Last week, I discovered that John Lombardi is teaching a class on managing universities. The reading list looks fascinating. I've started working my through the reading and plan to use my journal to reflect on what the readings look like from my perspective in the trenches of the University.

George Kuh's Tracking the Quality of the Undergraduate Experience claims that students today are less interested in abstract qualities of education and more interested in the practical, vocational aspects. I'm not sure I buy this, or if true, I think the process cyclical and mediated by forces larger than the University system. My father used Possum Living in his ecology courses for years and observed how student reactions to it changed over time. At some points in time, students were horrified -- they envisioned going out, getting a good job, and buying themselves a personality. Other cohorts of students were much more receptive to idea that you could adjust your expectations to existing economic realities and find satisfaction. A particular aspect I find absent from Kuh's paper is any consideration of task: what are students actually doing in class. The paper glosses over this, focusing on attitudes and outcomes (e.g. grades). He does say
That students are getting higher grades for lower levels of effort suggests that a tacit agreement has been struck between faculty and students in the form of a disengagement compact: "You leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone" (Kuh et al., 1991).

This attitude undergirds a large part of the traditional American educational enterprise. Students, from elementary school through undergraduate education, have increasingly limited opportunities to engage in "authentic" activities. I'm using "authentic" to mean activities and tasks that have a direct connection or significance in contexts beyond the educational enterprise. Typical educational activities include: (1) reading artificial presentations of academic content (e.g. textbooks), (2) taking notes for oneself while someone lectures about a topic, (3) answering questions by oneself that test recall of facts from reading or lecture, or (4) writing a research-like paper so that someone will make red marks on it. I submit that these are not authentic activities. As educators, we need to find better ways to engage students in authentic activities that inherently require the skills and abilities needed by professional practitioners of our disciplines. As classes get larger, however, the challenge becomes greater.

I have said elsewhere that the educational enterprise is organized like a conspiracy between teachers and students in avoiding meaningful learning. An empowering pedagogy would have teachers and students working together on authentic projects. We do that with our graduate students. There's no reason why we can't do it with our undergraduates (and K-12) as well. A big part of the home schooling movement sees the current "incarceration" model of K-12 education as a form of social violence against the young and is working on solutions. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that no-one is really interesting in better education: it's all about making education cheaper without making it unacceptably worse.

In the Biology Department, we have been successful in shifting the dialog about teaching from topic lists to more authentic learning goals. Our intro courses, particularly, are increasingly organized about reasoning with causal models. Changes have been bubbling up to the upper level courses, as students bring a richer set of skills as they move through the program. We still have a long way to go, but I feel we've made a good start. Randy Phillis identified the real questions about a year ago: what is the value of a face-to-face education and how do you measure that value? I'll be focusing on those questions as I continue my reading.