the little details. In my room I am sitting on one of his chairs. Would be a bit out of place in San Jose though...

While I am gone and from now on, some of the other members of the Core Committee will start blogging (hopefully!) so we'll start signing our names to the postings,

Michael

Study abroad for experiencing "gritty" immersion...

Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, Superior General of the Jesuits, urged Jesuit universities to give students the opportunity to experience the gritty reality of poverty. No program at Santa Clara does that better than Casa de la Solidaridad, the study abroad program in El Salvador. But therein lies a conundrum: one of the things that makes Casa so great is the incredible self-motivation of the students- a very small number of students. How can the experiences in Casa be generalized to a university-wide experience?

How does a university know when it needs a revision of its core/general education?

One interesting tool is the AACU diagnostic questionnaire Assessing General Education. I strongly urge every person interested in these issues to truthfully answer the 28 questions; they lay out quite sharply (and in ways a bit depressing) how far from ideal are the typical campus institutions and processes for maximizing the value of a general education/core requirement. In some sense, it is a similar exercise to reading Bok (we/you could be doing so much more...) and yet the shortcomings are the same (a university has limited resources and manpower, and can't have a great core and also a nice pony too).

By the way, UC San Diego has an interesting setup, with six colleges on campus, each one embodying a slightly different general education approach. The descriptions are a bit vague (and there is something slightly creepy about the way many of the colleges emphasize that they are "friendly"... is that something the marketing research focus group told them to put in there?) but nevertheless convey a sense of a different model, abandoning the idea that higher education should have one core, and instead facilitating room for student choice among various general education experiences.

Environmental Studies as a core requirement...

There is a perception that environmental studies is growing as a general education requirement at universities. In looking through the core requirements of fifty schools (links to their cores are available at our "sister" blog site coreresources.blogspot.com), I cannot find any, however, that have environmental studies as a stand-alone requirement. So American universities are not there yet, it seems.

Certainly there is a strong case to be made, pedagogically, for a good survey course in environmental studies. In the old days it was easy of compartmentalize environmental studies as something that "experts" could take care of, but it is clear that environmental issues are now firmly on the political agenda and thus environmental outcomes are driven, in part, by public perceptions of environmental processes. So citizens need to be well-informed critical thinkers on enviornmental issues.

But the hard question: is environmental studies more urgent than all of the other issues vying for position on a core? (See Derek Bok's positions below). And since I am a bit of a nose-tweaker, I found myself thinking that in terms of the human race, shouldn't our students have a good introduction to military and security issues viewed through a peace studies lens, since we seem unable to stop ourselves from killing each other directly, let alone indirectly through pollution.

Student panel on diversity and gender studies in the core

Last week we had a well-attended panel on the issue of diversity and gender studies in the core. One of the interesting things I heard was the pressure that student groups feel that they are responsible (implicitly) for diversity and gender education on campus, but this is something best accomplished with a trained educator. Following Derek Bok's discussion, it does make me wonder what the data says about the effects of greater support for multicultural and feminist extracurricular activities as opposed to extra resources needed by beefing up a diversity and/or gender requirement. I will follow through and report on what I find.

Study Abroad

At the University of Texas, apparently, the provost tells all incoming students only two things: do not decide your major until sophomore year, and study abroad.

An interesting debate in study abroad circles is how to integrate diversity/multicultural education with intercultural competence/communication. Diversity studies tends to emphasize how differences among students and within societies are the result of inequalities of power, while intercultural competence tends to be about learning how elite groups communicate with one another. How much common ground is there in these two approaches/themes? Not very much it would seem. So there would seem to be no sound "learning objective reason" for having the two themes be part of a single requirement, as some schools do.

Service learning

Service learning is a growing component of both coursework and general education requirements at universities around the country. But just what does service learning hope to accomplish? I am in Chicago for two days doing curriculum work with the International Education of Students (IES) study abroad outfit, and the topic came up, and a member of the consortium distributed information about SCU's Arrupe Center as a place that is "getting it right." Certainly in Jesuit education one can view serving as an important education outcome for students. One has to learn how to serve, and to serve effectively. This is something that educators can teach, and a good way to teach "how to serve effectively" is in the context of practical activities. Service learning does other things too, and there is certainly much disagreement whether this is a key learning outcome for the curriculum to take charge of (as opposed to extra-curricular or hybrid programming).

Internationalizing the curriculum...

I was reading a new report by the American Council on Education, "Building a Strategic Framework for Comprehensive Internationalization" and some passages in the report I found interesting. First, a short observation in the report on language learning: "A concrete example of adding outcome measures to input measures- or substituting for inputs entirely- can be found in foreign language teaching. Many institutions express their language requirements in terms of course requirements or "seat time", but few actually set these requirements in terms of proficiency in listening, comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing." This echoes Derek Bok's point of view.

More interestingly, on p. 11 of the report is a list of possible learning objectives from internationalizing the curriculum, and among them we find, "appreciates the language, art, religion, philosophy, and material culture of different cultures; accepts the cultural differences and tolerates cultural ambiguity; demonstrates an ongoing willingness to seek out international or intercultural oppportunities." Now these learning objectives are, I submit for discussion, profoundly liberal. They are profoundly anti-conservative. A conservative does not urgently want or sense the value in being exposed to other cultures; a conservative thinks that his or her own tradition is good enough. A conservative is wary of being seduced, is nervous about relativistic thinking, and believes that the need is for more respect rather than more understanding.

This conservative view is quite different, I hasten to add, from the view of libertarians like Tyler Cowen (see his blog Marginal Revolution), who celebrate the internationalization of culture, where Safeway sells sushi and taquitos and one might possibly become convinced, after listening fourteen times to Raquel Zozaya's rendition of Cuban troubadour Silvio Rodriguez' song La Gota de Rocio, that maybe the island of Cuba is experiencing a different history from the one that one thought.

That is one way of seeing these issues. Another way to see them is through the conservative lens; in this view internationalizing the curriculum amounts to devaluing the best of American society. American studies, in this view, are profoundly anti-liberal. A liberal does not want to embrace the 200+ years of history of the United States as a unique and inspiring achievement; a liberal thinks his or her own tradition is just as shameful as that of other countries. A liberal is wary of hurting the feelings of others by making value judgements, is nervous about truthfulness, and believes that the need is for courtesy and curtsies rather than a finger in the face.

I am not making political statements here, rather provocations. My own views I keep close; the purpose of this blog is to present issues of curriculum choice in their full complexity and with eyes open about their implications. There should be no other way to conduct this kind of public discussion in an open society.

iTunes U

The ability to make video of course lectures super easy to access is a subject that fascinates me for some reason... A good discussion is available at Endless Hybrids.
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For SCU people-Student run panel on Monday March 6, 5pm

Representatives of Feminists United, the Multicultural Center, the Women’s and Gender Studies Club and the Ethnic Studies Club are organizing a student initiated Student Speak event this coming Monday, March 6th at 5pm in the Kennedy Commons. It will be a panel discussion on the Core Curriculum requirements relating to Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies.

Units of inquiry as organizing model for Core?

Sometimes faculty like the idea of organizing a Core Curriculum as a set of themes that will be addressed in a wide variety of courses. Instead of selecting from a pre-existing menu of courses shaped by the disciplinary concerns of faculty in separate departments, faculty would craft courses that "spoke to each other" by emphasizing, reinforcing and deepening common themes. Derek Bok calls this the "modes-of inquiry" approach, in his book Our Underachieving Colleges. The approach de-emphasizes "knowledge" and favors "methods", broadly speaking. Bok has four criticisms of the approach: Too superficial? Too little emphasis on major, important knowledge? Too hard for a disciplined-based faculty to accomplish? Too hard to monitor for continuous quality?

Bok advocates thinking about curriculum review as a process rather than an attempt to attain the perfect curriculum. He is skeptical of perfection and purists, and cites (p. 273) research by Astin who concludes, "the varieties of general education programs currently used in American higher education do not seem to make much difference in any aspect of a student's cognitive or affective development." One wonders how rigorous Astin's study was? Something to look for.

Bok comes down against general education, to the extent that he reaches a conclusion. His presumable preference (p. 277) is: quantitative literacy, world cultures and international relations, moral reasoning, American government and political philosophy, and economics. There it is: from 5-7 classes. He's clear about what is left out: literature and the arts, science, and history. But he notes (p. 279): "Educators should have good reason to believe that the goal will actually be accomplished to a meaningful degree within the time alloted in the curriculum. it is on this basis that general education progams must be judged and on this basis that they are most vulnerable."

Changes in core curriculum will have effects...

Any serious change to the existing core will have significant effects. One of the best things a revision committee can do is try to think systematically about these effects. Here’s a partial illustrative list, emerging from recent discussions (and in no order of significance):

(1) Faculty recruitment. Hypothesis: Greater emphasis on real “core” courses, broad interdisciplinary courses taught by tenure-track faculty, has drawback that many new Ph.D.’s, emerging from the cocoons of 5-6 years in their discipline, may not be attracted to the prospect of teaching a broad interdisciplinary core.
(2) Department majors and faculty lines. Hypothesis: Smaller and perennially less popular Departments recruit from students obligated to sample their courses, and without the obligation few students may become majors.
(3) Double majoring. Hypothesis: In today’s credentialed society, students value the diploma-enhancing double major. A more onerous Core (in terms of coursework) imperils double majoring and may reduce attractiveness of the University.
(4) Transfer students. Hypothesis: If a core is guided by learning outcomes, a Core risks being undermined if transfer students can obtain credit for Core work when other colleges offer similar sounding coursework that nevertheless may not have the same rigor and depth of a Santa Clara core course.
(5) Length of study on campus. Hypothesis: A lighter Core may induce students to graduate even earlier, with financial implications for the University.

The hypotheses enumerated above are worth investigating; but they do not preclude there being other hypotheses (polar opposites, even) than may be just a likely. To reiterate, evidence-based research is necessary in sorting out some of the less likely or less substantial hypotheses from those that do find validation in the experiences of a broad sample of universities.

David Brooks has a pet Core Curriculum

NY Times columnist David Brooks provides his core education: read Reinhold Neibuhr, Plato's Gorgias, take a class on ancient Greece, foreign language mastery, learn statistics, spend a year abroad, a course in neuroscience, dabble away from major.

If you thought universities were not in a competitive environment... think again

"It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid...." Read more.... Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress New York Times. The article notes that the assistant secretary of education for higher education is a former lobbyist for the University of Phoenix.

Women's Crossroads: Endless Diversity Battles Sap Our Strength

Women's Crossroads: Endless Diversity Battles Sap Our Strength A short but pointed post that hashes out some of the beginner's discourse on diversity in the curriculum. "My canon is better than your alternative; my canon is more important than your alternative." "No its not, and besides, my alternative is not the canon because it wasn't allowed to compete in the marketplace of ideas." As author Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez notes, it would be nice to not have to engage in the debate at this level. But, she hasn't taken us to the next level.

Swerve Left: Mandatory testing for colleges?

Swerve Left: Mandatory testing for colleges? A nice post exploring some of the broad issues in assessment at the university level. One of the tasks in formulating a new core curriculum is thinking about how (and how much) should the new emphasis on assessment be embedded in the resulting core. The comments at the end of the post constitute strong evidence of the learning outcomes that have been achieved by Swerveleft's community: critical thinking, analytical capabilities, synthesis, international mindedness, etc.