By: Laura Behling

Is Randy Bass right?  Is the traditional course dead and it just doesn’t know it?  Have we really entered the “post-course era,” a time where the bounded, traditional course, the defining item of our institutions and their curricula, is no longer the site of high-impact teaching and learning practices?   Is the formal curriculum still at the center of our institution?  And if it is, should it be?

Given all the practices we have worked to incorporate into our students’ experiences because of their increasingly proven positive impact on student learning—global education, undergraduate research, and experiential learning, for example—why, Bass asked, do we fund, hire, tenure, and promote as if the formal curriculum is the most important thing we do?

There seems to be abundant evidence in higher education at large, and at the AAC&U annual meeting in particular, that the formal curriculum—those bounded courses in general education and disciplinary fields—is not at the center.  Rather, new activities and experiences are entering into colleges and universities, competing for attention and often getting it.

Richard Light, in Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds, offers: “even at a college as academically focused and intense as Harvard, most graduates have far clearer memories of their singing or writing or volunteer tutoring of immigrants, than of the details of the class on American history they took in the sophomore year.”

If the high-impact practices are outside of, or “other” to, the formal curriculum, Bass and copresenter Peter Felten of Elon University asked, then can we also assume that the practices that have less significant impact on student learning are to be found in the formal curriculum?  And if so, what are we, as faculty and administrators, to do about this, particularly as we enter a future of financial constraint for many of our institutions?

Felten’s response was to offer two examples in practice at Elon University that are part of the formal curriculum and draw upon the high-impact practices that elicit deep and reflective learning.  The first was the pedagogy developed at Barnard, Reacting to the Past, that engages students emotionally in what may at first glance seem to be esoteric or ancient historical eras.  The second was a student-faculty partnership in course design, which modeled, according to Felten, how it “might be useful to talk to students” as we think about how to make our curriculum higher impact.

The tensions articulated provoked a mixed response from the audience.  Pushed by audience members who defended their faculty’s practice of high-impact practices in the formal curriculum, Bass’s response—“you’re lucky”—offers entry into what may be the most significant concern a “post-course era” uncovers.

Our students shouldn’t have to rely on luck to have transformative learning experiences, either in the form of the institution they attend, or in the form of the courses they take as they work toward a degree.  High-impact practices are not pervasive in the formal curriculum, and as a result, only the “lucky” student can react to the past.  Indeed, it’s not only in the formal curriculum that high-impact learning experiences are lacking; even in those areas, such as global education or undergraduate research, not every student is lucky enough to have such experiences.

Perhaps the bold college or university will shift funding away from a formal curriculum and into the “other” curriculum.  Perhaps the proud institution should better recognize and celebrate those high-impact practices occurring in the formal and informal curricula.  Perhaps the reflective institution will see the false dichotomy set up between formal and informal curriculum and understand that classrooms and community service sites, laboratories and foreign cultures are each made richer because of the presence of the other in students’ lives.  Perhaps the student-centered institution won’t worry about which historical era it’s in, except for the now.   And perhaps every institution should work to make better connections between the formal and informal experiences of students, provide the foundations for students who venture out of a bounded course to make connections and insights in their “other” curricular experiences—and begin to realize, with care, that the education of a student can be limitless even sitting in a classroom.

Laura Behling is associate provost of faculty affairs and interdisciplinary programs at Butler University.

Tags: AAC&U 2010 Annual Meeting, high-impact practices