Monday, June 6, 2011
Gen Ed
Interdisciplinarity: if it isn't a way of downsizing departments into one unit, where's the commitment? Something of a rhetorical question, I know. But it's still very difficult at my own university to get team-teaching, or teaching in other units, approved. Last week it was announced that it's going to be even harder and probably impossible to give faculty release time to teach in other units. If that isn't cutting into the educational mission of the university, I don't know what is. I love to teach in something called the College of Creative Studies, which has (surprise?) a great nationwide reputation in the sciences, and whose literature students are amazing--so smart and thoughtful and motivated. Now it appears I may not be able to do so again after this year, when I will be teaching the first run of a course on the history of interdisciplinary thinking about the mind. I'll be teaching it again as a regular English course for Lit and Mind--but there's something very special about working the course out with a (relatively) small group of lively student minds who can think "meta" with ease. There have already been a few administrative attempts here to address the Senate on the topic of requirements that keep students from finishing quickly. My cynical soul, however, tells me that's a ruse; the scientists don't like Gen Ed and neither does the technocracy, and one of the main reasons students have trouble finishing in 4 years is that they don't hire enough faculty to teach the courses students need to graduate. I have desperate students from other majors in wholly elective classes, who just need a class, any class. Getting rid of requirements is just another way of getting rid of (humanist) faculty; nobody seems to be asking the science departments to streamline the extremely tight series of requirements they design for their own majors. I love the idea of students taking interdisciplinary courses that are also about interdisciplinarity and hence forms of knowledge. It may well be the only way to show students not already committed to liberal arts why it matters for them to be able to look at things from multiple perspectives. It's all about plasticity.
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The technocracy, I think you rightly intuit, would be happy to streamline most curricula so that they just pertain to particular [supposedly "professional" or "scientistic"] majors. Nevertheless, there are still deans and other administrators [including provosts] who have not let go of the importance of a broadly-conceptualized and disciplinarily diverse gen.ed. curricula, while they still also [maybe] make arguments for reducing it, credit hour-wise [that is the situation at my own university]. I am fortunate that at my university, nevertheless, students are *required* to take two, cross-disciplinary & team-taught courses, at the first-year and junior level as part of their required gen.ed. courses. These are double-sized classes, with about 70 students, but often come with grad. asst. teaching/grading support and have been, for me anyway, a joy to teach. My college [of arts & sciences] has also set aside a special fund to pay faculty to develop these courses--so, for example, one summer I was paid about $2,000 to develop a first-year team-taught seminar on Homer's impact on a broad diversity of cultures and genres, from the ancient world to the present [which I co-taught with someone in History--not much of a disciplinary stretch, I know, but other required team-taught courses at my university have paired biologists with music professors, English professors with sociologists, and so on]. I know this all sounds a little perversely utopian, but it's also to say that if my noone-ever-heard-of-it regional institution can do this, then anyone can. It does not cost MORE to put faculty together in a classroom with about twice the number of students they might have in one survey course: no one is over-taxed, labor-wise, and the students are not ripped off, close attention-wise. The university still gets its tuition dollars it needs per faculty member credit hour. The classes are always full because they are required. Everyone wins, especially a certain vibrant disciplinarity.
ReplyDeleteWhy anyone would be *against* such a course model is beyond me [but I'm not stupid, either]. This is not, also, the only model of cross-disciplinary team-teaching we should be pursuing. Sometimes I think we have to implement measures *within* departments, and maybe also colleges, that allow us to merge resources we already have in order to create the types of courses we *know* would be the most effective for promoting the health of the humanities, but I think we all know, too, that for the humanities to have continued health, we also have to have strong gen. ed. program within which the humanities play a core role, and then we have to have strong departments in English, history, foreign languages, philosophy, sociology, and the like to lead and innovate upon this gen. ed. program and to also develop majors within it as well as to instill in non-majors a *desire* for learning within their humanities electives. It also helps, of course, if the scientists and economists and business marketing types also feel that a strong humanities core is essential to anyone's education. I used to think the argument rested [successfully] on the idea that the humanities inculcated creative, but also ethical, thinking. But that argument does not appear to be effective anymore.
But I do think the argument for plasticity just might be.
Here is my own argument for team-taught, cross-disciplinary gen.ed. courses: wee demi-Papillon assistants to help with the grading and with serving of in-class cocktails. Just a thought. Who would argue?
ReplyDeleteNot I.
ReplyDeleteNot I. Sparky, you have the vision-thing.