Professionalism and the Liberal Arts

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Present:
John Gardner (Engineering)
Craig Hemmens (Honors)
Barbara Schroeder (Academic Technologies)
Susan Shadle (CTL)
Amy Moll (Engineering)
Shelton Woods (SSPA)
Sarah Toevs (COH)
Tony Roark (Philosophy & notetaker – source of any errors and vapidity)
Wayne Fischer (Education, grants)
Mark Buchanan (Business management)

Amy: “What are some of the so-called professional degrees?”

Susan: “Most programs include at least some focus on professional issues. Chemistry does.”

Mark: “The question is, to what extent does any program crowd out those classes that we think are part of a liberal education?”

Amy: “What about History?”

Shelton: “It depends. Some programs are rather regimented, like secondary ed in history. Others have more opportunities for exploration.”

Craig: “I doubt that any History major thinks, ‘I’m getting a history degree in order to get a job.’ A lot of CJ majors are majors just because they find it interesting, but others are looking to getting a job.”

Amy: “What about the constraints? In Engineering, there just isn’t a whole lot of room in the 128 credits for students to take courses of their choice.”

John: “That’s true of our program here, and most every other such program, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Almost all engineering programs have 50% more engineering courses than are required by the accrediting agencies.

Sarah: “It’s bound up with expectations. A lot of students and faculty are of the mindset that every course is supposed to serve a practical purpose, and that every minute within a particular course is supposed to contribute to that end. It’s a kind of culture of practicality.”

John: “If we were to encourage our Engineering students to take more liberal arts courses, they would not. They just hate the courses, hate to read, hate the classroom discussion.”

Sarah: “That’s evidence that they ought to take these courses.”

John: “Yeah, I agree. But a lot of our students are the introverted type who simply don’t get on well in classes where participation and discussion form a significant part of the treatment of the content.”

Amy: “We lose about ½ of our students, and they tend to be the expressive type. I’ve seen national studies that seem to confirm that the students who fail or drop out of an engineering program are on the expressive and creative side of things.”

Craig: “This raises an interesting question about self-selection: are personality types disposed to take particular courses, or do the courses form the personality type?”

Mark: “Here’s a fundamental question: what’s the purpose of education? Is it to allow the student to self select? Is it our job to be paternalistic and impose our idealized conception of an education, or is it to provide a way for the student to find their own way?”

Shelton: “Around the time of the industrial revolution, education became much more pragmatic and the notion that the unexamined life is not worth living went by the wayside. Since then, the connection between education and industry has only become stronger. I talked to my Eastern Civ. Students about the importance of keeping in touch with our past in order to appreciate our present and our future. They didn’t seem to get it until I cut the top off of a plant and asked them whether the detached part would live. Everyone said ‘no’, and they seemed to take the point I was trying to make. Unfortunately, the rest of the plant died, too.”

John: “Mark’s comment about self selecting is important. A lot of students say ‘I know I’ll never use this course’ when they come to me for advising. My stock response is ‘We are offering an education, not job training.’ I don’t know whether the students buy it, but it does shut them up. We need to be responsive to outside forces, but not determined by them. Our responsibility is to craft requirements in such a way that it’s very difficult for students to evade the intention of the core.”

Susan: “In answering the ‘Why do I have to take this course?’ question, when they do take the course, they get a lot of content and facts, but not a lot of thinking about the methods and processes that are characteristic of the discipline, about how that knowledge can foster lifelong learning, help them develop their own problem solving skills, and contribute to their longer term goals.”

Sarah: “When is the appropriate time in a student’s career to introduce them to the idea that a liberal education has some value? Freshman might not have the experiences and context necessary to facilitate what Susan just talked about.”

Amy: “Our standard core courses are all introductory level, and maybe that’s just too early, when students are just figuring out how to work through their major program. I tell some of my students to take an on-line art class, because they can do it in two weeks and then get on with their ‘real’ courses. I think it might be in the upper-division courses when students are in a position to draw the kind of connections between methodologies that we’re talking about.”

Craig: “At this institution there is a good deal of remediation helping students make up the context that they should have build in K-12. Some of these students haven’t read major literary figures, haven’t studies history beyond Idaho history, and don’t know any math beyond the basics. That’s a serious impediment to doing what we’re talking about.”

Susan: “The trend in K-12 and some professional degrees (like those in health) seems to be such that there are high-stakes tests that preclude broad study and engagement outside of the curriculum.”

Sarah: “But our accrediting agencies are encouraging civic involvement, so I’d like to turn the question around and look for opportunities rather than obstacles. We could be organizing cohorts of students within professional programs to emphasize community-based activities throughout the curriculum. This is what’s being required by the agencies, and it certainly enriches the student’s experience and retention of that core knowledge we’re trying to instill.”

Susan: “In the interdisciplinary session, we talked about what kind of structures can be set up to get students involved. The way student communities work right now is that they students are all co-enrolled (so they see each other a lot), but there’s not much beyond that. What if we took a health sciences course and a philosophy course and told these student communities ‘You might not see how these are connected, but they are.’ It wouldn’t take much work on the part of the collaborating faculty to play off of each other and help the students discover that the two really are connected in an interesting way.”

John: “An unstated assumption in this conversation is that the engineers and scientists teach the lower division courses and then ship our students off for the liberal arts aspect of education. I’m not sure that’s true, but to whatever extent it is true, I think that’s a bad set up. I think we ought to be more involved in helping out.”

Amy: “Our accreditation requires that we take a direct measurement of student outcomes in education, and as you can see [holds up the handout], there are a lot of what might be considered liberal arts requirements.”

John: “Those used to be called the ‘soft skills’; now they’re called ‘professional skills’.”

Amy: “We’ve created Calc. 1, Engineering 1, and Chem. 1 learning communities, but we don’t even connect those courses together. I feel obliged to meet the student where they are. Some of my students are people who’ve been laid off from Micron and need to get a job. We’re not a four year liberal arts college. A lot of students who come here have pressing needs that I feel obliged to help them meet.”

Craig: “That’s another facet of remediation. We work with the students we’ve got, not the ideal students in an ideal situation.”

John: “There are some good things that come from putting courses online. But the sort of outcomes we’re talking about here can’t be had in the den at night looking at the computer monitor.”

Susan: “That shows the importance of face-to-face communities.”

Sarah: “Unless core courses are permeated by things like service learning that compel you to interact with other people. I think BSU has made a lot of progress in instituting things like that that engage students in ways that extend their appreciation of the course content.”

Amy: “Didn’t our freshman task force say that service learning should come out of the core courses?”

Susan: “No, that was about Univ. 101. Just too much going on in the courses.”

Wayne: “More and more students are coming to college having done service learning in high school, and they’re excited about doing this stuff. I teach Univ. 101, and there are important issues that need to be dealt with ­– moving away from home, time management skills – so there isn’t enough time to do service learning in a one-credit course”

Craig: “There isn’t an applicant to the Honors College who doesn’t have a long list of community service on their application. My daughter’s guidance counselor in 7th grade told her she had to start doing community service in order to get into a good college.”

Wayne: “Some classes like social work have an obvious tie-in with service learning, and those students are really excited about doing it.”

Susan: “I have a question about what we mean by ‘liberal education’: to what extend to we want people in health sciences or engineering to be engaged in lifelong learning vs. what we want them to understand about the nature of inquiry and the values associated with different disciplines? Are we trying to instill a kind of curiosity, or an appreciation of diverse viewpoints? I take it that even in the core, students can choose courses that would introduce them to the kind of breadth and diversity that would foster both of these, but it’s too easy for them to miss that, either by design or by accident.”

Wayne: “I’m trying to get my students to be good learners. Many of my students have never read a book; they’ve worked their whole life, or they’ve just hung out. I’m all for liberal arts introducing perspectives, but many of my students don’t want that when they begin their college career, and they’re certainly not ready for that.”

John: “Developing the ability to be a lifelong learner is a good thing, but getting the student to be able to think like people who work in different disciplines is the real goal.”

Amy: “When does that happen? How do we do that? The way we administer the core doesn’t do that.”

John: “It’s capable of doing that, even in its current form.”

Craig: “If a student wants to avoid thinking, they can choose courses that will allow them to do that. But there are plenty of courses in there that require it.”

John: “I taught an area 3 core course recently, and some of my students said things like ‘I’d never thought of that before’, which was really rewarding. So it can happen, and it often does. I think it’s practically impossible for an engineering student to take a literature or philosophy course without being affected, because these are profoundly different ways of approaching issues.”

Wayne: “I do try to get students to take courses in areas of their interest just to keep them in school.”

Amy: “I tell my students ‘take your math, pass your math – after that, you can take your art classes.”

Wayne: “Three of 25 students passed my Math 025 class last semester. The rest failed.”

Susan: “I think we all ought to be required to teach Math 025 so we can experience that kind of failure rate. It’s easy to be critical of that particular program, but in fact probably all of us know enough math to teach it, and we’d be a lot more circumspect if we were put through those paces. So whose responsibility is it to incorporate the liberal arts into the professional degrees?”

Amy (laughing): “I think Craig should! He’s got the Honors College.”

Craig: “I think all of us are doing it. Engineering is doing their share. We can’t think, ‘Oh, we’ll ship them off to philosophy or literature, and they’ll get it there.’ That way of thinking about it is counterproductive to our goals.”

Amy: “I agree. It’s our responsibility to ensure that our students get it. I connect my materials science class with chemistry, but I don’t relate it to history. I’m not sure how I’d do that.”

Susan: “So when engineering demonstrates these outcomes, you can’t appeal to core courses, because you don’t know what classes the students take, right?”

John: “We appeal to the core, but we also have elements within our classes that satisfy these requirements. So I’ve had conversations with students and instructors about things like grammar, because there’s a disconnect between certain professional goals like clear writing that can be remedied pretty easily if we’re thoughtful about what we’re doing.”

Susan: “Where do the responsibly lie outside the professions? My content is so important, and my textbooks just keep getting thicker. What confidence should I have that my students are seeing those connections between different disciplines and modes of inquiry?”

Mark: “Students in business are like businesses and respond most directly to threats. Think about Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley. This is a case of reactions, and students are like this. It takes an extreme threat to get students to take action that might well be in their interest. Interestingly, my department no longer requires business ethics, which I have taught. Here’s where a profession meets the liberal arts, and the course has been cut.”

John: “It’s not clear that the liberal arts folks are making an effort to incorporate the sciences and other quantitative disciplines into their courses.”

Tony: “I teach a bit of chemistry in my ancient Greek philosophy course. (To Amy) Plato invented chemistry, you know.”

Susan: “We need to come to the point where we view lower level courses not as gateways to specialized fields of study, but rather as ways of engaging students and getting them interested in material that might well be new to them and that isn’t being delivered in service to some specialized field.”

Craig: “Maybe we should think about making core offerings terminal, stand-alone courses.”

Amy: “Also pull them away from 100 and 200 level, make our 400 level students show us that they can relate material science and history.”

John: “A Capstone Core course!”

Sarah: “And we should make it a priority that our core courses be taught by our best and brightest teachers. If what we want is an inspiring, interconnected presentation of material we’re going to have to devote our best intellectual and pedagogical resources to it.”

John: “One result from the freshman task force is that 25% of our first year students don’t take a single class from a tenure-track faculty. There’s no assumption that adjunct faculty are essentially or even uniformly worse teachers than regular faculty, but they typically aren’t as invested in the program.”

Susan: “One reason why so many core courses are gateway courses is that each discipline is required to offer these courses, and it’s expedient to let majors double-dip into a course both as a core requirement and as a major requirement. One remedy would be to relieve, say, science majors from having to take area 3 core courses, so that those core courses could be terminal course without threatening the integrity of the major housed in that department. There’s a potential political issue here, because departments have come to rely on core courses for FTE’s; if there were, for example, a logic class for majors and one for non-majors, that would impose new requirements on the philosophy department.”

Tony: “We’re actually looking into that possibility right now. I’m teaching a pilot course in the Honors College that could turn into an introduction to logic course for majors. But there are all sorts of practical problems associated with this. It introduces staffing problems and advising confusion. Most of our majors come out of intro courses, and a student who declares after taking the core logic course might complain about being penalized for discovering her interest in philosophy too late.”

Amy: “Have we made any progress here?”

All: “Yes. It’s hard, though.”

Amy: “Thanks for coming, everyone.”