Saturday, March 11, 2017

Honoring the past - Charting the future

We are about to embark on our decennial self-study that is required for membership in and accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. The process should take about two years and we are just in the “design” phase at this point. One of the first tasks of the Self-Study Steering Committee is to come up with a theme that will guide us and frame the context of our self-examination.  After some deep thought and deliberation, the committee has agreed on the theme “Lincoln University: Honoring the past – Charting the future”.
We talk extensively about legacy at Lincoln, probably because, as the nation’s first HBCU, this institution has educated numerous notable people who went on to impact our country and the world. It is easy to be proud of our past – and I think we should be. But we also need to look beyond the present and understand what it means to chart a viable and vibrant future for our institution. We need to be an institution that does more than honor its legacy; we need to actively transform that legacy into greatness now and prominence for the future of both Lincoln and for all the students that are being and will be educated by us. To chart the future can be both exciting and humbling; it is a tremendous undertaking, yet we do it every day in our classrooms. In small or great ways, we collectively help to plot the future for our students. With this blog post, I’m hoping to tap into that collective wisdom of the Lincoln faculty community to find out what charting the future means to us and to you.
You can read more about my thoughts around this topic, or, without further influence, go to: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/83ST26K to answer the question: What does “charting the future while honoring the past” mean to you? How do we, as faculty, chart a future for both our students and for the institution? How is this work anchored in the Lincoln legacy?
My hope for the future Lincoln student experience includes more experiential learning across disciplines. I think we are at the cusp of breaking out of the traditional three hours a week classroom monotony to enter a world of learning that is less scheduled but more relevant to the world for which we are trying to prepare our students. Experiential learning encompasses all types of schooling in which the students are active participants, or learn through experience and then reflect on their learning. This can take many forms; we could add service learning projects to more of our classes and have our student body contribute to the planning, designing, resource allocation etc. of running a university. Pre-nursing students could shadow in health services, the business students could analyze resource allocations and help fiscal affairs find savings, environmental science students could work with Aramark to implement more sustainability practices, computer science students could contribute to IT. We could take service learning outside the gates of the University and become more involved in the surrounding community organizations and schools. Experiential learning can also take the form of research projects that contribute to knowledge generation through publications. Science students have several opportunities to participate, both through classes and independent research projects, in experiential learning. To give student more time to work on their research projects we have had to re-think class scheduling to include longer but less frequent blocks of time in the classroom. This model may not work for all subjects, but it does lend itself to field-trips and interactive learning projects that take the students out of the classroom and into the real world, where students have a greater chance to learn through experience. Charting the future may mean that we need to push some boundaries and become a little uncomfortable, but in the end, we would honor our past by continuing to produce graduates that are well-prepared to take on the world.
What are your hopes for the future of Lincoln and how are those hopes anchored in the past?

3 comments:

  1. My hope is that we focus on education; and, by that, I mean literacy in the form of reading, writing and critical thinking at the college or university level. That, in my opinion, is the best way of “charting the future while honoring the past;” because the future keeps changing and, often, is unpredictable with any specificity. It is literacy, particularly higher education, which has been crucial in the past and, I believe, will continue to be important in the future.

    Safro Kwame

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  2. Kwame, lets marry the fundamentals of teaching literacy and critical thinking with exercises that allow our students to practice using their skills to solve real-word problems. Literacy will always be important, as will critical thinking. But you can teach and practice both literacy and critical thinking in many different ways. Today's - and probably tomorrow's - employers are looking for applicants who can solve real-world problems and work collaboratively to do so. I think we need to teach our students to read, write, and think critically through experiential learning that allows our students to collaboratively apply skills to real-world problems. In doing so, I think we may better help our students chart their futures.

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  3. Anna, a person who cannot "collaboratively apply skills to real-world problems" is not a critical thinker and, probably not highly educated either. A critical thinker "can solve real-world problems and work collaboratively to do so" or, at least, should be able to! What is your idea of a university or higher education, and definition of critical thinking?

    Safro Kwame

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