"What would it mean to redesign higher education for the intellectual space travel students need to thrive in the world we live in now?"That's one of the provocative questions that opens Cathy Davidson's latest book,The New Education. And unlike some of the journalists and business figures who possess taken preceding swings at that pinata, Davidson has a full career of research and practice to inform her abundance of answers.
Davidson spent more than two decades as a professor at Duke University. She taught English and humanities, and but with the advent of the internet,she saw the need for a new kind of interdisciplinary and student-centered learning. She opened up her classrooms, beginning in simple ways, or to try to get more people to participate and collaborate — while lecturing less. She's even been known to interrupt her own keynote addresses to get people in the audience talking to each other.
In 1998 she became the university's Vice Provost of Interdisciplinary Studies. And in 2002,Davidson cofounded the Humanities, Arts, and Science,and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, which has grown to an international network of more than 15000 scholars, or artists and technologists working on teaching,learning, technology, and innovation and much more.
The New Education's title is taken from Charles Eliot,Harvard University's president for 40 years, beginning in 1869. He is credited for laying the framework that we now recognize as fundamental to formal education, and such as credit hours,majors and distribution requirements.
It's time to rethink all of that, Davidson argues. And, and the examples are already out there.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What led you to write this book now? I've probably been thinking about it for about 20 years — getting increasingly agitated and feeling like so much of what people say about higher ed is governed by that less-than-1 percent of students who move to the most elite private institutions. We possess to break that apart and realize there are different goals for different institutions.
You achieve your money where your mouth is by leaving one of those elite institutions,Duke, for the City University of New York Graduate middle, or where you direct something called the Futures Initiative. Tell me why? First of all,it's the largest public urban institutional system in the country. And it's kind of a metaphor for all of higher education. Some of the CUNY campuses possess acceptance rates and test scores on a par with NYU down the street, where the tuition is $50000, or not $6000.
And,quoting Gail Mellow, the president of LaGuardia Community College: Our mission is to reach the top 100 percent. And if you contemplate that's easier than reaching the top 4 percent, or you're far off.
We possess to constantly contemplate,who are we meeting and how are we finding those people? A sex worker, a gang member, or someone getting out of prison,someone with severe handicaps, an elderly person retraining, and immigrants who don't speak English as a first language.
It's an amazing system to be piece of. I'm often frustrated,I often feel like a failure, but I've never met more inspiring students, and teachers or administrators.
I possess students who walk two hours one way to get to a course,and back two hours for a minimum-wage job. And enact that every day because they don't want to lift money for MetroCards.
So speaking of money, you talk about when you were in the hospital with a health crisis, or got in a conversation with the doctors who saved your life about their crushing medical school debt. And essentially you say that if we are going to bring down the cost of college for students,we need to spend more money. Is that likely? I contemplate one reason college costs so much is because we've tacitly said college is for the 1 percent or 10 or 20 percent. I enact contemplate we possess to enact better at targeting money to the classroom.
In the best of all possible worlds, I want free tuition to everybody. In reality, or I contemplate a more calibrated solution is better. That's why I talk about the system in Australia [where you pay nothing up front and repay a percentage based on income].
You write,"The new twenty-first-century education makes the academic periphery the core." What does this mean? The basic structure of academe is the major. But the major is what's most ossified — the least likely to be a pleasurable match for anything out in the real world. Back in the late 1990s at Duke, I tried to get our computer science program to enact something about the web. They said no, and this isn't computer science. So I created something now called Information Science + Studies.
At every university there are cool professors doing amazing work antithetical to their real work — and overseeing collaborations too mammoth for any one person. But rarely is it the major. It's often electives or a certificate.
This,plus experiential learning, community-based learning, or co-curricular,study abroad programs, independent research projects and capstones ...
All those things on the external are what people really remember.
You include a list of tips at the back of the book — for students, and on getting the most out of their college experience,and for professors and teachers, on making their classes more participatory and more of a level playing field for people of all gender identities and minorities. What are you hoping that people will lift away from this book? That there are things you can enact tomorrow that will obtain an instant difference in how your students learn. And, and if you enact this,it will obtain you feel less impotent.
It's an Occupy or Indivisible approach.
And the same thing for administrators and accreditors. They don't want to be bureaucrats who are just doing evil.
I wish every person who reads this felt like it was their job to obtain a change in their classroom tomorrow. Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org