Tomorrow's Professor Blog

Folks:

The posting below looks at the integration of the liberal arts into a business curriculum at the undergraduate level.  . It is by Lynn S. Arenella, associate professor of natural and applied sciences, Angelique M. Davi, assistant professor of English, Cyrus R. Veeser, associate professor of history and director of the Jeanne and Dan Valente Center for Arts and Sciences, and Roy A. Wiggins III,  professor and chair of finance, all at Bentley College. The article is from the Winter, 2009 issue of Liberal Education, Volume 95, Number 1. Liberal Education is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities [http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/index.cfm] Copyright © 2009, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: How to Succeed in the Academy: A Chair’s Advice to Junior Faculty

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

The Best of Both Worlds: Infusing Liberal Learning into a Business Curriculum

At Bentley College, a four-year private institution located in Waltham, Massachusetts, over 90 percent of students major in business disciplines. For decades, Bentley’s strong arts and sciences departments have battled for a place within an overwhelmingly career-focused curriculum, and great strides have been made to change the traditional relationship between business and the arts and sciences. Recently, for example, students gained the opportunity to pursue a double major comprising a business discipline and an interdisciplinary liberal studies program. And over two recent summers, in an effort designed to facilitate the integration of liberal learning principles across the curriculum, the college has offered weeklong workshops to faculty in both business and the arts and sciences.

The value of liberal learning

Bentley’s desire to integrate liberal learning principles across the curriculum is based on the belief that business and the arts and sciences are complementary, rather than competitive, elements of a complete education. A genuinely rich education should be the basis for both professional success and a more meaningful life. The ability to deal with ambiguity, for example, or to integrate seemingly unrelated ideas and perspectives helps young women and men succeed in their chosen fields. This notion is echoed by the former chief executive officer of General Motors, Roger Smith (1987), who believes that “the Liberal Arts may ultimately prove to be the most relevant learning model. People trained in the Liberal Arts learn to tolerate ambiguity and to bring order out of apparent confusion. They have the kind of sideways thinking and cross-classifying habit of mind that comes from learning, among other things, the many different ways of looking at literary works, social systems, chemical processes, or languages.”

Fostering such “sideways thinking” is one aim of the liberal arts. Getting business students to recognize that they, too, can benefit from such a background is essential to their success in industry. Employers are asking for a broader set of skills and attitudes that include more effective communication and quantitative skills as well as familiarity with and grounding in issues related to innovation, diversity, and global cultures (Schneider 2005). According to Roberts T. Jones (2005, 35), “virtually all occupational endeavors require a working appreciation of the historical, cultural, ethical, and global environments that surround the application of skilled work.”

Given the economic effects of globalization, institutions of higher education need to reexamine their approaches to teaching and learning in order to ensure that they are preparing their students for the ever-changing nature of “the world of work” (Schneider 2005, 3). As Thomas L. Friedman (2006, 302) observes, “the first, and most important, ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to ‘learn how to learn’-to constantly absorb, and teach yourself, new ways of doing old things or new ways of doing new things.” Such an approach is the basis of a liberal education.

Liberal learning workshops

In 2004, Bentley College received a grant from the Davis Foundation to integrate liberal learning with professional training. Recognizing the overlap between the two traditional approaches and enhancing some of those approaches was one goal of the workshops supported by the Davis Foundation. “Our goal,” the grant application explained, “is to reshape the curriculum in such a way that our students will encounter core liberal arts skill sets and perspectives in all their courses, and will be able to make meaningful and productive links between and among seemingly vastly different learning contexts. The priorities of liberal education will then be ‘marbled’ throughout the curriculum.” In addition, we set out to “marble” these perspectives and skill sets into the curriculum so thoroughly that students will repeatedly encounter and practice these elements in a multitude of courses and contexts well beyond the general education core. Ideally, students will be exposed to these ideas, concepts, and complexities over four years in their general education, arts and sciences, and business programs of study.

Following a collegewide search, the dean of arts and sciences appointed the chair of the finance department as the program director for the Davis grant. In conjunction with the dean, the director, in turn, appointed three liberal arts faculty members to serve as both organizers and facilitators of the workshops. These faculty members were chosen from the history, natural and applied sciences, and English departments. During the fall and spring semesters of the first year, they met to assess current liberal learning initiatives on campus, to discuss the needs of the faculty, and to design a faculty workshop. They determined that the workshop should encourage faculty to examine the limitations of discipline-based thinking and practices, to consider interdisciplinary approaches to current assignments, and to infuse their courses with materials that highlight the five strategic areas of the grant: ethics and social responsibility; technology and effective communication; creative thinking and critical analysis; service to the community; and diversity and global citizenship.

Throughout the first year, the Davis group worked to develop a workshop that would provide the support, forum, and resources to help faculty consider their syllabi, cases, and course projects in light of the strategic priorities and perspectives; explore productive ways of integrating some dimension of these priorities into what they already do in the classroom; and present their new ideas to and get feedback from workshop colleagues. Faculty were then invited to apply for a place in one of two weeklong workshops to be held during the summer. As part of the application process, each described an aspect of a course he or she was interested in revising (e.g., modifying an existing assignment, revising a course syllabus, rethinking an approach to classroom lectures or discussions, or designing a new module). Once accepted, faculty were encouraged to come to the workshop having thought through the ways in which they might already be incorporating these liberal arts perspectives into their courses or to consider ways in which they might begin to infuse their courses with these perspectives or skill sets.

In addition to enhancing the classroom experience for students, the workshops enabled participants to hone their teaching craft. Bentley already provides faculty with a variety of resources for creating dynamic classrooms, such as technologically advanced classrooms and seminars on topics like ethics and diversity. The workshops supported by the Davis Foundation grant supplemented those programs by providing participating faculty with the opportunity to infuse their courses with liberal learning principles.

Modeling one approach

In designing and leading the workshops, the facilitators were committed to modeling liberal learning principles in the modules offered. For example, facilitators designed sessions that allowed workshop participants to give input on the direction of a session. Recognizing that faculty might attend the sessions with some reservations about being able to implement all of the demonstrated liberal learning strategies in their courses, the first day’s module, entitled “Obstacles and Impediments,” gave faculty an opportunity to voice their concerns. These included worries about teaching in areas outside of their expertise and sacrificing course content in order to include themes like diversity or ethics. Participants also discussed their anxieties about whether they could rely upon institutional support for innovative approaches as well as about the potential downside to innovation.

The overall approach of the workshop was to break down preconceptions of how faculty from different disciplines and divisions teach. During the first two days of the weeklong session, faculty participants deconstructed what currently goes on in classrooms across the college. In order to free them of any disciplinary constraints, modules asked faculty to create assignments, syllabi, and business cases for courses other than their own. In one module, for example, faculty were asked to create a syllabus for a course on Southeast Asia. They were given no other particulars or parameters. The resulting syllabi emerged from collaborations among faculty from a range of departments, including economics, philosophy, finance, and English. Faculty collaborated across disciplines and, by doing so, came up with creative solutions to the many “obstacles” they had listed on that first day. In one case, faculty from history, English, and finance created a transdisciplinary course that included a two-week embedded travel component.

The experience of designing “someone else’s syllabus,” along with kindred exercises, largely succeeded in liberating faculty participants from their devotion to narrow, rigid disciplinary paradigms. The transdisciplinary collaborations proved beneficial as faculty moved into a “reconstruction” phase toward the end of the week and were asked to concentrate their efforts on changes they wanted to make to their own course materials. This was performed in concentrated personal time called “mini-sabbaticals,” which were used to finalize independent work. Following these focused efforts, faculty were asked to pair up with another participant from a different discipline in order to present their ideas. Then, each person presented his or her partner’s plans to the larger group.

These paired presentations turned out to be among the most powerful experiences of the workshop. In each case, participants made a special effort to understand and accurately articulate what their partners had developed. For example, in one presentation, a faculty member from the finance department reviewed the proposed changes of a faculty member from the English department. Together, they collaborated on ways the literature professor could “marbleize” the themes throughout her Shakespearean film course. In return, the literature professor helped the finance professor think through the integration of ethical issues into his corporate finance course. In another pairing, a faculty member from the taxation department helped a historian create Great Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, an ambitious course that incorporates material usually fenced off within philosophy and literature and that was later submitted to the college’s curriculum committee for consideration as a future undergraduate offering.

Unexpected benefits

While facilitators planned numerous activities and exercises for the workshop participants, some of the benefits of the workshops derived from experiences outside the classroom setting. Faculty who had often seen each other only at full faculty meetings or during committee work spent one week together from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. each day. The lunch hour, often a break from workshop modules, gave participants a chance to become acquainted and to learn about each other’s areas of specialization. The discussions generated during these open periods resulted in arts and sciences faculty and business faculty disabusing each other of misunderstandings about their pedagogies, curricula, and disciplines. Many faculty expressed delight at being officially encouraged, for the first time in their careers, to think in unorthodox and even subversive ways about the content of their courses and their classroom methods.

The Davis Workshops have been an extraordinary success for Bentley College and have influenced pedagogy and thinking across departments and disciplines. Over the course of two summers of workshops, seventy-four of approximately 250 full-time faculty members took part, including thirty-five tenured faculty and twenty-four tenure-track faculty. In all, sixty syllabi in undergraduate and graduate courses were in some way reshaped by the workshops. But the Davis Workshops were also at the core of a broader redefinition and realignment of the role of the arts and sciences in the culture of Bentley. They served as the intellectual inspiration for innovative arts and sciences initiatives at the core of the college’s mission. In retrospect this makes perfect sense, since the workshops encouraged critical reflection about the limitations imposed by our disciplines and promoted creative connections across disciplines around shared values and perspectives. But the degree to which interdisciplinary collaboration has grown is quite astounding.

References

Friedman, T. 2006. The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Jones, R. T. 2005. Liberal Education for the twenty-first century: Business expectations. Liberal Education 91 (2): 32-7.

Schneider, C. G. 2005. President’s message: Liberal Education and America’s Promise. Liberal Education 91 (1): 2-3.

Smith, R. B. 1987. The liberal arts and the art of management. In Educating managers: Executive effectiveness through liberal learning, ed. Johnston et al., 21-33. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled@aacu.org, with the authors’ names on the subject line.

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Folks:

The posting below looks at the non-technical factors necessary for effective online learning. It is by Roxanne Cullen & Michael Harris of Ferris State University, in Big Rapids, Michigan. and is #46 in a series of selected excerpts from the NT&LF newsletter reproduced here as part of our “Shared Mission Partnership.” NT&LF has a wealth of information on all aspects of teaching and learning. If you are not already a subscriber, you can check it out at [http://www.ntlf.com/] The on-line edition of the Forum–like the printed version – offers subscribers insight from colleagues eager to share new ways of helping students reach the highest levels of learning. National Teaching and Learning Forum Newsletter, Volume 18, Number 5, September 2009.© Copyright 1996-2009. Published by James Rhem & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: The Best of Both Worlds: Infusing Liberal Learning  into a Business Curriculum

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

Online Learning: More Than Technical Savvy

Too often student convenience or institutional profitability drives the decisions regarding what courses become part of the online curriculum and what prerequisites, if any, prepare students for the experience rather than goals for student learning. The notion that students emerging from the K-12 system today, the generation dubbed the millenials, have such technologically savvy that they can handle the rigors of fully online learning is unfounded. Admittedly, today’s students are, as Julie Evans of the Project Tomorrow Speak Up Survey on education and technology puts it, digitally “native” while their teachers, parents, and the rest of us appear to them as “immigrants” in their technology- rich world. She writes that students are functioning as a “digital advance team for the rest of us, adopting and adapting new technologies for increasing productivity beyond our expectations” (5). She calls on K-12 educators to rethink their hesitancy to embrace technology because of its potential as a means of promoting cheating, and to begin to consider new forms of learning and assessment in this digital era.

Evans’ views are based on data collected over the past six years reporting on the responses of over 1.5 million students, teachers, parents, and administrators about their use of technology. The interesting question that this raises, however, in relation to online learning is why it is, then, that adult learners, the “immigrants” of the technological world, tend to perform better in fully online learning environments than their younger, “native” counterparts?

Tweet, Yes, But Think?

We posit that readiness for online learning has less to do with students’ knowledge of technology and digital dexterity and more to do with their knowledge of how to learn and their motivation to engage fully in the process. Therefore, we submit that the introduction of online experiences for students should be consciously engineered to best capitalize on their readiness for independent learning, and that the progression into the online learning environment be intentionally built into the undergraduate curriculum rather than simply offering students an open menu of face-to-face, hybrid, or fully online courses.

The model of curriculum revision we envision is based on types of learning rather than on units of knowledge, with the goal being to integrate different types of learning as appropriate to the readiness of the learner. Placing types of learning at the center of curriculum review rather than types of knowledge (for example, hours of general education as opposed to hours in the major) provides new insight to the task of revising curricula. A variety of learning opportunities enriches any curriculum by accommodating individual learners and approaching learning outcomes from multiple perspectives.

Miller & Seller (1990) define three types of learning according to the role of the learner. The first is transmissive, sometimes called assimilative learning, which assumes knowledge is content, a transferrable commodity to be gained by demonstration, telling, and modeling. Transmissive learning is the hallmark of the instructional paradigm. The second type, transactional learning, assumes knowledge is constructed by learners and is characterized by experiential activities, student-to- student collaboration, and acts of discovery through active learning and team-based projects. In this learner-centered approach, the educator is designer, one who facilitates learning. The third type, transformative learning, asks the learner to assess new knowledge in relation to existing knowledge, requiring considerable reflection upon the assumptions and biases that the learner has accepted as part of his or her existing knowledge.

Building Toward Androgogy

While these three types of learning cannot be fully integrated as they arise from opposing philosophies of learning, it is possible to build a curriculum that progressively shifts from transmissive or instructional-based pedagogy to the transactive and transformational learning that characterizes the active learning pedagogy of the learner-centered paradigm. This conception is consistent with the shift that Knowles (1984) identified between teaching children (pedagogy) and teaching adults (androgogy), defining pedagogy as the art and science of teaching and androgogy as the art and science of helping others learn. Androgogy assumes that adults are self-directed learners and that their life experiences affect their learning both in regard to preconceptions as well as resources for future learning. Adults also have a strong sense of immediacy and require relevance to motivate their learning. Traditional-aged college students are in a transitional phase between pedagogy and androgogy, for while in some respects they can be considered adult learners, unlike the adult learner who has a wealth of life experience and workplace knowledge to draw upon, traditional-aged students emerging from high school do not have a substantial network of previous knowledge from which to draw (Harris & Cullen, 2009). In other words, there is still a need for some transmissive learning opportunities, particularly in light of the fact that less mature students tend to favor surface learning and memorization.

New Scaffolding

We propose a model of curriculum review that attempts to infuse the three learning types, progressively reducing the opportunities for transmissive learning in favor of transactive and transformational experiences. In this more holistic approach, curricula are organized according to broad concepts and types of learning opportunities as opposed to a sequence of units of knowledge. Redefining curriculum in terms of depth of knowledge as opposed to information transfer holds the promise of transforming the undergraduate curriculum into an educational experience that focuses on the student’s self-conscious attention to the process of learning, a curriculum that is intentional and learner-centered.

Can online learning support this kind of learning? A considerable body of research suggests that it can. Teaching online, whether web supported, hybrid, or fully online supports a learner-centered approach for the teacher. The teacher in the learner-centered class is a designer of learning opportunities, one who sets the stage and then steps aside while the students engage in knowledge constructing activities. Particularly in asynchronous fully online delivery, the teacher has to assume the role of designer and create the avenues for students to actively engage with course material and their peers in order to learn, because there is no single point of contact between students and teacher that allows for the teacher to remain front and center, so to speak. Weigel’s 2002 book, Deep Learning for a Digital Age, offers a thorough examination of how online tools can be used to foster constructivist pedagogy and learner- centered teaching, though he does not advocate fully online courses for most institutions.

New Tools

The tools available for online learning lend themselves to community building, sharing information, seeking information outside the confines of the course. Simulations, group research projects, discussion forums, chat and group functions, and wikis are the kinds of activities that foster deep learning and transactive learning experiences. Online learning by its very nature requires active participation on the part of the student and a great degree of learner discipline, motivation, and control. All of these facets of the online experience foster engagement, reflection, and create an environment where deep learning is possible.

But we must also acknowledge that online learning, whether fully online or blended/hybrid, presents challenges and even barriers for learners. While, of course, the online venue itself does not preclude courses designed around the memorization and regurgitation of facts, the tools that are avail- able for online teaching are just that: tools. It is their use that makes a course learner-centered. For example, the assessment function can be used in a traditional manner or it can be used to automatically generate self tests for students in order for them to begin to regulate their own learning. Discussions can fall flat face-to-face or online, but in the online environment it is much easier for the teacher to get full participation because of the ease of tracking and also the ease of privately encouraging individuals who need help, which is not always easy in the face-to-face format. Tools like wikis are great for collaboration and the individual webpages for students foster self-expression and engagement in the online community. The online environment also makes it very easy for students to contribute material in addition to that provided by the teacher, which presents opportunities to examine the quality of information that is so readily available to them. Some suggest that teachers in the online environment resist the temptation to create a multitude of links for students and instead encourage students to discover the information outside the course as an active learning strategy.

If we are to revise curricula based on types of learning rather than types of knowledge, the issue of online learning must be addressed as part of that discussion, for the opportunities that online learning in its various formats can offer the learning environments are too robust to be left to chance. We need to keep in mind that not all students are ready for many learner-centered practices, so learner-centered strategies need to be introduced incrementally so that students are prepared for them. The same holds true for online learning. We need to prepare our students to engage in their learning using these tools, keeping in mind that independent learning is a learned behavior that develops over time. Reviewing curriculum comprehensively with a focus on types of learning holds the promise of creating an undergraduate experience that is transformational and prepares students for the challenges of today’s workforce as well as a life of continuous learning.

Contact

Roxanne Cullen, Ph.D.

Professor of English

Prakken 120

Ferris State University

Big Rapids, MI 49307

Telephone: (231) 591-2713

E-mail: Roxanne_Cullen@ferris.edu

References

*  Evans, Julie. 2009. “High-Tech Cheating? Students See It Differently.” Retrieved July 18, 2009, from http://www.eschoolnews.com/ news/top-news/index.cfm?print&print&i=59609.

*  Harris, Michael & Cullen, Roxanne. 2009. “A Model for Curricular Revision: The Case of Engineering.” Innovative Higher Education 34/1:51-63.

*  Knowles, Malcolm S. 1984. Andragogy in Action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

*  Miller, John P. & Seller, Wayne. 1990. Curriculum: Perspectives and Practice. Toronto: CoppClark Pitman.

*  Weigel, Van B. 2002. Deep Learning for a Digital Age: Technology’s Untapped Potential to Enrich Higher Education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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Folks:

The posting below looks at an approach that gets students much more involved in grading outcomes. It is by Scott Jaschik and is from the August 3, 2009 issue of INSIDE HIGHER ED, an excellent – and free – online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education.  You can subscribe by going to: http://insidehighered.com/.  Also for a free daily update from Inside Higher  Ed, e-mail [scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com]. Copyright © 2009 Inside Higher Ed Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: Online Learning: More Than  Technical Savvy

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Getting Out of Grading

Few parts of their jobs seem to annoy professors more than grading. The topic consumes gripe sessions, blog posts and creates plenty of professorial angst (not to mention student angst).

Cathy Davidson has decided that the best way to change grading is to take herself out of it. Davidson, a Duke University English professor, announced on her blog last week that she was going to give students the power to earn A’s or some other grade based on a simple formula in which she wouldn’t play much of a role.

“I loved returning to teaching last year after several years in administration … except for the grading,” she wrote on her blog. “I can’t think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning than by assigning a grade. It turns learning (which should be a deep pleasure, setting up for a lifetime of curiosity) into a crass competition: how do I snag the highest grade for the least amount of work? how do I give the prof what she wants so I can get the A that I need for med school? That’s the opposite of learning and curiosity, the opposite of everything I believe as a teacher, and is, quite frankly, a waste of my time and the students’ time. There has to be a better way….”

Her approach? “So, this year, when I teach ‘This Is Your Brain on the Internet,’ I’m trying out a new point system. Do all the work, you get an A. Don’t need an A? Don’t have time to do all the work? No problem. You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart. You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points. Add up the points, there’s your grade. Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing ‘what the prof wants.’ No gaming the system. Clearcut. Student is responsible.”

That still leaves the question of determining whether students have done the work. Here again, Davidson plans to rely on students. “Since I already have structured my seminar (it worked brilliantly last year) so that two students lead us in every class, they can now also read all the class blogs (as they used to) and pass judgment on whether they are satisfactory. Thumbs up, thumbs down,” she writes.

“If not, any student who wishes can revise. If you revise, you get the credit. End of story. Or, if you are too busy and want to skip it, no problem. It just means you’ll have fewer ticks on the chart and will probably get the lower grade. No whining. It’s clearcut and everyone knows the system from day one. (btw, every study of peer review among students shows that students perform at a higher level, and with more care, when they know they are being evaluated by their peers than when they know only the teacher and the TA will be grading).”

Several of those posting comments on Davidson’s blog expressed support for her approach or outlined similar strategies they had tried or wanted to try.

One post, “Never underestimate grade orientation,” noted a caution. “I can see this working with a small course. I tried something similar several years ago at Buffalo. My mistake was to make it a ‘curved’ class (though only a positive curve). Two ‘gangs’ (one a group of fraternity brothers, the other just people who met and formed up) reached an agreement that they would vote up each others’ work no matter what, and non-members’ work down, no matter what, in order to increase their own grade in the class favorably, and hurt others’ grades. I wrote it up a little here. When I intervened, I got complaints: I had set up the rules, several said, if I didn’t like the outcome, how was it their fault.”

Another posting describes a more successful attempt of a similar approach: “I’ve done something like this with my big undergrad class, ‘Intersections: Race, Gender & Sexuality in US History,’ for years now. They do all the work, at a ‘good faith’ level of quality (earning a check from their TA), show up on time to all classes and participate in discussion sections — they get an A. Grades scale down from there. The greatest thing about it is that many students without previous educational privilege *love* it and often do extremely well when not being judged in the usual way — reading a book a week, writing response papers every week, and ultimately participating at grad student level. Entitled students who try to skate by on a good prose style do not like it at all.”

In an e-mail interview, Davidson said her announcement represents more than her personal distaste for grading as we know it. Rather, her views relate to ideas she explores in her forthcoming book (from Viking Press next year), The Rewired Brain: The Deep Structure of Thinking for the Information Age.

“Many of us are frustrated with grading as presently, historically constructed and are finding a mismatch between the kinds of learning happening on the Internet (from a 5-year-old customizing her Pokemon onward) and the rigid forms of assessment that has become the hallmark of formal education, K-12 and beyond, in the late 20th and now the 21st century. In an era when customizing, process, collaboration, and learning from mistakes are hallmark, when we are all having to revise how we think about the human desire to work together towards a goal — whether a Wikipedia entry or a Netflix software competition — we are saddled with a Machine Age model of assessment which is as rigid, reductive, uncreative, and uncollaborative as we can imagine. We know from early childhood studies that if you tell an American toddler ‘here comes the teacher,’ he sits up straight, looks up, shuts up, and stops smiling. That is not the kind of teacher I want to be. But by the time young people enter college, they have cordoned off ‘education’ into ‘grading.’ ”

Her approach to grading, Davidson said, “encourages students to rethink everything they’ve learned about grading within higher education and encourages them to think about how you evaluate quality and performance — not for a grade but for the respect of one’s peers and one’s own self-respect. This is one of the important skills of the 21st century.”

She stressed that she’s not abandoning the role of grading, but having students take ownership of the task in a way that shows that “evaluation, in a serious way, is part of collaborative, interactive creativity. Right now, we have an educational system that encourages ‘teaching to the test.’ That’s appalling as a learning philosophy and a total waste of precious learning time and opportunities in the digital age.”

Whatever the results of her grading approach, Davidson is in a secure position — as a highly regarded, tenured professor at a leading university — to try something new. She acknowledged that there would be additional issues for a junior professor or non-tenure-track instructor taking this idea, but said that they shouldn’t rule it out. And she noted problems with continuing with the status quo.

“One never knows what one can get away with pre-tenure and that is why I tell all of my students to make their department chairs partners in anything they do, from the most traditional to the most experimental — and to keep a paper trail. That is, write to set up a meeting to explain one’s pedagogical philosophy in a case like this, send it to your chair, ask to meet with the chair, discuss it, and then write a follow-up note thanking the chair for the meeting, recapping it, and giving her or him credit for any changes you’ve made in the syllabus (for example) and then send a copy of the revised syllabus. That is a helpful process for everyone involved as well as a wonderful addition to one’s tenure portfolio,” she said.

“Who wouldn’t want a teacher who thinks seriously and deeply about what teaching means? I don’t believe anything is risky if it is well thought out and well communicated. I happen to believe that just about everything is risky (including playing by the rules) without careful intention and careful communication.”

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Folks:

The posting below looks at the challenges of infusing public health education across the undergraduate curriculum. It is by Kathleen Roe, professor of community health and chair of the health science department, San José State University, San José, California. The article is from the Summer, 2009 issue of Peer Review, Volume 11, Number 3. Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities [www.aacu.org/peerreview] Copyright © 2009, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: Getting Out of Grading

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Infusing Public Health Education in the Undergraduate Curriculum:

The Experience of a Comprehensive University

The Institute of Medicine’s 2003 call to introduce all undergraduate students to public health education has stimulated the imaginations of faculty across the curriculum and across the country (Gebbie, Rosenstock, and Hernandez 2003; Riegelman, Albertine, and Persily 2007). The subsequent Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) initiative, the Educated Citizen and Public Health, brought forward the potential contributions of a public health perspective to liberal arts programs, particularly in smaller institutions with strong commitment to integrative learning and transdisciplinary inquiry (Albertine, Persily, and Riegelman 2007).

My colleagues and I, faculty at a large comprehensive university, watched these developments with both delight and revelation. Our delight was that of any academic specialists when the intellectual area about which they have been passionate for a lifetime is suddenly discovered by others. The revelation was a bit more complicated. “How are they able to do it?” we asked in wonder and a little envy, as we learned of new public health minors and complex courses initiated without being overly concerned about headcounts or resources. Compared to these nimble actors, we felt locked in bureaucracy and unable to contribute to the increasingly interesting discourse on the value of the “public health imagination” to the future of our world. So imagine our surprise when, participating in the 2008 AAC&U Undergraduate Public Health Faculty Development Institute, we realized that many of the challenges the liberal arts faculty were now encountering were areas in which we had been nimble and creative, both in and in spite of our very different institutional context.

Three of those challenges are addressed below: (1) engaging health-related academic units in public health general education, (2) working collaboratively across units to create public health learning opportunities, and (3) establishing undergraduate public health education in institutions with and without graduate public health programs. Examples and reflections are drawn from our experience in the Health Science Department at San José State University (SJSU), a large, urban, diverse, and complex comprehensive university. Our department has had a graduate public health program since 1970 and, since 2000, a stealth strategy to infuse public health values and perspectives throughout the university.

Engaging allied health units in public health and general education

We realized long ago that general education was an effective pathway for introducing public health inquiry to undergraduates across the curriculum. Over the years, we have also found it to be a strategic way to interest students in the range of majors that can both utilize and inform the population health perspective. In addition to the humanities and arts, general education through the public health lens can intrigue students with the community-based aspects of nursing, medicine, dentistry, and health science; quantitative fields such as statistics and demography; applied disciplines such as environmental studies and communications, and the biological and social sciences (Albertine 2008). This broad-based appeal helps champions of undergraduate public health education engage diverse academic partners in teaching or supporting general education. Ironically, some of the hardest units to engage can be those that offer health professions degree programs.

Academic units offering health-related programs must often address rigorous professional accreditation requirements, frequently leaving few resources or incentives for being involved in general education. Powerful incentives for our department included a university mandate to increase enrollments and the national visibility of the AAC&U public health and liberal education initiative. As an under-enrolled “discovery” major, community-based health science could certainly grow and thus meet the mandate. This possibility fueled our interest in accelerating the moment of public health “discovery.” Around the same time, the AAC&U initiative sparked new intellectual interest in general education among some of our graduate public health faculty. The initiative also helped legitimize our subsequent move into general education (GE) areas traditionally “off limits” to an applied health unit (”What qualifies public health to teach core math?” was one of the first questions from the university committee that governs the quantitative reasoning area of SJSU’s general education). Early success provided a third incentive for our department’s venture into public health-oriented general education. Indeed, the positive response to our public health-infused courses contributed to a 300 percent increase in our GE enrollments and the health science major in just four years.

Despite our departmental success, the timing was not right for a larger university-wide public health curricular initiative. However, our newly invested faculty developed a twofold strategy for expanding the public health presence in the university’s general education offerings. In some cases, we worked from the inside, introducing public health examples and principles throughout existing curricula. For example, we more explicitly centered the social ecological model as the conceptual foundation of our popular lower-division general education course, Understanding Your Health. This expanded the personal health focus to include social determinants of health and broader level actions, such as policy advocacy and organizational change. We also infused public health examples into our sections of the university’s required junior-level writing course. Anecdotal and course evaluation data consistently demonstrate that students from a broad range of backgrounds enjoy the learning activities that introduce, within the required course template, the 1918 flu pandemic and its community-level impact, social determinants of contemporary health and health disparities, and the scholarly public health literature. Other departments, including nutrition, anthropology, and business, have used these learning activities in their own sections with excellent results, even when the instructor has no public health background.

Our second general education strategy was to design new general education courses that were explicitly framed by the public health perspective. A new course, Health Statistics, was designed to meet all of the institutional requirements of the lower-level quantitative reasoning area through student work with population health data sets. This strategy also builds in faculty flexibility, since the course instructor need not be a public health expert. We are using this approach to a new upper-level course in the earth and environment area, designing the course to meet the required transdisciplinary and integrative student learning outcomes using exploration of environmental health through the public health lens. As recommended by the Consensus Report on Public Health and Undergraduate Education (Riegelman, Albertine, and Persily 2007), other public health areas particularly well suited to general education include epidemiology, global health, and critical issues in public health (Public Health 101).

Working collaboratively across units for community-based public health experiences

Graduate public health curricula draw heavily on practical experience (Council on Education for Public Health 2005); the initiatives for undergraduate public health education make the same commitment, most often through internships and integrative service learning (Cashman and Seifer 2008). However, this ideal can present a challenge when new public health curricula are developed in institutions without public health units and the attendant cadre of faculty, field sites, and community contacts. Such settings call for creative collaboration, itself a hallmark of the public health way of knowing, being, and acting. Two examples from our experience may stimulate ideas about creative collaboration across diverse academic units for a public health experience.

Collaboration for Neighborhood Change.

A technology grant from a local computer company facilitated a unique collaboration between engineering, health science, and urban planning students. The engineering students developed software for handheld computers that allowed GPS mapping, real-time notes, audio recording, and data entry for community observations. Students in our introductory major course, Community Health Promotion, then worked in teams to use the software and handheld computers to document the risk and protective factors in a low-income neighborhood near the university. The next semester, the health science students’ data were used by urban planning students to advocate for neighborhood safety improvements. Each “hand off” from one discipline to another was integrated into the curriculum, making the process of interdisciplinary collaboration for public health a part of the learning experience. The resulting environmental changes-speed bumps, lights, and neighborhood clean-up-were convincing evidence of the power of collaboration for students and faculty alike.

The Family Science Fair-La Feria de Ciencias Familiar

A Health Disparities Service Learning Collaborative grant and support from Community-Campus Partnerships for Health facilitated another public health collaboration across diverse academic units. Working as an interdisciplinary team, undergraduate students from health science, Mexican American studies, education, and biology work together with a local elementary school to plan, host, and evaluate annual Family Science Fair Workshops. The immediate goals of the project are to demystify the districtwide fifth-grade science fair assignment for parents, most of whom are recent immigrants from Mexico or Central America, and to provide technical assistance to parents who then help their children with experiments and poster presentations. The project’s broader public health goal is to address disparities in access to information, participation, and civic engagement that are associated with well-documented health and health care disparities in that neighborhood. Framing the activity as a public health intervention directs student reflection to the relationships among information, confidence, behavior, and community health, particularly for new immigrants, and the ways in which people are included or marginalized from the organizations and institutions of their communities. Working side by side and in the community, students experience the interface and reciprocity of their own disciplines and the public health.

Opportunities for smaller-scale collaboration on public health issues abound in any university or community setting, particularly through fieldwork, internships, or service learning. For example, English or graphic arts majors might work on communications material for the local diabetes coalition; Spanish or Chinese majors might help translate outreach or education messages for the county environmental health program. Kinesiology students might lead physical activity classes at after-school programs designed to address the obesity epidemic; anthropology students might develop oral histories of people living with HIV; political science students might intern with a local politician working on public health issues. Business students might assist community-based organizations with business plans or marketing materials. The possibilities are endless and exciting.

Establishing Undergraduate Public Health Curricula with or without a Graduate Program

It may seem easier to introduce opportunities for undergraduate public health education in institutions with graduate public health schools or programs. Certainly, such settings have faculty with professional expertise, library resources that support public health inquiry, and the required network of community partners and field sites. They also have local alumni who work in the field and graduate students who can support both faculty and students. However, these units may struggle with faculty bias against undergraduate instruction, lack of experience with undergraduate students, low tolerance for the administrative bureaucracy of undergraduate education, and resources restricted to activities that support their accredited graduate programs.

Entering the world of undergraduate instruction can be daunting, enlivening, and everything in between. In our experience, we needed an intellectual hook (the AAC&U initiative), professional legitimacy (the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research’s leadership), an administrative nudge (the mandate to increase enrollments), and resource support (small grants to facilitate collaboration). What we gained were new colleagues across the campus, new opportunities for collaborative research, greater visibility within our institution, and the energy, talents, and twenty-first-century sensibilities of undergraduate students.

Institutions without graduate public health programs have a different set of challenges and opportunities when seeking to introduce undergraduate public health curricula. However, national, professional, and local resources can support the work of campus visionaries who see the possibilities and simply need partners.

The material developed from the consensus conference, particularly the curriculum guides, offer rationale, intellectual structure, and practical tools for establishing general education courses, minors, and certificate programs that center the values and intellectual rigor of public health inquiry. The resources available at www.teachpublichealth.org and the Community-Campus Partnership for Health (www.ccph.org) provide additional tools and resources that seamlessly interface between professional practice and undergraduate education.

Local public health departments, community-based organizations, and foundations similarly provide opportunities to focus student learning on real-world application while offering possibilities for guest speakers, advisory board members, and internship preceptors. It will be important for universities without public health programs to make sure that their libraries have the key public health journals, that faculty are members of the key public health professional organizations, and that students have opportunities to participate in the conferences, scholarships, mentoring, exchange, and networking that occur at regional and national meetings.

Closing Thoughts

Our efforts to introduce and then infuse the public health imagination beyond our masters in public health program have shown us that this perspective is rich with the dualities that enliven liberal education. The public health perspective also speaks to the concerns and sensibilities of today’s undergraduate students. Private troubles and public issues (Mills 1959), urgency and patience, individual and social responsibility, risk and investment, local action and global impact, sustainability and innovation, outrage and hope-these are all recurring themes in the history of public health and the very twenty-first-century concerns of our undergraduate students. Whether in a small college or comprehensive university, public health inquiry embedded in liberal education is rich with lively and important possibilities.

References

Albertine, S. 2008. Undergraduate public health: Preparing engaged citizens as future health professionals. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 35(3): 253-257.

Albertine, S., N. A. Persily, and R. Riegelman. 2007. Back to the pump handle: Public health and the future of undergraduate education. Liberal Education 93 (4): 32-39.

Cashman, S.B., and S. D. Seifer. 2008. Service-learning: An integral part of undergraduate public health. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 35(3): 273-278.

Council on Education for Public Health. 2005. Accreditation criteria for schools of public health and graduate public health programs. Washington DC: Council on Education for Public Health.

Gebbie K, L. Rosenstock, and L. M. Hernandez. 2003. Who will keep the public healthy? Educating public health professionals for the 21st century. Washington, DC: National Academics Press, 144.

Mills, C.W. 1959. The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Riegelman, R.K., S. Albertine, and N. A. Persily. 2007. The educated citizen and public health: A consensus report on public health and undergraduate education. Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences.

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