The Humanities Drive; Skills Ride Along

May 4, 2010 By 2 Comments

I am going to reveal a hope of mine; I have long kept this hope closeted, as it seems very likely to bring me disgrace. I hope that Writing Across the Curriculum and Communication Across the Curriculum programs might one day render Composition obsolete.

The development of a specialized knowledge of writing instruction has been one of the most important achievements of higher education in the last forty years. This specialized knowledge of how to teach students to write will remain important. In fact, the incredible utility of this knowledge means that it cannot be confined to specialists! The birth of WAC, analogous to the invention of the web-link, has the potential to completely transform the way we conceive of the essential material of higher education. No longer can we isolate writing instruction to language classes. Could this be the idea that reverses a hundred-and-twenty year trend of increasing specialization in the curriculum?

Okay. So, once again, I have resorted to polemic (here, in the form of a strange sort-of-Hegelean fantasy). However, my conviction is a serious one. The humanities are ill served by the teaching of writing prior to the more fundamental questions. Why are we here, what do we do, how do we form the bases for our beliefs? These deeper questions, which students ponder on their own, are seldom addressed in their course work in Humanities disciplines, even though these are the questions that motivate humanistic study.

I have, tentatively, shared these ideas with my colleagues. The ideas are not well received. “If you can’t write, you can’t think. How can you work on big ideas if you can hardly sort out your words into sentences or your sentences into paragraphs?”

Further confession: I am either so prescient or so far-fetched in my thinking that I even like to imagine WAC and CAC will lead to curricular solutions to the economic problems of today’s higher education in the humanities. There are too many graduate students. Graduate education takes too long. Professorships become scarce as institutions increasingly rely on adjunct- and other temporary appointments. Meanwhile, enrollments continue to climb, especially at junior and community colleges. A caste system has formed where only “the best” professors can teach original courses, and an underclass of highly educated professionals prepare the masses by running them through a byzantine system of prerequisites for contact with the elite specialists.

Specialization in the sciences is important. In the humanities, specialization is like a derivatives market; it takes something that has a basic function, and, in trying to increase the wealth this thing produces, it fouls the thing’s basic functionality.

Let every graduate teach what he wants, but have him also armed to teach writing. Instead of, “how can you work on big ideas if you can’t write a sentence,” let it be demanded, “how can you build advanced knowledge, if you can’t teach basic writing?” The system of levels and prerequisites will fall away. The humanities will drive, and skills will ride along.

Is this really such a disgraceful idea?

Filed Under: Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Higher Education, Pedagogy, teaching, To Ponder, What if . . ., Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Freshbloggers

September 24, 2009 By 12 Comments

This semester, we’re managing our largest lift on Blogs@Baruch yet. In addition to an increasing variety of projects that I’ll blog about in the coming weeks, every Freshman Seminar at Baruch currently is blogging. That’s roughly 60 sections, populated by over 1200 students.

Baruch Freshmen at Convocation, September 2009. Click to see photo in its original location.

Yowser.

Each Seminar is directed by a Peer Mentor, a talented upper level Baruch student responsible for helping newcomers adjust to life at Baruch. The seminars meet every other week, and Freshpersons are required to attend lectures, panels, exhibits, seminars, and trainings, distributed across six “enrichment” areas over the course of the term. Then they’re supposed to blog about their experiences, and discuss them when they meet with their classmates.

Launching the project was a bit of bear, as we had to create the blogs, get the users registered, tie the whole deal together, and give some training to the Peer Mentors, who are crucial to the project. Ultimately, I created a custom theme (built on Carrington Blog), with certain core components to which each section would have access– a List of Seminars and Peer Mentors, a Guide to Blogging for Freshmen (produced by the Office of Student Affairs, who directs FRO), a description of the six enrichment areas, and a Google Calendar that displays upcoming events. I then created a Mother Blog, which syndicates posts from across the sixty sections of FRO, using the FeedWordPress plugin. The Mother Blog collects and stores all of the posts in one place, allowing faculty and administrators to look in on the writing that’s happening in FRO. Students are thus contributing to small discussions in their seminars, and also to a broader discussion among all Freshmen.

fro

Thus far, they’ve been writing quite willingly. In the fewer than three weeks since this thing was launched, we’ve aggregated about 900 posts; at the pace we’re going, we should reach well more than 4000 unique posts by the end of the semester. That doesn’t even begin to address the commenting, which has varied in intensity across the individual blogs. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to mirror comments between the original location of the post and the space where it is republished… if we did, and we hope to be able to do that soon, the level of dynamism would increase.

Needless to say, we’re looking at an awful lot of writing, and we’re trying to make sense of it in a few ways. We’ve created categories on the Mother Blog for each of the six enrichment areas so that posts directly pertaining to them can be easily sorted. This will allow the two administrators who oversee FRO– Mark Spergel, the Director of Student Orientation and Freshman Year Incentive, and Shadia Sachedina, the Associate Director of Student Life– to get student perspectives on the wide range of extra-curricular programs the school offers. Further, simple searches will allow certain segments of the Baruch community to see what students are saying about them. For instance, many of the early posts offered student perspective on tours of the library. Our librarians have already begun searching for “library” and “library tour” on the FRO blog to read student responses. Several blog posts have engaged Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, the Freshman text.

Other searches hold the potential to help identify students with like interests: “photography,” “history,” and “football” all offer returns. Such a use of the FRO Mother Blog suggests another function that this project can play, perhaps more effectively in future iterations: social networking. As a commuter campus, we constantly struggle to help our students see themselves as part of a community, and FRO attempts to address that tension. Integrating Blogs@Baruch into FRO makes that attempt much stronger, as students can more easily find, connect, and engage with their classmates through our platform. Next year, I’d love to get BuddyPress working in this project to foreground the social networking component… but, one step at a time.

At the end of the term, we’ll have, easily collected and archived, multiple writing samples from the majority of incoming students. With some more thinking and organization, this holds great potential for assessment, integration into writing instruction, early intervention, and assistance for ESL students. Ultimately, this project allows us the opportunity to further the core missions of Blogs@Baruch: increasing the amount and variety of writing that our students do, and nurturing critical thinking about the use of digital tools throughout the Baruch College community. Given the hectic nature of our launch this year, we weren’t able to spend enough time thinking collectively about the general education opportunities embedded in this project. I had argued that we should do a pilot with 20% of the sections so that we could be sure to more closely support our users and think more intensively about the implications of what we’re doing, but for various reasons, a small-scale pilot wasn’t feasible. But when we do this again, we know that the canvas works, what the challenges are in the mechanics of the thing, and how to improve our planning. We’ll be able to make a more significant investment in helping the Peer Mentors better understand the possibilities and implications of doing college work on the open web, crucial knowledge that they can then pass on to all Freshpersons.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Higher Education, Online Learning, Pedagogy, Syndicated Content, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , ,

Let Us Now Propose Our Ideal University

June 8, 2009 By 2 Comments

Several weeks ago, an old friend of mine from my undergraduate days at Sarah Lawrence College (who, it should be noted, is about to enter a graduate program in Business Administration) sent me a link to a New York Times Op-Ed article. His comment was “this op ed is great. He’s basically saying that all universities should be like Sarah Lawrence.”

The editorial, “End the University as We Know It” by Mark C. Taylor, did not actually mention Sarah Lawrence College at all. The article does call for the end of the tenure system, of doctoral dissertations, and of the system of academic departments based on traditional disciplines such as Psychology, English, Philosophy, etcetera.

It is this last detail that must have reminded my friend of our alma mater.  That is, the curriculum at Sarah Lawrence is arranged around “problem-focused” topics (to borrow a phrase from Taylor’s editorial). Students can take courses such as “Surgically and Pharmacologically Shaping Selves” or “Contemporary American Politics: the 2008 Election in Context,” (two offerings from the 08/09 Course Catalogue) without being a Political-Science major or first taking introductory courses in medical anthropology. In addition, the way the professors are tenured — without rank — in disciplines rather than in departments allows for the fluid creation of new disciplines to adapt to changing fields of study. Disciplines such as Global Studies, Ethnic and Diasporic Studies, and Science, Technology and Society were created in all likelihood by interested faculty in extant disciplines. The college has no majors or minors. Every undergraduate takes a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree. Some students choose to prepare for entry into law school or medical school or to design a highly specialized program suiting their own passions. However, the net effect of this curriculum is that the college graduates class after class of knowledgeable generalists.

That is the extent of the similarity between Sarah Lawrence College and Mark C. Taylor’s idea of a “university for the twenty-first century.” Sarah Lawrence does not grant doctoral degrees so his suggestions about how to revise the dissertation hardly apply. Taylor’s suggestion of ending tenure certainly is not exemplified by Sarah Lawrence where all faculty, in theory anyway, are tenured or on the tenure-track.

The idea to end the tenure system, radically distracting as it is from his other ideas, seems to me the only proposal that Professor Taylor puts forth in the article that would actually address the set of problems he starts out with — the failing economy of graduate education. Prior to the recent meltdown in the global economy, the problem of a glut of Ph.D.s for a dearth of tenure-track positions seemed to me a bit of a bugbear.  Daunted by the job market as a doctoral candidate and no stranger to exploitation as an adjunct, I nonetheless had felt curiously optimistic that after several years of grueling applications I could land that sought-after tenure track position somewhere in the United States. This optimism had been based on the impending retirement of the baby-boomers, however, and it shrank along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the value of all those 401k accounts. Reading this Op-Ed after a season of cancelled jobs and announced hiring freezes, I found myself sympathetic to Taylor’s polemical claim that “graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning” and also found myself for the first time oddly receptive to a proposal to end the tenure system. Certainly, mandatory retirement age seems like a reasonable idea.

For many years, I have been pondering the economics higher education. With the skyrocketing numbers of young people enrolling in college and especially junior college in the United States, there must be another way to increase the access of all these students to higher learning than exploitive adjunct labor.

Professor Taylor’s proposals seem unlikely to implemented any time soon. But maybe his example should be followed. I propose we all go out on a limb and imagine our ideal universities. What ideas do you have? Perhaps the existence of one college that has managed to become an elite institution without playing by the rules (besides having no majors, did I mention — no grades!) should inspire us with the value of the improbable.

Filed Under: Administration, Higher Education, Jobs, Liberal Arts Tagged With: , , ,