Transcript Slide 1

Deeping the Liberal Learning
Experience
Edward Zlotkowski
College of the Holy Cross
April 4, 2013
What the Research Shows
The method people naturally employ to
acquire knowledge is largely unsupported by
traditional classroom practice. The human
mind is better equipped to gather information
about the world by operating within it than by
reading about it, hearing lectures on it, or
studying abstract models of it.
The Santa Fe Institute, The Mind, the Brain and Complex Adaptive Systems (1995)
What We Know About Learning
• The learner creates his or her learning actively & uniquely
• Learning is about making meaning for each individual
by establishing and reworking patterns & connections
• Every student learns all the time, both with us & despite us
• Direct experience decisively shapes individual understanding for
each learner
• Learning occurs best when people are confronted with a
compelling and identifiable problem
• Beyond stimulation, learning requires reflection
• Effective learning is social and interactive
Peter Ewell, “Organizing for Learning,” AAHE Bulletin, Dec. 1997
Two Essentials
1. A felt sense of relevance: ownership of
the material.
2. Actions or activity that confirms a sense
of agency.
COURSE CHARACTERISTICS THAT LEAD TO
“SURFACE“ LEARNING
• Excessive course material
• Lack of opportunity to pursue something in
depth
• Little student choice vis-à-vis interests and
learning approaches
• Anxiety-producing assessment approach
Rhem, “Deep/Surface Approaches to Learning,” in National Teaching & Learning
Forum (1995)
High Impact Practices
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS AND EXPERIENCES
COMMON INTELLECTUAL EXPERIENCES
LEARNING COMMUNITIES
WRITING-INTENSIVE COURSES
COLLABORATIVE ASSIGNMENTS AND PROJECTS
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH
DIVERSITY/GLOBAL LEARNING
SERVICE LEARNING, COMMUNITY-BASED LEARNING
INTERNSHIPS
CAPSTONE COURSES AND PROJECTS
George Kuh, High-Impact Educational Practices, AAC&U, 2008
Next-Century Learning
…today, people worldwide need a whole series of new
competencies…but I doubt such abilities can be
taught solely in the classroom, or be developed solely
by teachers. Higher order thinking and problemsolving skills grow out of direct experience…they
require more than a classroom activity. They develop
through active involvement and real-life experiences
in workplaces and the community.
John Abbott, “The Search for Next-Century Learning,” AAHE Bulletin (March 1996)
Even At Harvard
…I assumed that most important and memorable
academic learning goes on inside the classroom,
while outside activities provide a useful but
modest supplement. The evidence shows that
the opposite is true: learning outside of classes…is
vital.
…Those students who make connections between
what goes on inside and outside the classroom
report a more satisfying college experience.
Richard Light, Making the Most of College (2004)
Faculty & Students
Colleges and universities today show an
increasing disparity between faculty and
students…What suffers as a consequence is the
learning process itself - an observation that
pervades in numerous national
reports…Unfortunately, the natural differences in
learning patterns exhibited by new students are
often interpreted by faculty as deficiencies. What
may be happening, then, is a fundamental
"mismatch" between the preferred styles of
faculty and those of students.
Charles Schroeder, “New Students – New Learning Styles,”
Change (Sept.-Oct. 1993)
Knowledge Consumption vs. Knowledge
Production
The nub of the problem, I believe, is that our society
encourages a consumer rather than a producer
mentality. In school, for example, students spend
much of their time reading and listening and taking
notes. At all levels they are merely consuming what
their teachers and their textbooks tell them, while
the only products they learn to produce are usually
in the form of tests that measure comprehension
rather than intelligence.
Robert Sternberg, Successful Intelligence (1997)
Unstructured Problems
An unfortunate feature of much education today,
as well as the assessment of educational progress,
is its overwhelming emphasis on well-structured
problems. It is easier to teach the facts and only
the facts, and then to test on these facts. Facts
lend themselves to well-structured problems…
with a clear, correct solution….The strategies that
work in solving well-structured problems,
however, often do not work particularly well, or at
all, for ill-structured problems.
Robert Sternberg, Successful Intelligence (1997)
THE SCHOLARSHIP OF ENGAGEMENT
I am convinced that…the academy must become a more vigorous
partner in the search for answers to our most pressing social, civic,
economic, and moral problems, and must reaffirm its historic
commitment to what I call the scholarship of engagement.
The scholarship of engagement means connecting the rich resources
of the university to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical
problems…Campuses would be viewed by both students and
professors not as isolated islands, but as staging grounds for action.
The scholarship of engagement also means creating a special climate
in which the academic and civic cultures communicate more
continuously and creatively with each other.
Ernest Boyer (1996), The Journal of Public Service and Outreach
CBL Characteristics
• Meets assessable learning objectives
• Involves experience with a community-based
organization or group suitable for promoting
civic learning
• Involves structured reflection or analysis
• Is based upon principles of campus-community
partnership and reciprocity
Public Engagement
Personal Contact
& Direct Service
Problem-solving
/Asset-creating
Projects
Research as
Resource
Teaching-Learning Objectives for
Community-Intensive Work
•
•
•
•
•
•
Field-based Research
Theory Testing
Skill Activation
Balancing Inductive & Deductive Approaches
Activation of Moral Imagination
Student Agency
How CBL Affects Students: HERI 2000
Principal Findings
• “Service participation shows significant positive effects on
11 outcome measures: academic performance (GPA,
writing skills, critical thinking skills), values…, self-efficacy,
[and] leadership...”
• “Performing service as part of a course … adds significantly
to the benefits associated with community service
…”(original emphasis)
• “Qualitative findings suggest that service learning is
effective because it facilitates four kinds of outcomes: an
increased sense of personal efficacy, an increased
awareness of the [surrounding world], an increased
awareness of one’s personal values, and increased
engagement in the classroom experience.”
The Difference
That CBL Makes
“There is an empirical fit between our goals
for students and the outcomes of servicelearning. If we want students who are lifelong
learners, can use what they know, and have a
capacity for critical analysis, then programs
like service-learning, which help them
construct knowledge from experience and
reflection , should form the core of their
educational experience.”
Eyler & Giles, Where’s the learning in Service-learning? (1999)
Converging Interests
Academic
Professional
Social
Justice
Reconceptualizing Liberal Learning
In the twentieth century, proponents of liberal
learning drew a sharp dividing line between
“practical” or career studies and the “true liberal
arts.” Today, we contend, we need to erase that
distinction and insist that liberal learning is,
among its other virtues, practical….a good liberal
education should take pride in preparing students
for “effective practice.”
Carol Geary Schneider, The Clark/AAC&U Challenge:
Connecting Liberal Education with real-World Practice” (2009)
LEVELS OF CHANGE
Pedagogy
↓
Epistemology
↓
Ethics
The Legacy of Positivism
Positivism structures our research, our disciplines,
our teaching, and our institutions long after it has
been discredited intellectually…. Positivism
structures patterns of evaluation, assessment, and
outcome measures, sustaining patterns of one-way
service delivery and the conceptualization of poor
and powerless groups as needy “clients,” not
competent citizens. It infuses government funding
patterns for “interventions” to fix social problems. It
shapes the institutions of the market, the media,
health care, and political life. Professionals imagine
themselves outside a shared reality with their fellow
citizens, who are seen as “customers,” or “clients,”
objects to be manipulated or remediated.
Harry Boyte, “Democracy and the Struggle Against Positivism in the Age of the Smart Machine” (2000)
A New Epistemology
If we intend to pursue the “new forms of scholarship” that
Ernest Boyer presents in his Scholarship Reconsidered, we
cannot avoid questions of epistemology since the new forms of
scholarship he describes challenge the epistemology built into
the modern research university….I argue in this article that if the
new scholarship is to mean anything, it must imply a kind of
action research with norms of its own, which will conflict with
the norms of technical rationality – the prevailing epistemology
built into the research universities.
In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high,
hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground,
manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the
use of research-basd theory and technique. In the swampy
lowlands, problems are messy and incapable of technical
solution.
Donald Schön, “Knowing in Action: The New Scholarship
Requires a New Epistemology” (1995)
Connected Knowing
Connected knowers are not dispassionate, unbiased
observers. They deliberately bias themselves in favor
of what they are examining. They try to get inside it
and form an intimate attachment to it. The heart of
connected knowing is imaginative attachment…I am
arguing against an unnecessarily constricted view of
thinking as analytic, detached, divorced from feeling.
B. M. Clinchy, “On Critical Thinking and Connected Knowing” (1996)
Community, Conflict,
and Ways of Knowing
…the way we know has powerful implications for the way
we live…every epistemology tends to become an ethic,
and…every way of knowing tends to become a way of
living….The mode of knowing that dominates higher
education I call objectivism….Objective, analytical,
experimental. Very quickly this seemingly abstract way of
knowing, this seemingly bloodless epistemology, becomes
an ethic. It is an ethic of competitive individualism, in the
midst of a world fragmented and made exploitable by that
very mode of knowing ….We make objects of each other
and the world to be manipulated for our own private
ends….it’s a trained schizophrenia….
•
Parker Palmer (1987)
P
Every intellectual revolution which
has ever stirred humanity into
greatness has been a passionate
protest against inert ideas.
Whitehead. The Aims of Education