"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion... We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?" --Thomas Jefferson to William S. Smith, 1787.
Thirty-seven years, and counting. I’m trying to remember how many different revolutions Roger Williams College/University has experienced in those years. When the memory fails in precision I revert to the word I tell my students not to use–lots. Like Jefferson on rebellion, I think this is a good thing. What’s troubling is the sense I sometimes get that each change is the universal panacea for whatever ails higher education as we practice it here.
When I first came here, taxonomy was the word of the hour. The argument was to move from the lower levels of cognition to the higher–from knowledge to evaluation. Each level was dependent on the previous level...not like love and marriage, you can’t have one without the other, but rather like Dry Bones: “The heel bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone connected to the shin bone, the shin bone connect to the knee bone” etc., etc. That made all the sense in the world to me. I’m reminded of the difference between “if I had some eggs I could have ham and eggs, if I had some ham,” versus the recipe which begins, “first break the eggs”.
Next was Myers-Briggs. Dr. Lorraine Dennis, now Professor Emeritus, introduced us all to the work of Isabel Myers-Briggs, based on the psychology of Carl Jung. A simple forced choice test provided a personality profile. A version of this is available on line, for those who would like to see where the pointy parts of their profiles are. I’m an INFP, or am I? I don’t know if this the version we took at the faculty conference so many years ago. But the idea was an intriguing one: at the root of the idea was a theory that not every faculty member could be equally successful with every student, and that student performance (and teacher satisfaction) could be maximized by aligning teaching and learning personality styles. It made sense to me back then, and makes sense to me now.
We never did much with this–the logistics were formidable in the days before computers ruled the world–they’re probably formidable now. But informally we all made use of this in advising. Given options, we had a pretty good idea which professor would make a good match for which student, and we sold the matches as well as we could. “You really have to have a course with ________, you’ll just love it”. Now when I get a course schedule with the very busy Ms./Mr. Staff teaching about a jillion course sections I shrug and advising is a much less satisfying activity. I can still suggest that five classes back to back MWF isn’t a very good schedule, but when the student asks “What is class X like?” I have to say I don’t know, because I believe the teacher makes all the difference.
On to Education by Mission Statement. I forget what year we had to have one of those jobbies... But I noticed shortly after we decided what our mission was everyone had one–Here is Starbucks mission statement:
To inspire and nurture the human spirit— one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.
I expect it must be hanging on the wall someplace on the ground floor of Global Heritage Hall.
From there (or simultaneously, don’t know which) we became Managers by Objectives, or something like that.
MBO aims to increase organizational performance by aligning goals and subordinate objectives throughout the organization. Ideally, employees get strong input to identifying their objectives, time lines for completion, etc. MBO includes ongoing tracking and feedback in the process to reach objectives.
We tried, and I expect if more of us could separate a goal from an objective with 95% accuracy we might have found this more stimulating. I couldn’t do it, and I really did try.
As I reminisce on paper I notice something about the direction of things here–the paths we followed to better ourselves in our craft moved further away from student centered education. Assessment and objective measures of performance became management tools. Just about the same time or maybe a little later we all became human resources. I never much liked that term, human resources. I guess it elevates me a bit above a piece of chalk or other non-human resources. But it begs the question resource for whom and in what way?
Now we’re embarking on another revolution, replacing the Core with General Education. We used to call that part of a student’s education General a score or more years ago. I don’t mind calling it that again...but I worry about the possibility of a false sense of novelty. I think we may be trying to think outside of a very small box–and that other institutions are devoting more energies toward a radical rethinking of the curriculum than we are. For example, on this year’s agenda is Creditizing the general education program. How many courses and how many credits should it constitute? Universities like George Mason have moved beyond that, and beyond the idea that one mode of delivery of General Education fits all. I’ll probably write a bit about some of the absolutely fascinating innovations going on around the country and abroad in a later entry on whatever this is evolving to be.
For now, let me conclude with a bit of Parker Palmer–whose approach to teaching I find inspiring. I was a Palmerite before I knew he existed, or so I believe. Later, I’ll introduce his thinking more thoroughly, but for now, I’d like to offer this–and a video as well.
I travel the country talking with faculty about the reform of teaching and learning, I meet many people who care about the subject and who have Compelling visions for change. But after we have talked a while, our conversations take an almost inevitable turn. "These are wonderful ideas," someone will say, "but every last one of them will be defeated by the conditions of academic life."
* * * *
The constancy of this experience has forced me to think more carefully about how change really happens. I have found myself revisiting an old but helpful distinction between; an organizational approach and a movement approach to change. Both organizations and movements are valuable, worthy of leadership, and channels for change and a healthy society will encourage symbiosis between the two (indeed, reform-minded administrators often welcome movement energies). But when an - organizational mentality is imposed on a problem that requires movement sensibilities, the result is often despair. I believe that some of us are making precisely that mistake when it comes to the reform of teaching and learning.
The organizational approach to change is premised on the notion that bureaucracies- their rules, roles, and relationships define the limits of social reality within which change must happen. Organizations are essentially arrangements of power, so this approach to change asks: "How can the power contained within the boxes of this organization be rearranged or redirected to achieve the desired goal?" That is a good question except when it assumes that bureaucracies are the only game in town.
* * * *
But there is another avenue toward change: The way of the movement. I began to understand movements when I saw the simple fact that nothing would ever have changed if reformers had allowed themselves to be done in by organizational resistance. Many of us experience such resistance as checkmate to our hopes for change. But for a movement, resistance is merely the place where things begin. The movement mentality, far from being defeated by organizational resistance, takes energy from opposition. Opposition validates the audacious idea that change must come.
* * * *
The genius of movements is paradoxical: They abandon the logic of organizations in order to gather the power necessary to rewrite the logic of organizations. Both the black movement and the women's movement grew outside of organizational boundaries-but both returned to change the lay, and the law, of the land. I believe that the reform of teaching and learning win happen only if we who care about it learn to live this paradox.
Parker Palmer, Divided No More
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