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.

Are we “losing our minds?”  Richard Keeling and Richard Hersh, of Keeling & Associates, argued as much in their panel of the same title.  What they mean, of course, is that by having allowed the petrification of a culture of higher education which stressed everything from rankings and athletics to student life and “throughputs,” but somehow ignored student learning, we are not just “adrift,” but at risk of losing student learning, and all that would come from it.  Where, they ask, is the higher learning in higher education?

Critiques of higher education have stacked up over the past two decades, largely focusing on important issues such as escalating costs or the decline of the full-time professoriate. But Keeling and Hersh point to the value of Richard Arum and Josipa Roska’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in providing demographic and research data to sustain the argument that the attributes we value most in higher learning – critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills, among others – are not being achieved at institutions of higher education.

Keeling and Hersh’s talk, which summarized their just-published book of the same title (Palgrave Macmillan) suggested that we are not fully developing the human and intellectual capacity of today’s college students because the current culture of higher education does not foster, require, or reward higher learning. This, they argue, is an unacceptable and costly failure that must be resolved if, as a nation, we are to avoid weakening our political, social, economic, scientific, and technical leadership. Further, if we attempt to solve the problem by removing resources from higher education, then we will likely succeed in becoming more efficient at producing less learning.

Colleges and universities often place predominant value on “throughput” – recruiting, admitting, enrolling, retaining, and graduating students.  Once in a university, the student will often find herself in what Barr and Tagg called the “instructional paradigm,” where faculty deliver knowledge, rather than in a “learning paradigm,” where faculty focus on creating learning environments and facilitating learning. Further, they argue, the entire higher education enterprise is vertically organized (think of our frequent talk of “silos”), whereas  student learning, characterized by its cumulative and collective organization, is much more horizontal, spanning across the student’s time at university rather than one course. Learning for students, as a myriad of studies have demonstrated, is achieved across a cumulative experience.

Decades of learning about learning suggest that this is a product of the complex, dynamic interaction among students and others, shaped by the introduction of new knowledge, experiences, and events as well as by students’ own histories and aspirations. Learners, as John Dewey taught nearly a century ago, construct knowledge by making meaning from the raw materials of content and their experiences.

So, what do we know about learning that can help us think about what students should be getting as a “higher” education? While the panelists spoke of a number of issues, the most important were the need for students to spend more time on task and to be presented with higher expectations: practice, repetition, expectations.

These factors, they suggest, cannot be addressed by a single “silver bullet,” nor can solutions be purchased with a sudden infusion of funds. They can only be addressed by a change in the culture that has sustained a “non-learning” mode in higher education for too many years. American higher education needs to rethink assumptions, principles, priorities, values, organizational structures, reward systems, and usual and customary practices, and we need to rethink these in light of what we know empirically about how students learn.

And what is to be a part of this new culture? For Keeling and Hersh, among many points, the following are most important:

* An explicit, and intentional, emphasis on learning (and not “throughput”);

* A recognition that student learning is holistic: you cannot divide the cognitive, social, personal, or emotional aspects of a student’s learning;

* A focus on cumulative and collective learning; learning over time, across experiences; and intentionally organized learning. This does not happen in only two classes or through four extra-curricular activities, but rather as a part of an intentional structure of thought-out design;

* Learning needs to be coherent and integrated, and for this to happen, the work of integration must be co-determined by student and institution. It is not in the ability of (most) students to knit their higher education learning together into the needed level of coherence;

* Higher education curriculum must be challenging and rigorous, with high standards as a common practice;

* Students must be asked and expected to engage in far more learning outside of the class than is currently the case; and

*Students need to come into greater contact with full-time faculty, who are also engaged in advising and mentoring.

Keeling and Hersh recognize that for institutions that are already strapped for funds, this can throw them into the most difficult of decisions. But, they argue, by placing student learning as the fundamental goal of higher education, the answers to those questions should follow.

Demands are made on students (who are expected to spend greater time on task; to engage actively rather than letting their education happen without their input; and to build up a tolerance for challenge and risk-taking); on educators (who are expected to play a leadership role in promoting student learning by raising their expectations, their support of students, and their willingness to challenge students); and on administrators (who are called on to create the environment where learning, not rankings, becomes the priority, to revise faculty reward systems to emphasize learning and account for the value of teaching, advising, and mentoring; and to provide regular faculty development to strengthen teaching and learning). It is the synchronous coordination of all these efforts that will change the culture of higher education and produce different outcomes.

Keeling and Hersh’s work appears to be the next logical step after Academically Adrift, suggesting ways to address the problems that Arum and Roska raised. And yet, if the points were powerful and the argument persuasive, the current environment doesn’t seem a propitious one for imagining massive culture change in the world of higher education. For many legislators, it is easier to blame the teacher and to focus on training students for the job than to wrap their heads (and budgets) around what learning is about. For faculty at most institutions of higher education, not only will their own employment be determined by a reward structure that treats serious teaching as a third rail, but as part-time faculty take up more jobs, they find themselves without even an office in which to meet students during the few hours they are on campus before the drive to their next adjunct position. And for students, who live increasingly complex and demanding lives, the notion that they may have to spend more years (and funds) on “learning” will not be an attractive one. I fundamentally support Keeling and Hersh’s conclusions … yet I remain less than optimistic about their chances for success.

Henry Eyring of BYU-Idaho got a lot of attention with last year’s publication of  The Innovative University, an insider’s account of changes to the higher ed business model.  BYUI has pursued online learning and year-round operations to rationalize its costs of instruction, taking some cues from the for-profit sector.

Eyring began by observing that higher ed may be slow to adopt online learning, owing to a rollout that coincided unfortunately with the tech bubble.  He said in the decade or so since, the technologies have gotten stronger while higher ed’s finances have weakened, making alternate delivery more attractive.

He went on to ask us to think about industries vulnerable to disruption, versus those that aren’t.  Our suggestions:

Disruptable:
- newspapers
- airlines
- photography
- music distribution

Not Disruptable:
- household goods (e.g. soap)
- theme parks
- sports franchises
- fast food
- hotels

From that list, you would expect universities to be relatively durable.  Like theme parks, we “bundle” services on a single site– things like buildings, people, and experiences.  By contrast, the newspapers’ tactic of bundling their cost center (reporting) with a revenue center (classified advertising) became their undoing when the two functions were decoupled five or six years ago.

Eyring doesn’t believe higher education has seen the full effects yet of the unbundling that on-line learning represents, but it’s clearly under way.  Aside from the online phenomenon, there’s also our bundling of lower-division coursework (a revenue center) with graduate research (a cost center), making us vulnerable to disruption.  Our best defense is to take a cue from Harvard’s recent commitment to contain costs.

Eyring closed the session by observing that our moment of transition calls for a new kind of Morrill Act, referring to the 1862 legislation that created the land-grant universities.  By underscoring our national commitment to learning, it reconfigured public education for generations afterward.  We may be at a similar turning point.

Sherrill B. Gelmon won this year’s Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award, conferred by Campus Compact. She’s a professor of public health at Portland State University, teaching in PSU’s College of Urban & Public Affairs. She began by pointing out how well that positions her for community engagement work: she and her colleagues are at the heart of downtown Portland, in a university whose motto is “Let Knowledge Serve the City.”

She used both survey data and personal anecdotes to identify faculty motives for engagement, but the real reward kept coming back to joy. Her colleagues report that community engagement makes their work more satisfying, deepens student learning, and adds dimension and relevance to their own teaching and scholarship. For each personal story, Sherrill projected an image that the respondent felt represented joy, some of them really whimsical. Of the comparisons she made, I think my favorite came from her PhD student Katrina, who said the pressures of faculty work reminded her of professional skaters, bringing their arms in and twirling faster and faster. Connections to the community pull the arms back out.

Devorah Leiberman, formerly of PSU and now president of the University of La Verne, added an administrator’s perspective to the value of community engagement–and curiously, her motivation began when she was a faculty member. Like Sherrill, she candidly characterized it as a source of joy; she’d once pitched for a promotion in faculty rank by expanding her scholarship to include local research, and her dean discouraged it, saying he’d only support research that stuck to her dissertation topic–a phenomenon she later dubbed “publishing without passion for promotion.” She vowed not to perpetuate the cycle when she got into positions of authority.

Julie Plaut, executive director of the Minnesota Campus Compact, confessed that she loves her work but wouldn’t have called it “joyful.” In her experience, it’s valuable for faculty but often elicits anxiety over the unknown, fear of a weakened case for RTP, even unease over the challenges of reconciling off-campus service with the quirks of the academic calendar. She said all of these can and should be overcome, but every day she feels first-hand the need expressed in the recently published Crucible Moment– that we take work like this beyond the episodic and sporadic, and make it pervasive and purposeful.

At the end of this engaging and well-prepared panel, it was hard not to agree. The work is clearly rewarding, but too many of the benefits are apparent only in hindsight, recognized by participants more than by the institution. The educational benefits also appear substantial, but until we have more presidents like La Verne’s, may be marginalized for a while to come.

We’ll know we got there when the title of a session like this doesn’t imply people have to be talked into engaging with communities.

It’s the first day of AAC&U’s Annual Meeting and I’m already bleary-eyed. Yesterday afternoon I flew into Washington from Utah, registered for the conference, and crashed in my room. It wasn’t so much the travel that has caused me to be so tired this morning, but the “goodie” I received in my registration packet. I’m referring to A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future, by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement. This call to action kept me up half the night reading and thinking about its message. And now that I just finished attending the opening plenary session, I want to get my thoughts down before they dissipate with the activities of the day ahead.

There is simply no better time than the present for a national call for elementary, secondary, and higher educators to work together to renew our commitment to democratic engagement. As Carol Geary Schneider, president of AAC&U, mentioned in her opening remarks, the scope and severity of the challenges the United States and the global community face are truly daunting. If I may elaborate just on the American situation: our over-leveraged economy seems incapable of returning to the levels of growth and employment we have come to expect in the post-World War II era; we appear to be running up against resource scarcities and environmental challenges at every turn; economic inequality has reached a level of toxicity not seen in the United States since before the Great Depression; our fellow Americans seem more enthused by their roles as consumers than their responsibilities as citizens; we have engaged in an extremely unilateral and militarized foreign policy that magnifies rather than diminishes national security problems; and our national institutions are held in varying degrees of disregard by the people they purport to serve.

I welcome AAC&U’s work with a variety of stakeholders and interested groups to produce the Crucible Moment report. It calls, in the words of Schneider, for educators to “vigorously, actively, and noisily reclaim our civic missions” in higher education. Institutions of higher learning can and should help to build democratic capital and encourage our students to engage in civic learning, practice the kinds of vigorous yet respectful dialogue so vital to democracy, and work to address the needs of the local, national, and global communities to which they belong. Indeed, as the list of concurrent sessions for this conference shows, many colleges and universities are already engaged in this vital work.

A Crucible Moment resonates with me as a classroom teacher. Over the years, some students in my courses have worked on political campaigns, advocated for a diverse range of interest groups, and served in humanitarian organizations to build houses, stock food pantries, and help refugees. They have written about how their work ties to the broad principles and concepts I introduce in my politics courses. At my institution, I have worked to promote service-learning and civic engagement in our mission, our learning outcomes, and our practices. In other words, I’m on board with the National Task Force’s call to action, as are most of my colleagues on the faculty and staff of Salt Lake Community College.

And yet (oh no, here it comes), I can’t help thinking that we are missing a vital piece of the picture—namely, the structures in which we and our students operate. If we don’t address the anti-democratic organization of—and practices within—our political, educational, and economic institutions, our work is incomplete. I think of this as analogous to A Crucible Moment’s recommendation for higher education to move from partial to pervasive integration of civic learning and democratic engagement. Graduating classes of students who are civically engaged is only a partial success, in my opinion, and will not be complete until those very students work with us to transform the institutions that produce the social and economic ills that plague us.

Let’s start with our own institutions. Are they as democratic as they could be? My son, who is fourteen, attends a school where new teachers go through a probationary period after which the students are given a great deal of influence on whether or not the new teacher is permitted to remain on the staff. The students also handle all disciplinary problems via a deliberative body. What happens in the future when he attends my own institution, where faculty and (especially) students have limited power? What happens when he becomes employed in one of the vast majority of corporations where distant CEOs and shareholders make all the important decisions? Despite what he might learn about democracy from a truly liberal education, I fear that the real lesson he will learn over time is that democracy is an “ideal form” that isn’t actually practiced in the settings that matter.

Let’s look also at our broader political and economic systems. The economic troubles we are currently facing were by and large not caused by a lack of civic engagement. Plenty of individuals and organized groups mobilized over the years to oppose the deregulation of the financial industry, to challenge the war-making, to rebut the alleged need to reduce taxes on the wealthy. All of those efforts were for naught, however, because the institutional structures and processes in place in our republic are geared to discount the collective voices of ordinary people in favor of large economic interests.

Our graduates should understand and be engaged to remedy the institutions and practices that produce the social ills that we are currently asking them to address in their service-learning experiences. I’m saying that poverty, injustice, environmental damage, and poor health are directly related to—among other sources—the way we finance our elections, the way that our news organizations are owned and operated, the way that our legal system treats corporations as people with nearly all the rights and few of the responsibilities of actual people, the way the US Senate remains an incredibly un-democratic legislative body, the way we treat healthcare as a product to be purchased on the open market rather than a right. The list could go on.

In short, we want our students to be civically minded, to be practiced in the art of working collaboratively and constructively with a diverse set of colleagues, and to be innovative as they tackle social problems. The Task Force’s call to action does that, and I am so grateful for it. But don’t we also want our students to get to the roots of those social problems? If not, we risk training them to be permanent medics, patching wounds in a war that never ends.

When I look at the description of events in the schedule of the AAC&U Annual Meeting this year, images of my undergraduate students cross my mind. I begin to think about what use my students from the English 101 class in fall 2007 (my first semester of teaching college writing) made of the “critical thinking skills” that I taught after they left my classroom. I wonder if my students from the advanced writing course that focused on global citizenship last year continued to “pause to look at two more perspectives” before beginning to argue and defend their own positions. The events in the schedule represent big and often abstract ideas emerging from the experience and wisdom of scholars who are intellectual leaders in higher education. But when browsing the themes and descriptions in the schedule, my mind turns toward the students from the past and students I will teach in years to come. Has my teaching helped them become productive citizens in their communities and work? How much am I helping them become the digital and global citizens that they need to be today? What else do I need to do in order to shoulder the responsibilities of an effective educator of the twenty-first century—and what does it mean to be an effective teacher today in light of the changes, challenges, and opportunities that are created or complicated by the forces of economic crises around the world, advancements in information technologies, and the growing interdependence of knowledge (and other) markets around the world? I will be seeking answers to these questions in the many exciting discussions that I look forward to attending at the AAC&U Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

The sessions that I am most interested are concerned with what I call digital-global citizenship. (And, by the way, the schedule that I carry is not in a diary, nor a printout: it is, thanks to AAC&U, a mobile “app.”) For me, integrating technological skills into teaching does not mean just including “cool” new technologies: I help students use new technologies to achieve and enhance the age-old mission of liberal arts education, of critical thinking, finding and synthesizing information, enhancing their civic awareness and developing in democratic engagement. 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. My students use technology to learn, write, solve problems, and develop new ideas, often collaboratively. Their collaboration is facilitated and enriched by technologies like wikis and blogs; they seek to understand the perspectives and practices of apparently universal phenomena in different cultures and societies around the world by using multimedia in their research, critical analysis, composition, and presentation of ideas and practices.

The sense of global citizenship that I inspire my students to cultivate is not just an ideal or abstract concept. It is one of the values of a liberal education, but it is simultaneously a pragmatic asset in their educational toolkit. Thus, I am enthused to see presentations such as “How to Prepare Global Leaders” because I know that this is a realistic question, considering that new modes of competition and collaboration in the global knowledge market will demand from my students intellectual capacity and professional skills that are applicable on global scales. I know that “global” does not always have to be “international” or “planetary”: my students’ learning networks cross sociocultural, professional, and national borders even when they are not physically crossing those borders. Mediated by new means and modes of communication, their learning and work encompass the formal and informal, personal and social, and even the professional and the apparently frivolous—often crisscrossing one another. The crossing of borders and making of connections have become so prevalent that even my students who come from rural backgrounds in Kentucky are deeply connected with the world at large: they already have access to resources for learning about issues and events in the world at large, and they are excited to engage in discussions about issues that are not limited within national and social borders. I know that many of these students are not the so-called digital “natives” that they are often assumed to be, but when I let them explore and use new and powerful means to share texts and ideas on their own, they quickly make meaningful use of the resources. Especially when I acknowledge the value of their personal learning networks alongside their learning in the university as a node in the larger network, my students draw on the best of both the “worlds” of learning. Thus, I look forward to attending sessions that will further enhance my understanding of “global civic awareness,” as the title of one session aptly describes.

As someone who is both keenly aware of increasing challenges in higher education—attrition and graduation rates, slashed funding, increasing use of contingent labor, the spread of “vulgar” forms of internationalization of higher education that seek to put bucks above brains—and also excited by the new possibilities of transnational sharing and collaboration, I am eager to participate in the conversations about subjects like these during the Annual Meeting. I look forward to learning more about how to make better connections between an understanding of the big picture of challenges and opportunities in higher education and the needs of my students; I want to learn how to develop better pedagogical strategies to help my students with the increasing and shifting demands from their academic and professional careers. When I enter the classroom, I do not want to pretend that if my students learn what I tell them to learn, they will be fine. My students will not apply the skills for critical thinking and communication, research and writing that I teach them into sociopolitical vacuums: they must apply those skills in order to get things done in complex contexts, and they too need to learn to see the big picture of the academy and the professions. Again, those contexts are more often global than local, and changing more quickly than ever before.

I am enthused by the themes of many of the discussions at the Annual Meeting, and in particular I look forward to learning more about how to help my students achieve one of the most important goals of college education for today’s and tomorrow’s worlds— as part of the title another session puts it, helping them gain the knowledge and skills they will need for “global civic engagement.”

Shyam Sharma is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. He will be recognized with a K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award during AAC&U’s Annual Meeting.

Community colleges are an increasingly important sector of institutions committed to liberal education, and they will be key to how liberal education evolves in the future. Many would argue—I hear this all the time on community college campuses—that they already are the foundation and center of liberal education, especially for all those students who transfer from community colleges into four-year institutions. Community colleges are positioned to educate the majority of students, and they are likely providing most of general education—certainly most of lower-division general education—now and as far ahead as we can see. We may already be there. If you think of common patterns of transfer, as Cliff Adelman has been arguing for years, you’ll realize that many students enrolled in four-year institutions simultaneously take courses, often in general education, at community colleges. Students, and in some state systems like the California State University, the majority of students, begin their studies elsewhere, primarily in community colleges. In the CSU system, 60 percent of graduates transferred into their institutions from community colleges (see here, here, and here).

What are the implications of these trends for leadership in liberal education? The best policy for the well-being of community colleges will encourage program development similar to what we find on the ground at the Oxnard, Anne Arundel, and Maricopa colleges I have profiled in this series. These are program designs drawn from a shared vision for student success that anchors learning in applied, engaged, high-impact practices. The very best of these designs, at these and other community colleges, weave career and technical education (CTE) and the liberal arts together. This more blended model equips students with far more versatility than either curriculum can alone. If we can nurture such programs from school to college, we’ll bring great talent into the workforce of the future.

The challenge  at many community colleges, as I have learned, is that the national priority on career and workforce education has driven a wedge between the liberal arts transfer curricula, the associate’s degrees in arts and sciences, and CTE, with applied degrees and certificates. Community college leaders are under pressure to accelerate completion and raise numbers in applied fields, to the detriment of learning in the liberal arts and general education. They are being asked to reduce or remove general education from applied programs and to increase productivity in workforce-ready fields. The pressure on community colleges to get jobs to the unemployed is understandably intense. But the tendency to care more about narrow job training and less about liberal education is everywhere visible. That narrow job training won’t build a platform for sustainable working and living. The workforce is changing too fast. As my earlier posts have suggested, this is short-sighted behavior. It is shooting-ourselves-in-the-foot behavior. I would go further and say it’s a human rights and social justice issue. For what reason do we consign the new majority of learners to an educational pathway that will guarantee they are unprepared to make a good living over the long term?

A glance at the numbers and percentages of students in developmental learning in community colleges—programs that are often called Basic Skills—indicates the depth of the challenge here. On some campuses, sixty to eighty percent of the students are enrolled in pre-collegiate courses. They are doing middle and high school-level work. That is a tremendous talent pool hungry for a good education. But most of them won’t make it to the associate’s degree. Most will drop out, the climb from level to level of developmental courses too exhausting to sustain. Yet developmental courses need not be dead ends. At many colleges now, there is a flurry of creative and generative developmental work that bodes well for the future. But it’s still the exception, not the rule. And the combination of forces, so to speak, to my mind raises questions about educational disparities up there on the order of health disparities. The least advantaged students are trapped in either developmental sequences or workforce preparation programs designed for the first job or the next technical upgrade. Neither gets a person to sustainable growth within a lifetime of career development. That’s what liberal education is designed to give. The deeper our work with community colleges goes, the more urgently we see the need for liberal education within developmental education, liberal education within CTE. Every time I visit a campus, I hear this—urgent voices that may hesitate to speak out against current policy.

This brings me to general education as it is currently evolving at community colleges. The brightest hope I see for work ahead with community colleges supports and nurtures learning-centered general and liberal education. This is the way to go for school-to-college-to-university alignment.

My optimism stems from my current role as the senior director for student success at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, where I regularly engage in conversations with my like-minded peers about making excellence inclusive in higher education, and the need for equity in learning at all levels. These conversations tend to reaffirm my belief that “we” in higher education are poised for significant change focused on issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity—all leading to new definitions of student success. We often share with the larger community campus examples and information from our member institutions about how educators are asking difficult questions that are the foundation for sustainable change. For example, how do we introduce first-generation, low-income, and/or underrepresented students to the cultures of the academy? How can we alter those cultures to make them more inclusive and responsive to difference? How do we effectively engage traditionally underrepresented students in high-impact practices? How do we create equitable pathways for student success? These questions are at the heart of our conversations for making excellence inclusive, and illustrate the optimism I share with my colleagues about the future. I have no doubt that my son will attend educational institutions that have engaged in these types of discussions and created environments of inclusion, not exclusion. On that level, I am optimistic.

So, why am I a realist?

A recent report from the CollegeBoard, The Educational Crisis Facing Young Men of Color, shows that beyond the “two Americas”—one characterized by opportunity and wealth, and the other characterized by significant social and economic strife—there is a “third America.” That report notes that “this is an America that is almost totally ignored by mainstream society. This America is often captured in popular television documentaries and newspaper stories and includes frightening statistics about unemployment, poverty and high rates of incarceration. The citizens of this third America are primarily men, and mostly men of color. These men live outside the margins of our economic, social and cultural systems.” Unfortunately, we all know that there is profound truth in this statement. We, as a society, have yet to truly understand the “third America.” The third America that is also called the “new majority,” given our changing demographics. When I read this quote for the first time, I thought that the third America was “other” minority males, not my son, and then I realized that when society “sees” my son, it will see, at first glance, this third America. He will encounter the stereotypes associated with the third America because of the color of his skin. That is not a defeatist statement, but reality, if we are being honest.

My colleague, Karen Kalla, director of the Network for Academic Renewal, raised a question recently that should be explored by us all. She said, “We use the terms underrepresented, underserved, low-income, and/or first-generation to describe the new majority students. In reality, aren’t many of these students misrepresented? The use of deficit-minded language to categorize groups of students fails to recognize the skills and talents of the individual.” I completely agree. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are still struggling with individual difference, tolerance, and mutual understanding. Conversations around diversity have become politically correct, or completely disappeared, because some people believe we have evolved beyond those discussions. This is not the case. I think we still have much work to do, as Ramon Gutierrez clearly states in the foreword to the second edition of AAC&U’s publication The Drama of Diversity and Democracy. He notes that “Being aware that we are still divided along racial/ethnic and cultural lines … is not the same as embracing the task of truly confronting our racial legacies.”  He notes further that “there is, in fact, small appetite in our country for probing—or even teaching about … struggles for full inclusion, … struggles that still continue today.”

The continuing need to probe these issues is one reason why we have started this series of blog postings focused on making excellence inclusive, building up to AAC&U’s 2012 Diversity and Learning conference in Baltimore, Maryland. We want to engage in these conversations now.

Over the next several months, my colleagues and I will discuss various topics including, but not limited to, diversity and democracy, new contexts for diversity and learning, campus climates, faculty and staff diversity, and pathways to excellence and equity.  We all enter into these conversations based on our lived experience, and you will hear those perspectives in these blog postings. We invite you to engage with us in this exchange of ideas. Our hope is that our collective efforts in the past, the present, and the future will lay the groundwork for sustainable and honest change. That is the optimist in me talking.

The renewed and intensified attention to college costs isn’t unwelcome.  We should be having a “national conversation” about college costs—about the importance of investing in higher education in order to fuel economic growth, and about who should bear the financial burdens of educating our citizens for success in the 21^st century.  But we also need to have a national conversation about quality, and about who has access to high-quality college education.

While it is true that tuition has been rising, it is also true that, for those who actually complete college, the economic value of a college degree continues to be very high. And many, many students are graduating from college either with no debt at all, or without an excessive amount of debt. It’s always important in these discussions to keep things in perspective, yet the media doesn’t always do a good job of helping the public do that (see, for instance, the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce report, College is Still the Best Option (pdf), for good data on the “value” of a college degree).

The public needs to understand that college is still the best option to prepare for success in the knowledge economy. They need to understand what a reasonable student debt-load is as well.  They also need to know, however, that getting a quality education is most important of all. And we urgently need a broader and louder national dialogue about what really constitutes quality in college learning. The good news is that while Duncan was speaking to financial aid workers, another group of less prominent, but no less important, national leaders was also gathered here in Washington to launch another kind of national conversation. About thirty-five individuals—including educators, assessment experts, state-level policy leaders, faculty members, and national experts—came together to launch AAC&U’s new Quality Collaboratives (QC) project. Part of the ongoing Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, this Lumina Foundation-supported project is focused on transfer students.  It involves policy leaders and educators in eight states working on issues of learning outcomes, curricular change, high-impact practices, and assessment. Participants in the project will work over three years to clarify, map, improve, assess, and document transfer students’ achievement of learning outcomes essential for success in life, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century.

Individuals in the participating states are using the new Degree Qualifications Profile and beginning with the foundational question of what students really need to know and be able to do for success in the twenty-first century. Good ideas are already percolating and are beginning to show the way toward better outcomes—both better learning outcomes and better financial outcomes. For instance, discussions already underway among faculty in Kentucky have clarified what, exactly, students need to know and be able to do in the area of quantitative reasoning. For years, in order to graduate, every student has been required to take the same college algebra course. Many never complete their degrees just because they encounter hurdles getting through this one required class. Kentucky educators—through discussions about what quality learning really means in the twenty-first century—have decided that there are many potential courses that can provide students with high levels of quantitative reasoning skills. Not every student needs the college algebra course, and many will be more likely to graduate—and better equipped for success in the twenty-first century—if they take other quantitative reasoning courses.

This is one small example, but the QC project will surely generate many more “win-win” solutions like this one. And these examples will help demonstrate how we might productively bring our conversations about cost together with serious conversations about quality. The fact is that neither of these conversations is really worth having on its own. Whether we can bring costs down or not, we must ensure that students actually get a quality education for the money they and their parents pay for college. And creating quality curricula is hardly worth doing if we don’t ensure that more Americans can actually afford to attend college and graduate in a timely fashion. We must figure out a way to “make excellence inclusive.”

The QC project particularly targets transfer students, the majority of students getting degrees today who attend two or more institutions. Surely these students deserve a quality educational experience as much as any other students do. And surely we can find ways to make their transfer experiences smoother (thereby potentially saving them money), while also providing a high-quality learning experience.

That is what the QC project—and, more broadly, AAC&U’s LEAP initiative—hopes to accomplish. We must, at once, get more students into college, get more students to graduate from college, and ensure that every one of these students learns the skills and knowledge they need to navigate our complex world successfully.

Watch www.aacu.org for more information about the recommendations and findings that emerge from this new project.