Give Students a Compass: Liberal Learning, Educational ...

By: Ken O?Donnell, Senior Director, Student Engagement and Academic Initiatives & Partnerships, California State University Office of the Chancellor, Long Beach, CA

AAC&U Annual Meeting Session ? Thursday, January 24, 2013, 1:30 p.m.
2013 Ernest Boyer Award Presentation
Give Students a Compass: Liberal Learning, Educational Innovations, and the Global Commons

The New American Colleges and Universities (NAC&U) is a consortium of twenty-two selective, small, and mid-size independent institutions ?dedicated to the purposeful integration of liberal education, professional studies, and civic engagement.?? Each year NAC&U recognizes an educator who exemplifies Boyer?s charge to unite theory with practice.? This year?s recipient of the award is Carol Geary Schneider, president of AAC&U.

Richard Guarasci, president of Wagner College, praised Carol in his introduction for many things, including her leadership in creating last year?s publication A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy?s Future, which calls for a deeper civic dimension in postsecondary curriculum, and her fearless public opposition to what he called ?homogenizing? attacks on diversity in higher education.

Yet, when Carol took the floor, she spent little time looking back.? She acknowledged Richard?s kind words and the recap of some recent highlights, but focused most of her remarks on where we are and what we?re likely to find next.? As she put it, ?we?ve been educating one another, guiding ourselves for the moment we?re in now.?

I like that observation for a few reasons.? First, I agree with it, and I personally don?t worry much about the changes besetting higher education.? I think she?s right that developments like distance education and the disruption of credit-hour funding will make us focus on students and their learning, in ways we?ve been rehearsing for decades.

But aside from the inherent appeal of the upbeat, it?s that opening clause that appeals to me, highlighting what I see as the key to Carol?s clout.? She and her organization genuinely learn from their members, continually.? This is good practice for any community organizing, but it?s especially apt for us, embodying as it does the academy?s spirit of collegiality and continuous inquiry.

The next section of her remarks focused on the present:? what all of us have come to believe about (1) the learning outcomes that most matter, (2) what produces those outcomes ? i.e. high-impact practices ? and (3) how to assess for those outcomes.? Her handouts, examples, and data displays in this section may have been familiar to many in the room; I know I?ve used them myself while evangelizing around California.? But at this point it seemed she was just laying the groundwork, reminding us that indeed we?ve been building up to something.

And then she got to the digital revolution, and asked can we now, all of us, flip the classroom?? Recalling the meeting?s Opening Night Forum, she echoed the question posed by Jos? Antonio Bowen: Can we seize the moment and ?clear the teaching-learning space of the lecture??

I found this kind of a bombshell.

Really?? Clear it of the lecture?? I came into higher ed teaching film ? its aesthetics, its production, and in particular screenwriting.? If there was some point I wanted my students to get, I made them sit still and focus.? I often played entire films, because I knew that assigning them for homework would make for a different experience, one more subject to interruption and inattention.? I wanted them to watch, together, in a continuous sitting, how the story was shaped, loading the whole 100-minute experience into their working memory pans for examination when the lights came on.? (More precisely, I?d tend to stop every fifteen or twenty minutes, preferably at a really suspenseful part, and ask them to tell me why they were mad that I cut in, how the filmmakers created that urgent need to know what happens next.)

I thought it worked pretty well, and I got good evaluations.? I imagine in that sense I?m like my colleagues in other disciplines, who have worked hard to make their lectures meaningful and memorable.

Clear all that out?? In other words, the test of whether something should go online is whether it can?

I get it, and I believe it, and I?ll probably lobby for it.? Technologically, it?s where we are, and we don?t need students showing up to write down what we say any more than we need wandering poets to recite the Odyssey.? We?re kind of past both.? But it makes me a little sad.

But if Carol found this watershed moment poignant, it didn?t show.? She focused instead on the responsibility we have, today, to make sure this comes out right:? that we take the best of digital education and use it to keep pushing for purposeful, engaging educational practices that constrain student choice in useful ways, instead of multiplying it infinitely in a kind of Amazon.com of coursework and curricular goo.

She sees e-portfolios as an important counter-pull, giving the student pride of ownership while making the learning visible and goal-oriented.? And by highlighting emerging knowledge and skills, they overcome a troubling lapse in the current panoply of MOOCs, which Carol called ?competency-free zones.?

At the end of her remarks Carol took a few questions, including one from a participant who cited the book 1491.? He pointed out that her reference to scaffolding in education may be culturally biased, and that other kinds of construction could work as education metaphors.? He said that in the book, author Charles Mann describes conquistadors amazed by rope bridges in the new world, since in their experience a bridge always began with a pile driver.? The idea that you could derive strength by braiding together many individually weak strands was a revelation, and (the questioner went on to point out) may not be a bad way to think of the power of networked learning.

It was a thought-provoking observation, and as Carol worked through it, she added that it might be an especially apt model for adult learners, as she found out while working on Lumina?s Degree Qualifications Profile.

And I thought, yeah, still educating one another, right before my eyes.

Tags: AAC&U 2013 Annual Meeting, civic learning, global learning, liberal education

Source: http://blog.aacu.org/index.php/2013/01/25/ernest-boyer-award-presentation/

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