Countering ‘Social Curriculum’ and ‘Alternative Truths’

Guest Blogger: Abbes Maazaoui

In this era of rising xenophobia, ethnocentrism and “alternative truths”, the question that may be raised, particularly during and after the US elections, is whether schools and universities are doing enough to educate students and prepare them for what might be called “ le vivre ensemble” (= living together) or global citizenship. For it is academia where students are expected to learn how to think critically, make ethical choices and develop an inclusive global mindset.

One quick way to appraise what higher education institutions teach students and what types of curriculum, courses and experiences they offer is to examine actual course schedules.

For instance, a quick glance at Lincoln University‘s fall and spring courses, as listed on the Registrar’s website for 2016-17 academic year, reveal a glaring lack of diversity in course offerings. Major regions of the world and notably those marginalized and/or demonized in today’s polarized world are inexistent. Our students, like most Americans, are left with what Carlos Cortés calls “social curriculum.” Their education about other cultures, countries and religions is mainly fed through media of all kinds (TV, film, Facebook, Tweeter, etc.).

The question is to consider what can be done to strengthen student learning with regard to multicultural/international education and help confront the illiberal forces of political, social and religious extremism. Here are a few areas where these forces can be resisted:

1.     A globally-rooted curriculum. In most cases, this implies revising the curriculum and developing strategies for incorporating multicultural education in all academic majors, not just foreign language programs. Courses targeting marginalized cultures, religions and regions should be developed with specific assessable outcomes in all majors.

2.     The liberal arts component of the curriculum. Students should be provided with ample opportunities to explore multiple perspectives, the clash of truths instead of the “clash of civilizations,” to make judgments based on facts and not opinions, and counter the effects of ethnocentrism. Truly multidisciplinary (team-taught) courses should be implemented. For instance, developing team-taught courses has been a Lincoln’s dream for a long time, but as far as I know, was never really carried out with any coherence or consistency.

3.     Faculty development grants should include money for developing international/multicultural courses.

4.     Study abroad activities and exchange programs. Cross-cultural contacts have the potential of increasing student tolerance, broadening their horizons, and lessening the harmful effects of “social curriculum.” “Currently, less than 10% of U.S. students graduating with associates or baccalaureate degrees each year study abroad” (Institute of International Education).  But we should do more, and aim at reaching 25%, 50% of students going abroad. This is true of Lincoln University too. Around 3-4% of students study abroad annually at Lincoln. As the chair of the Committee on International/Global Initiatives, I must acknowledge here the efforts of the current Lincoln’s president who made study abroad a cornerstone of his educational leadership, as well as the growing number of colleagues who have been accompanying (or are planning to accompany) students abroad.

 These four areas, in my view, must be strengthened in all U.S. institutions, particularly liberal arts colleges, if we are concerned about true diversity, tolerance and democracy in this country.  I hope these random thoughts will trigger serious reflection and discussion, and better yet, be followed by action. 

Lincoln Excellence Returns

A while back I posed the question “What is Lincoln Excellence?” and encouraged you, dear readers, to chime in by taking a survey that asked “How do you practice excellence in your classroom? Give an example of a practice or teaching technique that you feel promotes excellence in teaching and learning.”  I promised to share the answers, so here I go:

Seven people answered the question and there were a few common themes:

•  Emphasize problem solving and teach students how to think, not what to think
•  Combine some lecture or theory with group work that allows student to solve problems and discuss issues in groups
• Know the students and respect their opinions – teach students how to respect each other’s opinions
• Draw on same reading material and sources that are used at other reputable universities.
• Focus on learning and application rather than route memorization
• Push students to develop and grow by continually questioning everything
• Begin on time, use lessons plans to follow a well-developed syllabus, return assignments promptly 

According to the above list, we are absolutely amazing! I would send my child to a school that advertised the above as their goals for teaching and learning.

In the above list, there is one point that jumps out at me the most: Focus on learning and application rather than route memorization. This intrigues me, not only because I think it is extremely important – and probably the underlying reason why I use a lot of problem solving and discussion in all my classes, but because I think it is the most difficult to do well. It is so easy to ask students to memorize facts and then quiz them on those facts. It is much more difficult to come up with good assignments that includes the memorization, but then goes a step further and helps students find meaning in the memorized facts through real world application that helps them expand their learning and hopefully encourages them to become life-long learners. I would love to hear if anybody out there has figured out how to do this well! 

What is your greatest challenge in achieving teaching and learning excellence?

If you intended to reply to the survey three weeks ago, but let it slip too far down into the abyss of your inbox or to-do list, here is another opportunity: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PJRY9HW

If you prefer to share directly in this blog, please go ahead and add your thoughts on Lincoln Excellence below.

Getting Engaged

The premise of Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers by Alison James and Stephen D. Brookfield, one of the new CETL books available in the library, is that reflective thinking is essential for learning, and engagement is essential for reflection.

The authors begin with “Three Axioms of Student Engagement” (pp. 6-7):

1. Student learning is deepest when the content or skills being learned are personally meaningful, and this happens when students see connections and applications of learning. 
2. Student learning “sticks” more when the same content or skills are learned through multiple methods.
3. The most memorable critical incidents students experience in their learning are those when they are required to “come at” their learning in a new way, when they are “jerked out” of the humdrum by some unexpected challenge or unanticipated task.  We naturally remember the surprising rather that the routine, the unpredictable rather than the expected.

The rest of the book explains why and how to get students involved in the following 14 reflection-encouraging activities:

• Check the assumptions that inform their actions and judgments;
• Seek to open themselves to new and unfamiliar perspectives;
• Attempt intersubjective understanding and perspective taking—trying to understand how another person reasons, understands content, or views knowledge;
• Make their intuitions and “gut” feelings the focus of study;
• Study the effects of their actions with a view to changing them;
• Look for blind spots and omissions in their thinking;
• Identify what is justified and well grounded in their thinking;
• Accept and experiment with multiple learning modalities;
• Value emotional dimensions of their learning as much as the purely cognitive;
• Try to upend their  habitual ways of understanding something;
• Connect their thinking conducted in one domain to thinking in another;
• Become more aware of their habitual epistematic cognition—the typical ways they judge something to be true;
• Apply reflective protocols in contextually appropriate ways;
• Alternate cognitive analysis with an acceptance of an unregulated, unmediated flow of emotions, impulses, intuitions, and images.

What sorts of activities have you tried to encourage student reflection and engage them in multiple ways of knowing your subject matter?  Any creative teaching tips to share?

What? Your Students Are Reading Their Textbooks?!

An interesting discussion has been taking place on one of the listservs I belong to, focusing on what we can do to encourage students both to read their textbooks and to make sense of what they read.  Below are a few of the suggestions.

• Try “JITTs” (Just-in-Time Teaching), an approach that involves asking deep questions or questions that you think will be hard for students to answer and ending with something like “What did you find especially puzzling or especially interesting in the reading?”  Student answers are graded (to encourage participation) and turned in before class, so that the teacher knows what to focus on in class  (Bill Goffe, Penn State University)
• Don’t like JITTS?  Try SPUNKI, which stands for questions asking what was Surprising, Puzzling, Useful, New, Knew it already,  and Interesting.  Rebecca Clemente (North Central College) has students use a rubric that involves them finishing sentences like ““When the article stated … this was surprising because …“  Then they talk over their responses in groups at the beginning of class to set the focus for the discussion to follow.
• Another way to stimulate motivation for reading recommended by Jen Lara is going through an upcoming assignment, writing important quotes down on individual note cards, and having all students at the beginning of class pick a quote that is of interest to them and then discuss it with a partner. 
• A variation of this was suggested by Jill Dahlman (University of Nevada, Reno ): “I am going to ask people to note on a piece of paper (no name!) where they had difficulty and a list of words that they didn't fully understand and turn these in. I'm going to start our discussion with going through those areas of difficulty, and then see if any of these areas spark a discussion. Reading academic language is difficult, and the more students can see that it's ‘not just them,’ then I think more people will become engaged.”
• A number of listserv members recommended online discussions as a good way to motivate students to read and clarify reading assignments.  Charles MacArthur (University of Delaware) pointed out that “one good angle for questions is about the value or meaning of the reading for students' own lives. How would you use this? How is it related to your experience?”
• Lynda Harding (CSU Fresno) assigns students to online discussion groups and gives them some credit for posting a question and some for answering a colleague’s question or for helping to select one or two questions for the group to submit to her.
• Jon Mueller (North Central College) has students write just a couple sentences about two or three questions he poses on the reading assignment.  Credit is given not for accuracy but just if the student has made a good-faith effort, so it only takes 5 -10 minutes to assign credit to a stack of papers.  He added, “I was initially surprised that virtually all of my students, including the weaker and less motivated ones, complete almost all of the assignments. They are much better prepared for class.”
• Lee Torda (Bridgewater State University) has a different approach, a “top 5 document”:  “One page. Single spaced. Top Five Things You Think Are Important for Other People to Get from this Reading. It's a living document in class. Students read each others'. They battle over their choices in a friendly way. They write back and forth about it so I don't really do a ton of evaluation of it. Mostly if they do it and it's not absolutely wrong and phony, they get the credit. And it's 15% of their final grade.”
• And finally Irv Peckham (Drexel) reminded everyone of the importance of giving reading assignments that students will enjoy reading, that they can feel connected to, since, as he put it, “Reading and writing should be a pleasure for students.”

Have you used any of these?  Did they work?  Do you have tips to add to the list? 

So here's an IDEA

IDEA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving learning in higher education. On their website, you will find a myriad of “peer-reviewed articles pertaining to the general areas of teaching and learning, faculty evaluation, curriculum design, assessment, and administration in higher education as well as shorter POD/IDEA notes on instruction and notes on learning.”  If you haven’t yet discovered this rich resource, check it out.

The following list, for instance, comes from POD-IDEA Center Notes on Learning Item #11. It suggests a series of critical thinking tasks that give students practice analyzing and critically evaluating ideas, arguments, and points of view, as well as getting feedback on their efforts.

• In humanities and social science courses, keep the reading load manageable and model for students how to read critically and to evaluate arguments in your field.
• In math, sciences, and engineering courses, encourage students participating in study groups not only to share ideas for solving problems but also to provide reasons for the problem solving ideas they advance.
• Have students respond to an editorial in a newspaper or to a review essay in a scholarly journal. For that response, ask students to identify unstated assumptions, biases, and points of views and show how they undermine the argument the author is making. 
• Teach students to use a pro and con grid to analyze ideas and points of view.
• Take time in science and engineering classes to explore the ethical considerations of research questions and experimental design.
• In organized class debates, ask students to argue for a point of view counter to their own.
• Give students “ill-structured problems” in class to work through. Such problems have no known answer or solution and cannot be solved with formal rules of logic or mathematical formulas. Ask students to come up with multiple solutions for each problem and rank the viability of each solution.
• Teach students Peter Elbow’s “believing and doubting game” which asks them to be both sympathetic and skeptical readers.
• Help students develop strategies for systematically gathering data according to methodologies in your discipline, assessing the quality and relevance of the data, evaluating sources, and interpreting the data.
• Encourage students to enter into dialogue with the sources they read; encourage them to ask questions, give assent, or protest in the margins of what they read.
• Train students to identify the author’s audience and purpose when they read.
• Encourage students to engage their critical reasoning skills outside of the classroom.

In my basic writing classes, for instance, I have students turn in a cover page with each essay that asks them to specify, among other things, the essay’s audience, purpose, topic and thesis.  I hadn’t thought of this as a way to encourage critical thinking until I read the next-to-last bullet point above, but perhaps it is a way for them to internalize those categories and look for them when they are reading, not just when they are writing.  

Which of these have worked in your classroom?  What others might you add?

7 Ways of Learning

If you haven’t read Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning:  A Resource for More Purposeful, Effective, and Enjoyable College Teaching by Davis and Arend, I highly recommend it. (We've ordered it for the library but I would be happy to lend my copy to anyone who wants to take a look at it right away.)

Their thesis is that we learn in different ways depending on which of seven desired outcomes we are targeting: building skills; acquiring knowledge; developing critical, creative and dialogic thinking; cultivating problem-solving and decision-making abilities; exploring attitudes, feelings and perspectives; practicing professional judgment; or reflecting on experience). Each way of learning, they believe, requires different ways of teaching. Teachers who don't use a variety of teaching methods, therefore, are teaching too narrowly. 

If we simply want our students to acquire knowledge of a topic, for instance, we can teach via lecture and readings.  If we want them to learn specific skills, on the other hand, we can’t lecture that skill- building knowledge into existence; we need to provide practice exercises and set tasks for students to work through. If our desired outcome instead is for students to become good problem solvers, we can’t just provide canned practice exercises—we need to help them work through real-life problems, case studies, labs, projects.

It was eye-opening to consider the differences in learning outcomes, the related theories of learning associated with each, and the common teaching methodologies (See table with summary below) that lead to the desired outcomes.  Here, though, is the passage that made me stop and think hardest:

Almost anything that once required class time can be done outside class electronically, technologies can often perform educational tasks more efficiently than humans, and information is readily available for free to anyone with Internet access.  So the fundamental question arises:  What is class time for?

How would you answer that question?


Summary of Seven Ways of Learning

Intended Learning Outcomes (What Students Learn)	Way of Learning (Origins and Theory)	Common Methods (What the Teacher Provides)
Skill building (Physical and procedural skills where accuracy, precision, & efficiency are important)	1.       Behavioral learning (behavioral psychology, operant conditioning)	·         Tasks and procedures ·         Practice exercises
Acquiring Knowledge (basic information, concepts, and terminology of a discipline or field of study)	2.       Cognitive learning (cognitive psychology, attention, information processing  memory)	·         Presentations ·         Explanations
Developing critical, creative, & dialogical thinking (Improved thinking & reasoning processes)	3.       Learning through inquiry (Logic, critical and creative thinking theory, classical philosophy)	·         Question-driven inquiries ·         Discussions
Cultivating problem-solving and decision-making abilities (Mental strategies for finding solutions & making choices)	4.       Learning with mental models (Gestalt psychology, problem solving, & decision theory)	·         Problems ·         Case studies ·         Labs ·         Projects
Exploring attitudes, feelings, & perspectives (Awareness of attitudes, biases, & other perspectives; ability to collaborate)	5.       Learning through groups and teams (Human communication theory, group counseling theory)	·         Group activities ·         Team projects
Practicing professional judgment (Sound judgment  & appropriate professional action  in complex, context-dependent situations)	6.       Learning through virtual realities (Psychodrama, sociodrama, gaming theory)	·         Role playing ·         Simulations ·         Dramatic scenarios ·         Games
Reflecting on experience (Self-discovery & personal growth from real-world experience)	7.       Experiential learning (Experiential learning, cognitive neuroscience, constructivism)	·         Internships ·         Service-learning ·         Study abroad

from:

Davis, James R., & Arend, Bridget D. (2013). Facilitating seven ways of learning:  A resource for more purposeful, effective, and enjoyable college teaching.  Stylus: Sterling, VA.