Teaching and Learning at Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH)

Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, Sept. 24, 2008

Sporting an Obama or McCain button? Driving a car with one of the campaigns’ bumper stickers? You might need to be careful on University of Illinois campuses.

The university system’s ethics office sent a notice to all employees, including faculty members, telling them that they could not wear political buttons on campus or feature bumper stickers on cars parked in campus lots unless the messages on those buttons and stickers was strictly nonpartisan. In addition, professors were told that they could not attend political rallies on campuses if those rallies express support for a candidate or political party.

Faculty leaders were stunned by the directives. Some wrote to the ethics office to ask if the message was intended to apply to professors and they were told that was the case. At Illinois campuses, as elsewhere, many professors do demonstrate their political convictions on buttons, bumper stickers and the like.

[Read more →]

The New York Times Magazine for September 21, 2008 is the “College Issue,” with a cover title, “It’s All About Teaching.” Among the articles is one on “Judgment Day” by Mark Oppenheimer. While making the point that there have been over 2,000 studies on the value of student teaching evaluations (i.e., those evaluations which all students are required to fill out at the end of our classes), the research on their utility is still mixed. The article calls attention to the way that the evaluations are subject to particular gender/race biases, how they can reward “entertainment value” over good teaching, how it is difficult to rate the sciences/math (i.e. very vertical curricula) vs. the humanities and social sciences, etc. Oppenheimer closes his article (spoiler alert!) with the following: “When students in the 1960s demanded more say in academic governance, they could not have predicted that their children would play so outsize a role in deciding which professors were fit to teach them. Once there was a student revolution, which then begat a consumer revolution, and along with more variety in the food court and dorm rooms wired for cable, it brought the curious phenomenon of students grading their graders. Whether students are learning more, it’s hard to say. But whatever they believe, they’re asked to say it.”

What do you think? SET’s are required at Oberlin and we have put a fair amount of time trying to make them more reliable and uniform. Are there better ways to evaluate teaching? What would you like to see (other than superlative comments from students on ALL your classes)?

(AAC&U News, September 2008)

Oklahoma City University Integrates Art Across the Curriculum

Oklahoma City University professor of history Marie Hooper, in her ninth year of teaching multiple sections of World Civilization to 1500, is familiar with challenge of making a survey course engaging. “This course is five thousand years of history in fifteen weeks,” she says. But a few years ago, Hooper found that her students became much more interested in the material when she made one important curricular change: adding art. “Most world civilization texts focus on people and issues and throw in the occasional illustration,” she says. “The students don’t get it, they don’t get the connections. But using art can help students focus on the distinctions, see that all ancient civilizations were not the same. They learn to see art as an artifact of the civilization that produced it.”

Arts across the Curriculum

Hooper’s innovative approach to teaching world history is part of a larger movement. Many colleges have well-developed “writing across the curriculum” models, and more schools are developing similar approaches to teaching quantitative and other skills. At Oklahoma City University, an organized effort is in place to integrate the arts across the curriculum, and especially in general education courses. The university’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) and its Fine Art Institute (FAI), both created in 2005 as part of a $4.6 million grant from the Robert and Ruby Priddy Charitable Trust, are dedicated to fostering appreciation for and engagement with the arts across the university curriculum—not just in arts courses. Through faculty workshops, portfolio training sessions, conference travel grants, and an annual arts curriculum guide, the CETL and FAI support faculty and students in arts-related endeavors…. Read more here.

Do you know about Oberlin’s “Languages across the Curriculum” (LxC) initiative?

(Inside Higher Education, September 5, 2008)

Most faculty hiring is done department by department — a method that many scholars say contributes to the difficulties for those whose teaching and research can’t be neatly placed in one departmental box. Professors have complained for years that to do interdisciplinary work, they need to get hired by one discipline (playing down out-of-field interests), and then post-hire or post-tenure, they can branch out. After all, many a search committee is more impressed by a willingness to teach survey or intro courses than a desire to work with the department across the quad.

Seeking to break that pattern, Michigan Technological University used a new system in hiring this year. As in past years, it had about 25 professors’ slots open to fill existing positions on its faculty of 305. In recent years, the university has been able to replace those who leave, but hasn’t added positions. This year, the university made seven hires on top of replacing the existing faculty positions — but none of these searches were managed by departments. While those hired are working with one or more departments, they applied and were evaluated universitywide, and all around a single theme: for their ability to contribute to the study of sustainability. … Read more at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/05/michtech

What do you think? Worth exploring?

OK, so I’m listening to NPR this morning, and there’s a news item about the United States and Poland signing an agreement to place a missile defense system in that country. Secretary of State Rice makes a big point of arguing that the Russians have nothing to worry about, that the missiles are “not aimed at anyone.” Now, either Rice is not the sharpest knife in the drawer (which I don’t believe), or she is, how to put it, lying. But it’s a lie that most understand is a “diplomatic” lie. Those “in the know” understand that Russia indeed has something to be worried about. My point here is not with Rice, Poland, Russia or the particular matter (i.e., whether the U.S. should or shouldn’t base a missile defense system in Poland), but rather with the issue of “acceptable” lying and what it means for us in the classroom. How do we teach about the importance of “truth” (understood as an accurate representation of reality) in the classroom when the vast majority of political leaders engage in continual lying? This is, I suggest, a problem both when we think of those who don’t know that they have just been fed a lie (e.g., there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda;  Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks; the U.S. would never engage in torture; the earth is 6,000 years old, etc.) and for those who know that these are lies…but a part of political convention; it’s “what politicians do,” so don’t get stressed. But why bother with “truth” in the classroom if truth doesn’t matter? This, of course, is hardly a new question, but it is an increasingly important one to the extent that the proliferation of viral news can spread lies so much more quickly than the rumor mill used to spread stories about spider eggs inside of Bubble Yum. What do you think?

Steve Volk

Each year Beloit College publishes what it calls a “Mind-Set List” for the entering college class.  According to Beloit, it is composed of “observations that help to identify the experiences that have shaped the lives–and formed the mindset—of students starting their post-secondary education this fall.” They continue:”The Mindset List is not a chronological listing of things that happened in 1990, the year they were born. It is instead an effort to identify the worldview of 18 year-olds in the fall of 2008. Of course, our students come from many backgrounds and different traditions and these generalizations may not apply to all. The list identifies the experiences and event horizons of students and is not meant to reflect on their preparatory education.

“This month, almost 2 million first-year students will head off to college campuses around the country. Most of them will be about 18 years old, born in 1990 when headlines sounded oddly familiar to those of today: Rising fuel costs were causing airlines to cut staff and flight schedules; Big Three car companies were facing declining sales and profits; and a president named Bush was increasing the number of troops in the Middle East in the hopes of securing peace. However, the mindset of this new generation of college students is quite different from that of the faculty about to prepare them to become the leaders of tomorrow.

“Each August for the past 11 years, Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief. The List is shared with faculty and with thousands who request it each year as the school year begins, as a reminder of the rapidly changing frame of reference for this new generation.

“The class of 2012 has grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, and colleges no longer trumpet the fact that residence halls are “wired” and equipped with the latest hardware. These students will hardly recognize the availability of telephones in their rooms since they have seldom utilized landlines during their adolescence. They will continue to live on their cell phones and communicate via texting. Roommates, few of whom have ever shared a bedroom, have already checked out each other on Facebook where they have shared their most personal thoughts with the whole world.

“It is a multicultural, politically correct and “green” generation that has hardly noticed the threats to their privacy and has never feared the Russians and the Warsaw Pact.”

Some examples:

#28. IBM has never made typewriters.

#32. There has always been Pearl Jam.

#37. Authorities have always been building a wall across the Mexican border.

The full list is available at: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2012.php

Here’s an interesting experiment that has been implemented by Villanova’s undergraduate business program in order to spur innovation and integration in the curriculum. One aspect is to combine specific skills (e.g. communications, technology) so that they can be taught across the curriculum, which can enable students to get at “the big picture,” rather than compartmentalized sections. James Danko, the business dean also attempted to restructure departments to get at the goal of curricular integration. According to an article in “Inside Higher Education” (June 2, 2008: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/02/villanova), Danko “made ‘trial departments’ called strategic initiative groups. Professors were offered the chance to take a ‘leave of absence’ from their own department to join these groups. Some of these groups have focused on course development while others have focused on research. He said he encouraged the faculty to work in a ‘multidisciplinary way.’ This faculty reorganization became a precursor to the change in curriculum.”

Leaves of absence from departments, anyone?

Steve

Welcome to the Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence (CTIE) blog. This blog is available for your use, to write about issues of teaching, pedagogy, learning, curriculum, course design, higher education, and all other issues that you think worthy of a chat.

—Steve Volk, Director