Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Practice-Oriented Education and Biro

In the latest Atlantic Monthly's "College Admissions 2004" section, Richard Freeland, president of Northeastern University, lightly historicizes the tensions between vocationalism and liberal arts, then, deriving an "I pick grey" gradient, tabs a new, emergent, blended plan as "The Third Way"--an interdisciplinary conflation of lib-intellectual inquiry and market readiness, buttressed by off-campus practica.  

Gradually taking shape is a curricular "third way" that systematically integrates liberal education, professional education, and off-campus experience to produce college graduates who are both well educated and well prepared for the workplace.

If not earth-shaking, it is at least interesting because the case for a practical orientation doesn't attach to any particular discipline, nor does it reconcile itself with the methods loosely associated with critical pedagogy in composition, particularly.  

But another response to the trends of the 1970s and 1980s, which received much less attention, may be of greater long-term importance.  Some educators recognized that higher education had been permanently democratized, and that many students--including some of the most talented--had a legitimate interest in preparing themselves for the workplace.

It does, however, pat the back of UMaryland's "World Courses" gen-ed core where there's a course "focused on the damming of the Nile River [...] taught by members of the departments of civil engineering, microbiology, and government politics."  And the article eventually suggests that "some preliminary version[s]" of practice-oriented education have, in various guises, already coalesced over the last thirty years, stopping just short of formal edu-trend nomenclature. .  I agree that such a plan (if we must formally call it a plan, rather than seeing it as a manifestation of students' desires to customize programs of study and to do education) deserves our attention.  Particularly, it deserves our attention in composition because "The Third Way," as presented here, doesn't mention the universal requirement.  More notably, perhaps, on the work of teaching, it says

[I]mplementing a practice-oriented curriculum is not easy.  It requires faculties to collaborate across lines of professional separation that have been in place for generations.  It requires colleges and universities to provide more than token support for off-campus programs.  And it requires a level of attention to undergraduate learning that many university professors will find difficult to muster.

How, then, does it reconcile with dependencies on part-time labor?  I won't pretend to have a clear perspective on the inner-workings of instructor hiring and teaching assignments at any institution, but at first glance it looks like Northeastern U. relies on part-timers to staff its FY writing course along with several other gen-ed requirements in the School of General Studies.  I see 2FT:6PT writing instructors in the SGS.  Whether or not it's the case that adjuncts bear a considerable share of the U.'s overall teaching labor, it undoubtedly holds true at many schools. 

That's all I really wanted to get at here: it's fine to have schemes for revolutionizing education, but they often go bust when they don't reconcile with labor practices. 

Note: The article's full text is available via subscription only, but that should life once the edition ages.

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For fun, I want to build one of these.  [via Metafilter]

Posted by Derek Mueller at September 28, 2004 8:30 AM to Distances