Tran|Script

I am involved with a project for my school called the American Democracy Project, a neat little multi-campus thing that intersects with the technology and engaged pedagogy foci of my job. And we have a group of people on campus that are involved in that project, people interested in bringing a civic engagement curriculum into the core of the public liberal arts curriculum.

I hope those people won’t mind me sharing my experience of the last year. I think it’s important.

A bunch of people went to a conference a year ago on ADP, and were blown away by the possibilities. They came back to campus thinking big — what about a four course integrative block of courses using a place-based education approach?

Turns out the earliest you can get that together given registrar requirements, room scheduling, core reqs for students, and current law about when textbooks for courses have to be announced is about two years out. And that’s just to run the pilot course.

We explored a number of similarly ill-fated ideas. Then the semester hit, and things got really bad. We started to talk big picture. What are we about? What are we trying to accomplish, ultimately? Unsurprisingly, it turned out we had differences of opinion. Faced with that, we decided we wanted consensus. We would talk until we came to consensus on the big stuff and work down to the details. We would think BIG thoughts.

A year passed. No one ran any new curriculum, really. And so, a year later we were still trying to figure out what the group was about.

We went to the 2010 conference. Everyone got excited. We came back.

Here’s the realization. Forget the big course, forget the big idea, forget consensus. Faculty saw stuff at the conference that was neat. They wanted to do it, because they are wonderful educators, still energized by the possibilities of a liberal arts education. So what was stopping them?

The real answer? Nothing.

Bear with me here. Years of academic freedom and departmental turf wars have made teaching at a college an unusually unfettered job. Do you want to do something in your classroom? Out of your classroom? You want to do anything that doesn’t mess with the semester schedule or the names of courses? Guess what?

There’s nothing that can really stop you.

Business often thinks that the reason education can’t change and will ultimately fail is there is no top-down authority that can make it change. There’s not much hierarchal power at a state college. That’s why the for-profits have to step in, right? To bring some discipline to the enterprise?

But what if that was backwards? What if it is the famously distributed power structure of the modern college that was the key to pulling through this thing? Remember that the businesses that are currently failing — newspapers, record labels, etc. — are pretty top-down affairs. All that top-down discipline may have cut through the gridlock, but that just had the effect of hitting the gas as they headed off the cliff.

Here’s some things you can likely do as faculty at your institution, and no one can stop you:

1. Divide your 80 person lecture class into peer groups, and make class attendance optional. Or break it into smaller classes that meet every other week.
2. Invite outsiders to audit your class online for free.
3. Base the class around working with public data from your state government in small project size groups. Send the processed data back to state government as a public service.
4. Have students that want to continue working on a public project sign up for independent study for the next semester.
5. Allow students to pursue individualized education via opencourseware, and use class time for coaching. Grade students based on whether they achieved their stated goals.

The list goes on. As long as you don’t mess with the registrar, there’s not really a limit to what you can try.

So why did we spend so much time talking about the one or two things that blocked a couple blue sky projects, instead of hacking the existing course schedule and offerings? Why didn’t faculty just change what they teach, and convince others to do the same?

There’s really only two problems higher ed has. One is that many faculty don’t see the need for change. The second problem is that faculty that want to change often think they don’t have the skills or power to do so.

I’m particularly good at convincing faculty of the need to change. And I think I’m also pretty good at helping faculty who want to change what they do, and letting them know — hey, you can actually do this, and I’ll show you how. My colleagues in CELT are similarly skilled.

And what happens, what will save higher education in the end, is we keep plugging away, day after day, at making the case with individual faculty, and helping those that want to join the Secret Revolution. Maybe that’s naive. But everything I see locally here says the strategy works. It a race against time, certainly, but it’s a race worth running, and it’s the best option we’ve got.