The death of Trayvon Martin has sparked a national conversation on racism, the law, media, and ethics, and it is clear that Martin has put a face on the systemic problem of racial profiling. As an African-American man, I cannot help but think how easily Trayvon Martin could have been someone I know and love: a nephew, a cousin, a friend. In fact, I cannot help but wonder if it could have been me. I grew up in small-town Virginia, in a quiet, predominantly white community similar to the one where Martin was shot. And now, in Washington, DC, I live on a similar street, and I often walk to the corner market with the hood of my jacket shielding my face from the cold. All of this prompts me to ask what the AAC&U community and higher education can learn from this tragedy, how it might inform our work to foster the potential in all students—particularly men of color—as well as our efforts to build an informed, antiracist culture. Most of all, I wonder what is at stake if we as educators fail.

AAC&U aims to answer those big, complex questions through its national meetings, such as the March, 2012 Student Success conference and the upcoming Diversity and Learning conference in October, as well as through publications such as Diversity and Democracy. At the Student Success meeting, I attended a session facilitated by Norm J. Jones of Dickinson College and John Michael Lee, Jr. of the College Board. According to research from the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center, 51 percent of Latino males, 45 percent of African American males, 42 percent of Native American males, and 33 percent of Asian American males between ages 15 and 24 who graduate high school will end up unemployed, incarcerated or dead. I cannot help but picture Trayvon Martin’s face in those numbers, the faces of my nephews. For educators in a country that professes equality and democracy as its founding principles, these numbers and the dire portrait they paint are unacceptable. And they not only reveal what is at stake, but demonstrate that the stakes for these students are high.

In light of the above statistics, it is encouraging to see programs such as Dickinson College’s MANdatory, whose mission it is “to provide a space where men of color can share their Dickinson experience through a raced/gendered lens” and “to assist men of color in defining notions of success for themselves and in the context of their own experience.” Acknowledging the particular challenges, contributions, and concerns of men of color is key to college access and retention and to fostering their sense of identity and inclusion on campus. As Shaun Harper and Frank Harris write in College Men and Masculinities, male students of color are “better served by advocates who see them for who they are (note that we didn’t say ‘see them as different’) and make known to colleagues and White students how the experiential realities of men of color help explain persistent gender gaps in engagement and achievement.” Not only are programs such as MANdatory essential to fostering individual success on campus, but by raising awareness of the experiences of men of color, they can create campus and community cultures that value intercultural learning and perspective-taking—both of which are outcomes included in the Essential Learning Outcomes developed as part of AAC&U’s LEAP Initiative. These outcomes are, in fact, essential for an inclusive, socially responsible, and informed citizenry. When educators—and the nation as a whole—begin to see young men of color as people with specific talents, interests, and needs, and not as statistics or problems to be feared or fixed, we just might see the above percentages shrink.

In fact, providing support for male students of color is only half of the equation. A 2010 report from the College Board, The Educational Crisis Facing Young Men of Color (referenced in a recent blog post by Tia Brown McNair), names lack of familial support, financial constraints, unsympathetic peer groups, and machismo as roadblocks to academic success for men of color. These roadblocks in turn may lead them to be among the aforementioned percentages. Admittedly, I did not have some of the obstacles many men of color face when it comes to college retention and success. But, that night in February, if I were in Trayvon Martin’s shoes (or in his hoodie) that may not have mattered, because positive potential just is not associated with African American men in this country. As Nell Irvin Painter writes in The History of White People, “What we can see depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for.” In the eyes of so many Americans, young black men—like Trayvon Martin, like my nephews—become a number, a stereotype, a threat. And those perceptions can cost a person everything. Consequently, just as it is important for higher education to cultivate the potential of men of color, it is equally imperative that we work to dismantle the dangerous perceptions and misguided ideologies that are systemically embedded in our national (and global) psyche.

Undeniably, men of color are not the only students who face systemic misrepresentation and exclusion on our campuses and in our culture (and male privilege cannot be overlooked). Women, low-income students, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender students, and immigrant students face immense barriers as well, and higher education can and should be a tool for toppling walls and paving pathways to success. Of course, higher education is not the sole answer to the question of equity, and I am certainly not arguing that what transpired between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin could have been prevented by education alone. But I will assert that a quality liberal education is a vital cornerstone for building a more just, equitable, and inclusive nation and globe. Student learning outcomes such as knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world, creative and critical thinking, and personal and social responsibility have the power to foster citizens with sophisticated cross-cultural and global understanding, a commitment to the common good, and a strong vision of democratic voice and justice. This belief is the driving force behind AAC&U’s newest project for community colleges, Bridging Cultures to Form a Nation.

Join us at the Diversity and Learning conference in October to grapple further with these questions, but please do not wait until then to begin the conversation with your colleagues and students. The stakes are far too high.

]]> http://blog.aacu.org/index.php/2012/05/16/what-can-higher-education-learn-from-trayvon-martin/feed/ 0 http://blog.aacu.org/index.php/2012/05/09/focus-on-the-student-experience-to-increase-quality-and-completion/ http://blog.aacu.org/index.php/2012/05/09/focus-on-the-student-experience-to-increase-quality-and-completion/#comments Wed, 09 May 2012 10:53:00 +0000 AACU Guest Blogger http://blog.aacu.org/?p=1272 In January 2012, AAC&U published a special issue of its journal, Liberal Education, featuring a series of articles about implications—intended and unintended—of the Completion Agenda. We have invited a series of national educational leaders and practitioners to comment on the issues raised. This fifth and final posting is by Hilary Pennington, former director of Education, Postsecondary Success, and Special Initiatives for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The latest issue of Liberal Education raises important questions about the so-called “completion agenda,” including concern that a more aggressive focus on helping students complete the degrees they start will degrade learning and quality in higher education. To me, the key question is how to move forward on both fronts simultaneously—reorienting the debate so that it is both/and, not either/or.

How do we do this? As Carol Geary Schneider wisely notes, by making markers of learning or quality an integral part of the completion agenda. The best change efforts I know are doing exactly that. What they have in common is putting students and the student experience at the center. Learning is not defined as imparting what professors know and choose to teach, but rather as advancing what knowledge students master as they progress towards their goals.

Achieving deeper learning and better completion requires an intentional focus on student engagement and progression, not just at the level of the individual course, but across the entire program of study that the student experiences.

Of course, this is easier said than done—especially at a time when resource constraints put added burdens on faculty and student services. But innovative institutions around the country are demonstrating promising successes. Powerful examples include

•Efforts to reinvent developmental education in two and four year institutions—through a combination of course redesign, contextualization, and technology that personalizes learning and student supports.

•Increasing attention to coherent programs of study, where the institution and its faculty help guide student choice. An example is the twenty-one community colleges participating in Completion by Design. They are analyzing where they lose students, and how best to target resources to re-engage and support them. They are using their own best practices and lessons learned from peer institutions like Valencia Community College, which reoriented student supports based on data indicating that getting through the first five courses, on first attempt, was the best predictor that a student will graduate.

•Interactive, adaptive on-line and hybrid learning technologies, such as those being used by Arizona State University’s faculty to create new developmental and freshman math courses in partnership with the technology company Knewton. Their adaptive learning platform uses data from each student’s activities to help customize feedback, provide extra practice, and test for mastery of all the concepts in a given course. Or Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, which joins cognitive scientists, curriculum designers, and math professors to create an intelligent tutoring system—focused on helping students practice key concepts by taking them through the thought processes experts use to solve problems in their disciplines. Even more powerful, the technology lets the professors see where students are struggling, so that they can target their classroom lectures on places where students need help. The model dramatically improves course completion rates and mastery of subject material—in half the time.

Sandy Shugart, president of Valencia Community College, puts it best: “we should not assume that if more students complete college, they will have learned more,” but rather, “if institutions get more effective at helping students learn more, then more students will complete.”

Hilary Pennington
Former Director of Education, Postsecondary Success, and Special Initiatives
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
United States Program

The January 2012 edition of Liberal Education, devoted to the “completion agenda,” should be required reading for those concerned with improving student success in US higher education. In the lead article, Carol Geary Schneider cautions against defining degree completion as a mere accumulation of credits and urges policy makers to ensure that the degrees achieved are meaningful evidence of educational attainment. As a public university president, scholar of writing across the curriculum, and member of Team Illinois of Complete College America, I urge policy makers and funders to focus on the points of intersection of completion and quality. A degree must be more than a credential; it must represent an educational milestone. Without more underserved students completing college, demands for “quality” are elitist. Without quality, defined as meaningful educational attainment through high-impact practices, “completion” is empty.

I support Schneider’s identification of the Degree Quality Profile (DQP) as a rallying point for those interested in connecting quality and completion. Cogent definitions of what it means to complete associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees provide benchmarks of quality.

I further support Alexander Astin’s blog comment: “As it happens, a thoughtful and well-informed approach to completion will clearly tend to promote quality” (posted April 5, 2012). He points to three barriers to completion—preparation, part-time attendance, lack of community—which are also road-blocks to quality.

An example of a program designed to overcome these road-blocks is the Dual Degree Program (DDP)—not to be confused with dual enrollment—a partnership, supported by the Kresge Foundation, connecting Governors State University and eight local community colleges. The university provides substantial financial incentives for community college students to attend full-time, requires that students achieve the associate’s degree before transferring, and promotes a sense of community among DDP students and with the faculty and staff at both the community college and university. The encouragement to achieve the associate’s degree is a quality initiative, requiring students to complete a coherent program in the community college, one informed by the DQP, before transferring to the university. Community college students who take ad hoc, randomly selected courses over a period of several years are not giving the community college a chance to provide high quality preparation. Transfer specialists and peer advisors assist students in creating a sense of community and in navigating academic, social, and psychological issues that often prevent completion and diminish quality. Advising on college/university financing affirms the counter-intuitive principle that full-time study (defined as 12–15 credits per semester) can be combined with employment and that strategic progress toward completion can actually be less expensive than swirling from course to course and institution to institution. Completion and quality intersect in the DDP program.

In addition, as Governors State University plans for the admission of our first freshman class in 2014 (we started out as an upper-division university), we are drawing many ideas about quality and completion from Complete College America and from AAC&U’s LEAP initiative. First-year students will be organized into thematic cohorts, with each student taking at least three courses per semester with the same group. Students will follow a core curriculum of required liberal arts courses that will transfer (if necessary) to any Illinois college or university. These courses will be designed to integrate high-impact practices (writing across the curriculum, service learning, civic engagement, study abroad). Necessary remediation will be accomplished through a summer bridge program and supplementary hours in credit-bearing courses in English and mathematics.

I feel confident that colleges and universities are ready to develop additional examples of programs that harmonize completion and quality. I hope that policy makers and funders will encourage these initiatives.

Elaine P. Maimon
President
Governors State University

Alexander Astin’s excellent comment covers a lot: “When you combine poor preparation with minimal engagement, you have the worst of everything, which helps to explain the poor completion rates of so many community colleges and public four-year colleges.” But it doesn’t tell the whole story. Institutions and the policy systems within which they live have embedded values and habits that conspire against more widespread completion. Failure to make improved K-12 preparation a postsecondary priority is one of those habits, and it needs a lot more attention. Colleges and universities should take advantage of the development of Common Core State Standards as an opportunity to work more closely with K-12 in improving preparation. (See www.corestandards.org) Many other problems, however, fall entirely within higher education.

For decades, funding formulas and federal student aid based on enrollment, regardless of course completion (to say nothing of degree completion), have provided incentives for institutions to enroll and keep enrolling students who are not succeeding. Some of this number may be hopelessly underprepared. But it is clear that vast numbers who can succeed are not doing so.

Where there is a large gap between enrollment and success, something is wrong, and it should be fixed. It is reasonable to begin by changing the financial incentives that reinforce and evidently contribute to a dysfunctional status quo. But then the programmatic and financial barriers to student success must be addressed.

Without time or space to elaborate, let me list a few of the “programmatic” barriers:

1. Ineffective, “cookie cutter” developmental education, which wastes student time, dampens motivation, and probably is imposed too frequently
2. Inadequate support for coaching or tutoring for students who require additional assistance
3. Minimal effort to foster commuter student engagement by cultivating peer relationships
4. Poor academic advising, and incoherent program designs which confuse, rather than motivate
5. Policies and campus cultures which tolerate and even promote excessive time to degree
6. Poor instructional quality, which well-prepared, highly motivated students can transcend, but others cannot (See www.newleadershipalliance.org/what_we_do/committing_to_quality/download)
7. Irrational, monopolistic policies which make transfer of credit and credit for prior learning difficult or impossible.

The financial barriers are more readily acknowledged in the academic community. The first is inadequate financial aid. Too often Pell Grants, which are barely adequate to cover non-tuition costs, are allocated to tuition. Low-income students can survive only by working excessive hours or stretching a degree program over many years, both high-risk practices.

The second major financial barrier is the practice of underinvesting in the education of students attending less selective institutions. Educating students who have risk factors is hard (with multiple risk factors it is harder), and it takes both commitment and resources to be successful.

By and large, American higher education allocates more resources to the education of students who are most likely to succeed and underinvests in average or below-average students. (Of course, average and below-average students with great athletic gifts or money manage to get the extra help they require.) To have a competitive workforce and a sustainable democracy we need to do a better job of educating average Americans. It is easy to see a parallel between American higher education and health care; in both we lead the world in excellence, but we suffer from great expense at the high end and uneven access to quality.

We are in a confusing transition from an economy that could thrive with limited educational attainment to one that requires widespread attainment. We need to emerge from this confusion with a clearer vision (and definition) of educational quality and a commitment to achieve it for more people. (See www.aacu.org/leap and www.luminafoundation.org/publications/The_Degree_Qualifications_Profile.pdf) But the path of least resistance is likely to be the status quo for the advantaged and cheaper, faster, flimsier for the disadvantaged.

That path, a combination of economic and academic elitism, threatens social mobility, which has been the moral bedrock of the United States and the fuel for our economy for over two centuries. We are unlikely to find the economic resources needed to sustain the American Dream without reallocating some of our wealth to the priority of wide-spread educational attainment and becoming more cost-effective in higher education.

Paul E. Lingenfelter
President
State Higher Education Executive Officers

The Completion Agenda has emerged as the overarching mission of the community college in this decade. Never in the history of the community college movement has an idea so galvanized stakeholders—from the White House to the state house to hundreds of community colleges. Never has so much funding from philanthropic groups, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation, been more generously funneled into our colleges.

The Completion Agenda is the community college’s Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame; our future as a reputable member of the higher education community and as an instrument of social and economic change for the nation will depend, in great part, on how well we perform in achieving what Lumina calls the “Big Goal” reflected in the Completion Agenda. Community colleges face almost insurmountable challenges in achieving this goal:

1. Our enrollments are going through the roof while our funding is going into the tank. “Doing more with less” is beginning to have a hollow ring.
2. The Open Door of access—one of the hallmarks of the American community college—is beginning to close: Pell grants are being reduced; in California approximately 250,000 students have been denied admission because there are no classes available; some states are terminating remedial education, and some colleges are making plans not to admit those who score at the lowest level of preparation. What future institution will address the needs of the underprepared, commuting, and part-time students Sandy Astin pegged correctly in his April 5 blog as our most challenging constituency?
3. The community college’s greatest success is in workforce training and development where we produce well-prepared workers for the economy. But we sell these students short when it comes to liberal and general education. Without a “common core of knowledge for the common person,” Earl McGrath’s finely honed definition of general education, our career students are not prepared for the complex world they will face, and they will not have the skills and knowledge to change jobs half a dozen times. That challenge is not limited to our career and technical students. Without a well-rounded general education none of our students will be prepared to think critically, solve problems, embrace change, engage as citizens, and contribute to the general welfare of others. The cafeteria offerings of our current distributed general education programs are impotent to provide the common core of knowledge. And if we cannot create sound programs of general education we have very little chance of embracing the tenets of liberal education in any substantive way except in a few boutique programs scattered in the nooks and crannies of the curriculum.
4. Even with all the emphasis on reform in every new decade, and with the breakthroughs in technology, higher education is still mired in a historical and traditional architecture of education that limits what can actually be done to place learning first and make student success our priority. We continue to operate within the structures of time-limited semesters and fifty-minute classes and three-credit courses with one teacher responsible for thirty students in a class. Even though Paul Dressel told us in 1983 that “the course grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite material,” we still use this primitive system of A through F to brand a student for life.
5. Many of the full-time faculty who created the current levels of success for community colleges are retiring in hordes, with only a few graduate programs to prepare their replacements. And as the number of full-time faculty declines, we increasingly rely on adjunct faculty who—dedicated though they might be—are not provided with offices, long-term departmental/institutional training, or basic incentives to provide for students outside the classroom.

These are just a few of the challenges community colleges face in achieving the goals of the Completion Agenda. Let’s hope they perform well enough in their fifteen minutes of fame to earn an encore.

Terry O’Banion
President Emeritus, League for Innovation in the Community College
Senior Advisor, Programs in Higher Education, Walden University

For examples of how community colleges are developing effective ways to advance student success—in completion and high-level learning—see the Roadmap Project section of AAC&U’s LEAP Campus Toolkit.

I enjoyed reading AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider’s thoughtful lead article in the latest issue of Liberal Education. As government officials and foundation executives keep pushing higher education to increase degree completion rates, it is important to remind ourselves that in attempting to raise completion rates we should not ignore issues of quality.

As it happens, a thoughtful and well-informed approach to completion will clearly tend to promote quality. For example, the best-designed and most comprehensive research that’s been done on completion shows that the single most important factor in degree completion that’s been identified so far is academic preparation, far more important than costs, financial aid, and social class, the favorites of so many politicians and policy wonks. Poorly prepared students, in short, are prime candidates for dropping out of college.

This same research also shows that the next most powerful factors in non-completion are commuting and part-time attendance. Most likely these relationships can be best understood in the context of involvement or engagement: students who are most likely to drop out are those who are the least involved in their college experience. Commuting and attending part-time, of course, tend to minimize involvement in the academic experience. The fact that commuters and part-timers are often deprived of exposure to a community of fellow learners compounds the problem.

When you combine poor preparation with minimal engagement, you have the worst of everything, which helps to explain the poor completion rates of so many community colleges and public four-year colleges.

That these factors get so little attention in policy discussions is a source of considerable frustration, especially to a researcher who has devoted much of his career to studying such issues. While it is true that problems such as poor academic preparation and a lack of residential facilities cannot be fixed merely by waving a policy wand, there are certainly creative ways in which we can enhance pre-collegiate preparation by forging closer academic partnerships between secondary and postsecondary education, and there are measures that commuter institutions can take to simulate the benefits of the residential experience. We can also do more to encourage new college students, especially traditional-age students, to attend college on a full-time basis.

Finally, it should be pointed out that this same research evidence on degree completion connects directly to our notions about what constitutes the ideal environment for effective liberal learning: good preparation, a community of learners, and high levels of effort and involvement. In other words, academic quality and degree completion are compatible: improve (or remediate) preparation and create a learning environment that promotes student involvement, and better completion will follow.

Alexander W. Astin
Allan M. Cartter Professor Emeritus &
Founding Director
Higher Education Research Institute
University of California, Los Angeles

My intention is to be a resource for LGBT students and their allies on campus, but there are limitations in my ability to fully engage with students due to my status as an adjunct faculty member. Like most adjuncts, I have very tight time constraints and I teach at the periphery of my home department. The New Faculty Majority has been making these and other issues related to the experiences of contingent faculty members explicit. These experiences, and the steps needed to improve the working conditions of contingent faculty, were the focus of the organization’s recently-held National Summit, sponsored at the same location and directly following AAC&U’s Annual Meeting. If conditions improve for the nation’s contingent faculty, conditions will also improve for undergraduate students in the classroom. Fair compensation, access to campus resources, and encouraged involvement in developing and advancing departmental learning outcomes and intentional curricula are just a few inroads toward better working conditions and better outcomes for students.

My own set of outcomes in the classroom, reflective of AAC&U’s Essential Learning Outcomes, includes critical and analytical thinking, written and oral communication, and civic and intercultural knowledge. Yet, contingent faculty members often structure their course syllabi and learning outcomes in a vacuum. Inviting part-time and per-course faculty members to departmental conversations on curricula and learning outcomes would be beneficial to everyone involved, and such conversations should be facilitated in the spirit of collegiality. Many contingent faculty members also enjoy engaging in campus activities, and these individuals bring different kinds of expertise to the institutions they teach in, providing their respective campuses a rich pool of critical and diverse perspectives. There should be some sort of departmental recognition of extracurricular campus participation in activities such as campus panels, since contingent faculty partake in these activities because they care deeply about certain issues, in spite of their time constraints.

In the courses that I teach, we often read about and discuss issues that could lead to ambivalent or even defensive feelings among students. Time and again, however, I witness students grappling with these issues in profound ways. Issues of gender and sexuality pervade public life and are highly visible in all of the major topics that are woven into the daily updates of our modern news cycle—topics such as the economy, healthcare, education, political violence, immigration, and marriage. A critical perspective that interprets the world through a race, class, gender, and/or sexuality lens is not woven into our news cycle as explicitly as I would hope, but I am inspired by the level at which students engage with such a critical lens to discuss issues of the modern era; these students are making inclusive excellence a priority in their education. We can also see this at California State University, Chico, which has a gender and sexuality pathway figured into the institution’s General Education program. Additionally, we see this at the University of Vermont, which – thanks to “a long institutional change process” – has established an LGBTQA Center, “the inclusion of gender identity and expression in UVM’s nondiscrimination and harassment policies,” and a Sexuality and Gender Identity Studies minor. Both institutions were recently featured in Diversity & Democracy (Volume 15, Issue 1).

In spite of these positive examples, much must still be done to improve the campus climate for all students. As Warren J. Blumenfeld points out in the same issue of Diversity & Democracy, 31 percent of the students, staff, faculty, or administrators who participated in a 2010 survey (conducted by Blumenfeld with Sue Rankin, Genevieve N. Weber, and Somjen Frazer) “experienced a difficult or hostile campus climate and 21 percent experienced some form of harassment related to their sexual identity or gender expression.” And the situation is even worse for transgender people or queer people of color. What practices can be instilled at institutions to ensure that harassment, bullying, and hate crimes decrease significantly (or altogether disappear)? Blumenfeld and his colleagues suggest the following: “campus climate and needs assessments, inclusive policies, training and development options, services including counseling and healthcare, housing options, appropriate and timely responses to anti-LGBTQ incidents, and inclusive curricular and co-curricular education.” We can also look to individual campus responses to specific incidences of intolerance or hate crimes, such as the University of California–Davis’s The Civility Project.

Inclusiveness is a crucial part of a healthy and fulfilled undergraduate experience. I hope that more campuses across the United States present concerted efforts to create and foster tolerate environments for all current and incoming students, administrators, staff, and faculty (full-time and contingent).

Not to say it isn’t hard work. NOVA has made an investment in learning across the curriculum, in liberal education across the curriculum. They’ve made it a priority to “look both ways,” to work with local schools and with George Mason University through an innovative program called Pathway to the Baccalaureate. They see the AAA/AAS not as “terminal” because NOVA and the Virginia Community College System have partnered with a number of universities to create transfer pathways for students in CTE programs. They’ve been working for years with student learning outcomes for all programs. To keep things together, they’ve put responsibility and authority for the curriculum in one office, led by Sharon (Sheri) Robertson, associate vice president for academic services.

Sheri Robertson likes that design: “It’s intentional. We know that many students come to NOVA because they need work right now. Many self-place into applied programs for employment—when they know they want to transfer in the future. We see it all the time. Lives change; people move on. Faculty know that, and they care about the students. It’s my job to find ways to bring the CTE and transfer faculties together. Our automotive and air conditioning technology faculty are thinking about transfer. English faculty and nursing faculty have worked together to give nursing students the communications education they need to transfer. Faculty in the information systems technology  program, an applied degree, decided to create a sister IT program that’s a transfer degree. They worked with George Mason to do it. The result: the AS degree in IT is one of the biggest programs that we have.

“We had one program in recreation and parks that had a single faculty member and offered an applied degree. That faculty member wrote a proposal to close her own program and develop a transfer specialization in general studies in its place. That’s what her students needed. They told her they needed a course or two or they needed a master’s degree. At the curriculum committee meeting on the program change, thirteen students came to support the faculty member—with tears in their eyes. Talk about commitment to students!”

“Students come to NOVA to get their hands dirty,” Robertson tells me. “That emphasis on application crosses the liberal arts and the applied programs. It fosters unity and respect for liberal arts and applied fields in CTE. NOVA values both, not one primary, the other secondary. That’s one of the things I like about my job. I get to work with the whole curriculum. I’m also a horticulturist. The metaphor works well in my field and it carries a larger meaning.” She tells me that she’s had students with degrees in horticulture from large research universities who come to NOVA as she herself did—literally to get their hands dirty for the first time. “They never had a chance to do that very much before; I didn’t, either.”

But there’s another side of the story. She tells me about a horticulture student who’d never been to college. He’d been working in landscaping, “plugging trees into holes in the ground by the light of truck headlamps, cramming in the roots, stuffing in some mulch. Work experience, muddy boots, yes, but what a way to kill a tree!” A blend of theory and practice is what these students need most for career success and lifelong flourishing. Liberal arts and sciences and applied work need to go hand in hand.

My visit to NOVA opened the door to a new understanding of the ways in which this large and complex institution innovates. Higher education generally, but especially four-year institutions, needs to hear more about what community colleges are doing. Like other strong institutions, NOVA is developing faculty and staff communication and leadership across the campuses. They are organizing and integrating programs located on different sites. They are bringing together the transfer liberal arts and career and technical education (CTE) curricula. They are addressing the plethora of mission-driven demands, including the long-standing commitment to community-based education that is open to all. They do all this in the face of declining public investment in education and while under pressure to produce more workforce-ready degrees and certificates. Challenged to serve more students with fewer resources, resolutely committed to finding more powerful lifelong education—including liberal education for more students—this is the condition of many community colleges these days.

I’m seeing networks everywhere these days. There’s the obvious one—the Internet—but, there is also a growing trend in of studying networks, and not just social networks like Facebook , but also in literature, like the network of relationships between characters in Hamlet.  AAC&U has its Network for Academic Renewal, NITLE works with a network of small liberal arts colleges, and our students are facing a world of webs and networks, as I described in a blog post last year.

One of my fellow bloggers, Shyam Sharma, a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville and winner of the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award, describes the “responsibilities of an effective educator of the twenty-first century” and explains what this means for instructors: I help students develop and maintain broad and deep “personal learning networks”—webs of places, resources, and people where they receive and also share knowledge.

Because of the internet and online social networks, we tend to think these networks require digital technology, but learning networks aren’t new. Consider the “Republic of Letters,” now mapped in a new project that visualizes intellectual exchange via a different kind of network technology—mail. We all have our personal learning networks, whether they are supported by water-cooler conversations, conference attendance, journal articles, or twitter.

Sitting in an e-portfolio session on the last day of the conference, I was struck by the networked learning going on around me when the person sitting next to me leaned over, held out her smart phone, and asked, “Is this you?” She was playing one of my favorite conference games: follow the conference hashtag (#aacu12), see if anyone is tweeting in your session, and look around to see if you can recognize them. Then go introduce yourself after the session ends. Twitter is an excellent icebreaker because you’ve already started the conversation electronically. There’s some debate about what to call the experience of meeting someone in person after only interacting online; when I tweeted this question, crowdsourced suggestions included “meat-meat”, “disambiguation”, and “devirtualization”. While it’s fun to invent new vocabulary, for me these terms raise a distinction that isn’t necessary. It’s the network that is important, however it is instantiated—whether that is by twitter or face-to-face meetings.

During that same e-portfolio session, one of my twitter followers started talking to me about e-portfolios. She wasn’t at AAC&U; we had actually met in person at THATCamp Liberal Arts Colleges, a digital humanities “unconference,” and started following each other. This is a great example of how information moves across the network; I knew her from another domain (digital humanities) but was able to pass information from this one (AAC&U) that she needed because her campus is considering e-portfolios. That makes me a “local bridge”, which Mark Granovetter has shown to be a necessary element in the diffusion of information across a network.

Because I am a heavy twitter user, I see the network at work in my twitter conversations. This example won’t work for everyone, and I’m not saying that you have to use twitter. In fact, if you can’t tap into a network in your area of interest on twitter, I would argue against it. You’ll just be disappointed. On the other hand, you might have a similar networked learning experience in a face-to-face conversation about high-impact practices at your next disciplinary conference.

But why is the network important? Why make all of these connections? And how do they help student learning? Let me share one more example from the conference.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m working on how to teach collaboration. I shared this work with one of those people I met at the conference via twitter when we had a chance to talk in person. He then pointed me back to a resource I already had but hadn’t checked yet—the VALUE Rubrics, specifically the one for teamwork, and described how it made him rethink group work. The last time I used the rubrics I was thinking about assessment. not teaching collaboration. Even if I had remembered there was a teamwork rubric, I wouldn’t have had the benefit of talking to someone who had already used it in his class for group projects.  For me, networking is a strategy for filtering information, a way to let the information find me when I need it. This is my just-in-time learning. And this is why I marked networking as my chief takeaway on the AAC&U conference evaluation.

In this post, I’ve tried to write very intentionally about how networked learning works because of how important it is for our students. The growing Anonymous and Occupy movements are powerful examples of what networking can do and its role in civic and commercial activity.  Yochai Benkler has written about the Wealth of Networks.  George Siemens, in Connectivism, his theory of networked learning, argues that in the current information environment, students need to learn how to learn from a network—they need to develop their own learning networks, in which some nodes are the classroom and fellow students, but others are extracurricular connections. In the vocabulary of the AAC&U network, this is integrative learning. Teachers, then, become both nodes on the network, but also connectors that help students build networks. We all (not just instructors) need to be thinking intentionally about helping students become networked learners and what our place in their learning network will be.

Wednesday night Ken O’Donnell opened the AAC&U 2012 Annual Meeting by telling us that the road connecting civic and commercial activity is “collected work toward a common purpose.” He backed that up in part by citing the no. 1 answer on the National Association of Colleges and Employers survey of what employers are seeking: “ability to work in a team structure.” I’ve been promoting collaborative projects (usually between different institutions) for almost ten years now, and I routinely work in a distributed team with colleagues at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. But, after hearing O’Donnell speak, I wondered, how do we teach that skill to students?

This is not an idle query for me; in fact, it’s a homework assignment of sorts. I’m currently part of a working group (collaboration again) that is collectively brainstorming a curriculum for digital humanities pedagogy workshops, and collaboration is one of the topics we see as key. As those who attended the Digital Humanities for Undergraduates panel on Thursday know, collaboration is one of the practices that differentiate the digital humanities from traditional humanities studies.

One of the HEDs up speakers, Kristine LaLonde, associate professor of Honors at Belmont University, gave us one answer to my question—through team projects—but also suggested that many of us teaching in higher education don’t know good teamwork, which hinders our instruction. I think that’s true in some quarters. Certainly humanists are stereotypically loners, at least when it comes to research. On the other hand, I noticed a significant trend towards collaboration and teamwork when reading through the preliminary program before coming to the conference. Just to be sure, I did some rudimentary textual analysis of the preliminary program and found that roughly 20 percent of the sessions (twenty-six sessions) contained references to collaboration or teamwork in their title or description. Only about four of those, however, seemed to be referencing collaborative learning (though collaborative assignments and projects are listed by AAC&U as high-impact practices. Instead, sessions like “The Benefits of Collaboration: Lessons Learned from a Teagle Collaborative” focus more on teaching ourselves the value of collaboration. It seems that we are coming to appreciate collaboration, but we’re still working on how to teach it to our students.

LaLonde’s provocatively-titled talk, “Team Projects as Democracy Killers,” argued that if we aren’t doing team projects well, perhaps we shouldn’t do them at all. While Marc Chun’s “The Play’s the Teaching Thing” was clearly the most entertaining of this year’s group of HEDs Up talks (in the tradition of TED talks), LaLonde’s provoked the most discussion. One of the key sticking points was whether students could learn anything from a bad team project. I take LaLonde’s point that just putting a team project in a course doesn’t lead to active and collaborative learning; practices are only high-impact if you do them well.

On the other hand, I think the issue is a bit more complicated. What about learning from failure? I suppose that if an instructor doesn’t put in enough time to make a team project work well, then s/he may not put in enough time to help students learn from failure. But, if there were time, then it would be great to have students reflect on their experience, to learn from their problems. Or (and I am now sitting in an e-portfolio session) perhaps a student could reflect on what a failed team project taught them in their portfolio or some other tool for intentional learning. As much as students may expect to work in teams after college, they should probably also expect to work on bad teams. Getting a little advance experience on how to handle malfunctioning team dynamics is not necessarily a bad thing.

Hand-in-hand with learning from failure is iteration. If students only do a team project once, I doubt they are learning much about how to collaborate. At the very least, they are learning only one variety of collaboration, whatever was required for that project. I would augment LaLonde’s ultimate message, then, to say, “don’t think you’re teaching collaboration just by putting a team project on the syllabus.” Take the time to do the project well (LaLonde’s message), and then put one on your next syllabus, too. Students need repetition, and so do teachers.

Fortunately, resources also exist to help you teach collaboration. Take a look at the VALUE rubric for teamwork available here. The framing language contains this important point: “This rubric is designed to measure the quality of a process, rather than the quality of an end product.” Like so many other things, learning collaboration should be an iterative process. We need to scaffold teamwork by breaking it down, modeling it, and giving students multiple experiences. For example, LaLonde described a less-successful project style where teams divide up the content, work separately, and then one person knits it together at the end of the project. O’Donnell, however, talked about teams built based on members’ dispositions and skills, such as free discourse, open communication, and conflict resolution. In my experience, good teams assess their own abilities (whether formally or informally) and deploy each member where needed. Though I am often the one keeping a team organized, it’s a pleasure for me to be part of team where another member has that strength and takes the lead in organization.  So, a first student approach to teamwork may focus on the mechanical division of content labor; more experienced students will move on to attention to team dynamics.  In order to help our students understand the team process, we need to encourage students to reflect on their collaborative experiences.

It’s no mistake that newly developing fields like the digital humanities are turning more towards collaboration. As Clay Shirky argues in Cognitive Surplus, our whole culture is making the shift to collaborative creation. Whether the common purpose of our collective work is leisure, research, commercial, or civic activity, collaboration underlies our new, networked world. We all need to think about how to learn it.