So I just got back from the Pacific Northwest Two-Year College English Conference. It’s a pretty small meeting of community college English faculty. The theme this year was “Pedagogy and Politics: Citizenship in the Classroom and the Community College.” I’m paging through ten pages of journal scribblings and consolidating what I learned. There seem to have been two threads for me:
- School is not really structured to support deep learning; that sort of learning happens in communities of engaged people who rely on one another to develop.
- Students and faculty often have quite different perspectives on the ethical and historical issues that define a general education; they need to arrive at a common vocabulary if they are to become a real learning community.
Perhaps the most interesting phrase was “the unstated curriculum.” Paul Bodmer used this phrase to name the social life that most community college students never experience. Faculty and most folk who run colleges spent time “on campus”; that is, they lived with a group of people who were also in the business of learning. The ideas and skills that circulated in class followed us around quite naturally in lunch conversations or arguments at a local tavern. In the best case, “on-campus” learners practiced not for class but in a community. Bodmer observed that the majority of community college students come in for a class and then leave; they don’t really experience the “unstated curriculum.” One result is that they get fewer opportunities to practice and get feedback from other learners. They come to see knowledge as something owned by authorities and not constructed by learners. He wondered about (without in the way of a solution) how to offer the current generation of college students a chance to experience the “unstated curriculum.”
I wonder about this as well. We know (Bodmer pointed to reports issued by the DoE and the AAC&U) that not all (and likely not enough) students are not leaving college with fluency in “critical thinking” or “problem solving.” We know that this is so in part because they have too few opportunities to practice these skills and get feedback on their development. Of course, the current crop of students practice thinking and think quite fluently. But the exemplars are The Daily Show and Fox News (Bodmer’s examples). In these cases, the thinking is produced by someone else and neatly packaged. Humor or ideological correctness displace rigor and argument.
In the final session I attended, we talked about how to imagine a research writing class as a student club that was responsible for publishing work on important local topics. What I still wonder is whether my students would find this a) too boring (it ain’t the Daily Show) or b) the crackpot idea of some social do-gooder (the folk at Fox News might say this).
7 comments:
How about c) all of the above (you've gotta love multiple choice). Really though, you were talking about packaging earlier in the posting. Might it not just be about the bows and ribbons? At times I'm convinced we're all just raccoons impersonating people; we like the shiny stuff.
"Students and faculty often have quite different perspectives on the ethical and historical issues that define a general education." I think this happens mostly when I have professors that are 30 or 40 years my senior. I have found that when I encounter a teacher in his/her 20's or 30's, that we tend to have more things in common than the professors that are in their 50's and 60's. The difference in the generations is huge. A man in his 50's really doesn't have a clue to understand a 21 year old woman's perspective. But it's also awesome because we learn how different our ideas are. The 50 or 60 year old man has the historical perspective with lots of old age knowledge and I am quick/sharp in my thinking.
So An makes me wonder how a 21-year-old woman and a 60-year-old professor work together to develop a perspective that neither of them began with but that is a perspective that is more useful than either of them began with. Seems like this is what school should do, but I am suspicious that school is set up in ways that will encourage neither person to aim for that more "complete" (that's the adjective I'm using these days) perspective.
I would first like to preface what I am about to write by stating; I am certain Paul Bodmer is a brilliant man- held in the highest esteem among his colleagues. That being said, what data did he base his notion of the “The unstated curriculum” on? It seems from your summery that “The unstated curriculum” is nothing more than scaving broad generalizations of the student body found on community colleges. True, the students attending community colleges are present on the campus for a shorter amount of time than those students found on a four-year campus; nevertheless, it is a fallacy in logic for one to assume that the student body attending community colleges across the nation are not engaging in “the ideas and skills that circulated” in their classrooms over coffee or for that matter lunch with close friends and family members. It is not that there is a lack of opportunities for one to “practice and get feedback from other learners”; rather the venue for this interaction has changed. It is a brash assumption for one to assert that “they” being students see knowledge as object owned by authorities. It almost reads as though Bodmer discounts those attending community college as scholars or learners in their own right. Why is this?
The idea you have regarding imagining a research writing class, as a student origination that was responsible for publishing work on important local topics is a good start TC. What the students truly need is for those in the educational community to not become jaded and cynical regarding the opportunities that community colleges provide for an exchange in ideas, the student body eager to learn.
You are right at one level. It would be falacious to claim that no students attending a community college experience what Bodmer is calling the "unstated curriculum." But wouldn’t it also falacious to claim that that all community college students are experiencing this curriculum. For me, both of those claims would be false if made about Harvard students, so let me qualify what I’m writing about. The question that is likely not based in a fallacy (and I hope that it’s the one both Bodmer and I are asking) might go like this: How do various approaches to college support access to the "unstated curriculum"? or How might we make the “unstated curriculum” available to and engaging for more learners.
Thanks for helping to clarify this point. I didn’t make this as clear as I might have. I'm not really thinking about "community college students," so much as I am about “college students” (I expect the Daily Show is as or more popular among UW students as it is among Cascadia students). U.S. colleges are pretty widely acknowledged to fail to serve most of the students who attend. I'm trying to imagine alternative approaches but not to let us (U.S. citizens) off the hook. In the end, I think that colleges are under-resourced and as institutions, they largely replicate social conditions rather than serving as paths to a society that matches our aspirations more closely. I think about colleges increasingly in the terms of King's "I Have a Dream" speech. The vision of public education made a promise to citizens and that promise is returning, for a lot of folks, stamped NSF.
All that said, “community colleges” (especially like Cascadia) serve lots of students brilliantly. I want these institutions to do more and want resources to be able to do more.
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