Posts Tagged ‘LEAP’
It is highly unusual for a U.S. president to call a small group of higher education leaders to the White House. But, these are clearly unusual times. Building on national economic concerns being expressed so powerfully through the various “occupy” demonstrations, many reporters have begun more intense coverage of the issues of college costs and student debt—the topics of today’s White House meeting. The meeting today follows on a high-profile speech delivered in late November by Education Secretary Arne Duncan in which he called on higher education officials to “think more creatively—and with much greater urgency” about how to reduce the cost of going to college and how to reduce students’ debt loads. I am hoping that the conversation at the White House today also addresses creatively questions of educational quality in addition to questions about college costs.
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 21st century. But we also need to have a national conversation about quality, and about who has access to high-quality college education.
My last posting in my series on school-college alignment described how the Maricopa Colleges have been using the Significant Discussions Guide to help them align learning from school to college to university. The Significant Discussions project, as I’ve written in previous posts, aims to improve student success by promoting collaboration on curriculum alignment among secondary schools, community colleges, universities, and employers. Anne Arundel Community College (AACC), in Maryland, has been using the Guide in their own way with high schools in their county. This local work is part of a larger career and technology education (CTE) program for high schools throughout the state.
Maryland, I discover, is a national leader in CTE. The state has merged secondary vocational and college preparatory programs. Instead of the two traditional tracks, Maryland has embedded CTE within the overall high school program. If you choose a career cluster, what you get is an infusion of applied learning, for example, in arts, media, and communication, starting in tenth grade. The goal is to develop and reinforce the more traditionally academic knowledge, skills, and abilities through application and hands-on activity in real-world settings. CTE is particularly attractive to students who are not thriving in the high-stakes testing regimen of No Child Left Behind. This approach clearly aligns with the emerging blended model of liberal education advanced in the LEAP initiative.
This blog post was first published on July 21, 2011, on the George Mason University General Education blog. The author is Rick Davis, associate provost for undergraduate education at George Mason University.
It’s Orientation season again on our campus—the summer ritual (conducted on this particular day amid an Excessive Heat Warning) of welcoming our roughly 2,600 incoming freshmen and their parents with two days of information overload, placement tests, registration advice, fun and games, more and quite possibly better food than they will find in the fall, and my little bit about the liberal arts.
Last week, I attended the 2011 National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE) in San Francisco, California. The conference explored some of higher education’s most pressing issues—diversity and access, social justice, and inclusive excellence. Speakers challenged attendees to revise our thinking about how we educate students and to what ends.
On Friday morning, Daniel R. Wildcat, Director of the American Indian Studies Program at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, gave the keynote address. In his talk, “Diversity: An Issue of Life-Enhancement for the Planet,” Wildcat called for a paradigm shift in the ways we think about place, power, and human personality. He explained that in his native language, there is no word for “resources,” but instead, the word for materials drawn from the earth is closer to the word “relatives.” It is not acceptable, Wildcat asserted, to treat family and relatives as we would “resources” or ATM machines, so why should we continue to treat the environment in such a way? He emphasized the need for restoring the symbiotic bond between people and place, and for reconceptualizing “wealth” as the number of strong relationships we maintain with people and not as the amount of resources we can gather.
A few weeks ago, I began exploring school-to-college alignment in a new series of blog postings. What does purposeful work on school-to-college alignment mean and what can it do for student learning? How can work in the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) campaign also advance alignment efforts? What does it mean to invoke alignment and focus attention on students’ own work? Educators in both the secondary and postsecondary sectors now have the means to work together on learning-centered alignment—K-16, P-16, P-20—beyond any opportunity we have had before. The urgency that we do so has never been greater.
Why is it important that community colleges are innovatively engaged in alignment? They represent a crucial sector in the current national debate about education, the sector of higher education most critical in my view to the future well-being of our democracy. Centering attention on community colleges, we can see the achievement and promise of alignment that reaches from community colleges back to schools and onward to four-year institutions. To learn about a community college-centered approach to alignment, I strongly recommend Significant Discussions: A Guide for Secondary and Postsecondary Curriculum Alignment, www.league.org/significantdiscussions.
We’ve seen over the past few years an explosion of high-profile national conversations about higher education. At the federal and state levels, in regulatory bodies and legislatures, as well as in many foundations and think tanks, policy makers and their many advisers are pursuing ways to increase “student success” by fixing what is wrong with higher education.
I have written before about the problems with how these national conversations are framed. There are, of course, many problems that require urgent action – and, indeed, national dialogue is needed. Read the rest of this entry »
You may have missed the media coverage of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates’s differing opinions on the appropriate focus of higher education policy,which began in the pages of Inside Higher Ed and now has reached the New York Times. It is, of course, a bit of a gimmicky way to approach a serious issue, but the debate about the forms of college learning that really matter—and that are worthy of investment either by individuals or taxpayers—is a real one, and many commentators continue to be missing some important points. They paint the choices individuals and policymakers have before them in too-stark terms. As is so often the case, the media also presents an either/or choice when the world really demands a both/and option.
Inside Higher Ed raised the issue initially by reporting about a speech Bill Gates delivered to the nation’s governors in which he expressed a remarkably narrow vision for higher education policy—arguing for a greater focus on funding “categories [of courses] that help fill jobs and drive [one’s] state economy in the future.” At the time, AAC&U’s President Carol Geary Schneider noted that, “the basic lessons of a liberal education are in fact crucial to the long-term employability of nonacademics.” Schneider noted, further, that focusing policy only on narrowly conceived majors or courses with explicit vocational applicability was a remarkably “unenlightened view of the value of higher education in general.” As she put it in an Inside Higher Ed article:
I know that many of you have probably been reading the copious news coverage of the new book Academically Adrift. The articles in the higher education press have already elicited hundreds of comments—some useful, some defensive, some derisive. All this attention, of course, is because the book presents some very compelling and disturbing data about learning in college. I know there are limitations to the data presented in this book, but I don’t think any reasonable person can simply dismiss the facts its authors present: that too many students are, indeed, not developing their analytic thinking and writing skills, especially in the first two years of college. These two aspects of college learning are incredibly important for success in today’s world. There are, however, other capabilities that we also need to develop in college students if we are to prepare them well for work, life, and citizenship in the twenty-first century.
For those of us who care about increasing students’ achievement of key liberal education outcomes—including students’ integrative and applied skills—there are also two other articles published in the past few days that shouldn’t be missed. Heather Wilson, a former member of the US House of Representatives, graduate of the US Air Force Academy, and former Rhodes Scholar, writes in the Washington Post about her experiences evaluating candidates for Rhodes scholarships. She has served for twenty years on the selection committees and has “become increasingly concerned in recent years—not about the talent of the applicants but about the education American universities are providing.” Rather than bemoan these top students’ lack of writing skills, however, she worries about another important capacity we would hope a quality liberal education would develop in students. In her experience, even “high-achieving students seem less able to grapple with issues that require them to think across disciplines or reflect on difficult questions about what matters and why.”
The humanities are both central and necessary to a liberal—and liberating—education. The humanities help us make sense of the complexity of the world we inherit—including our histories, values, and cultural traditions. They help us explore competing visions of the past and future and probe what it means to be human. All these themes are vitally important both to individuals and to our society. One of the academy’s most fundamental responsibilities is to explore and teach about global issues and democratic aspirations and realities at home and abroad. These explorations and the root commitments to equality, liberty, and the expansion of justice all depend fundamentally on the humanities’ heartbeat.
While there are other important dimensions to liberal education as AAC&U has made clear in its Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) articulation of “Essential Learning Outcomes,” it is absolutely impossible to provide students with the benefits of liberal learning absent a strong grounding in humanities questions, disciplines, and perspectives. The humanities are necessary to any institution that claims to provide a high quality college education.
Those who know well the work of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)—an organization that has existed for nearly one hundred years—will probably be surprised that AAC&U has something in common with Wired Magazine. Wired recently published an article, “7 Essential Skills You Didn’t Learn in College”— in the form of a mock “Wired University Course Catalog.”
Once you get over the uber-hip format of the whole thing, it’s actually pretty interesting—and not bad advice for today’s college students. The “essential skills” the magazine highlights are actually pretty similar to at least some of the essential learning outcomes at the center of AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, and are also in synch with the outcomes on which employers say they want traditional colleges to place more emphasis (pdf). (See our recent national survey of employers). What Wired recommends are exactly the kinds of things that AAC&U has also recommended—learning experiences that prepare students to solve unscripted problems and to understand knowledge in the context of how today’s complex world actually works.
