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Curricular transformation: why we need it how to support it

Change - January 1, 2004

I've been in higher education for over 30 years, with time off for a diversion into elective office at the state level and in the United States Congress. Throughout my career, I've watched, listened, and engaged in the swirling debate about the need to transform our colleges and universities and our approaches to students, teaching, and learning. But, sadly, despite a lot of research and advocacy to the contrary, the basic shape of the box--the American university and how we do business inside it--hasn't changed very much.

Despite an enormous diversity of institutional types and our historic commitment to access, there is a numbing sameness across our campuses when it comes to the actual practice of teaching and learning. Different colleges recruit different students, serve different audiences, and teach different bodies of knowledge. But they do it all using the same basic academic model.

A scholar-professor appears in front of students largely in isolation from the world outside. Instructional encounters are structured in terms of standard blocks of time of approximately three hours per week, organized around a central text and syllabus tailored to fill up a 12- to 16-week period. We are similarly universal and unvarying in what we expect of students, no matter their individual needs or background. They are expected to come as they are and be ready to learn, to absorb the teaching they receive, to prove that they learned it, and to go on to a higher level for more of the same.

And while technology has certainly modified many courses, the reality is that even technology-infused course designs continue to treat all students similarly and that the cost of technology is usually treated as an "add-on" not as an investment in transformation. Consider as a parallel hundreds of restaurants, each claiming to be unique, but all serving one dish: white rice. Some of it might be fried, some of it might be steamed with saffron. Some of it might even be part of a fricassee dish. But it's all rice.

No matter where you go, what campus you visit, which students you interview, the assumptions behind the teaching-and-learning process are unchanged: to absorb knowledge from someone wiser, regurgitate it to the wiser person's satisfaction, and move on.

This classic academic model has worked pretty well for America over the last 250 years. So what's the problem? The problem is that the world we serve is changing before our eyes and the current model of education won't get us to where we need to be as a society. Our learners are changing, becoming more diverse in ethnic background, age, and participation patterns. Our capacity to support high-quality teaching and learning through use of technology and the World Wide Web is growing dramatically. And our knowledge base about how people learn is developing rapidly.

The world that is emerging requires new instructional approaches, new organizational forms, and new academic cultures to meet its needs. Any one of these three forces constitutes a significant challenge to the traditional academic establishment. The interplay of all three creates an urgent dynamic that we can neither ignore nor outlast.

New Students: Beyond Access to Effectiveness. Colleges and universities today are faced with a dilemma. We have succeeded in creating enormous potential opportunity through financial and physical access to college. But, once learners are through the front door, the pathway to success is tortured. Students and their learning do not constitute the organizing center for what we do; faculty and tradition do. Faculty teaching loads, schedules, gaining tenure, and attracting research funding all take priority over student learning.

Raul Yzaguirre, the president of La Raza, the United States' largest Hispanic organization, spoke to a gathering on Capitol Hill late in 2001. His gentle voice filled with conviction when he said, "The education gap between the His panic and majority community is not narrowing, it's getting wider. And at the same time, especially for you Members of Congress, I need to remind you that the American public school system, when it comes to Hispanics, isn't a pipeline; it's a sieve."

He is right, and for more learners than just Hispanics. Our relative failure lies in those parts of the population that are growing fastest. And the consequences of our failure include the disappearance of the middle class in America's future. If you look at our record of success beginning in the ninth grade, our record for successfully graduating learners from college is the story of Raul Yzaguirre's sieve.

First, persistence and success in high school are still highly sensitive to income and ethnic background. Students graduate from high school in disproportionate racial groupings. That's troubling enough. But even for those who do graduate from high school, the probability of going to college and graduating is less for those who are poor and of ethnic minorities.

Here's the bottom line. For every 100 ninth graders, an average of 18 students graduate from college after 10 years. When students' ethnic background and income are factored into this already low rate, the true dimensions of the problem become clear. Now that's a sieve!

None of our nation's students, especially minority students, are achieving college degrees at rates acceptable for society's long-term well-being. When one combines the population increases for minorities with the disparity in college achievement by race and income, we are risking a nation driven by potentially yawning educational and occupational gaps.

New Knowledge about Learning. Much of the evidence that we've accumulated over the years about the way people learn contradicts traditional "common practice" in teaching and learning. And this is not just new research. For example, Jean Piaget's work on the development of cognitive capacity suggests how seriously flawed the traditional approach to teaching and learning can be. Piaget demonstrated that as a child's brain grows through puberty, much of the learning is "additive" (one block of knowledge is stacked on another). As we age, however, our learning is increasingly "adaptive"--that is, we evaluate what we are told based on our experience.

Similarly, Allen Tough's research on adult learning tells us that we are constantly learning, even if our learning is never recognized or assigned a value by a college. Furthermore, we know that intelligence has many faces. The artist and the mathematician see and experience the world differently, the introvert and the extrovert work differently. Every human being has a "personal learning portrait" that is as distinct from all others as a Monet from a Picasso.

Yet sadly, because employing this emerging knowledge challenges the historic structure of universities, we ignore it. Higher education has treated new and well-established knowledge about why people learn and how they learn best as either threatening or superfluous. Ignoring such new knowledge, most colleges and universities operate like an emergency room where the first thing the attendants do is put a splint on your arm, regardless of your complaint. Imagine the conversation:

"What happened to you?" "My head and neck are killing me. I was whip-lashed when my car was rear-ended." "Okay, let's just get this splint on your arm, and then we'll talk."

Absurd? Absolutely. Despite our best intentions we have organized American higher education--from classroom architecture to graduation standards--around the interests of the university, not the needs and the learning profile of the student. As one example, we know that large lectures, though they generate considerable revenues for the institution and constitute the staple diet for lower-division students, are only marginal learning environments for most learners. And yet we continue to pack our most-deprived and least-prepared students into lecture halls as soon as they walk through the door.

A doctor would not dream of prescribing medication or recommending treatment without taking the time to learn about the person in front of her. But in higher education, where we now have the capacity to similarly diagnose every learner, we simply end up doing again what we did for everybody else last year.

Increased Technological Capacity.

Technology is transforming our understanding of how to employ time, space, and locus of responsibility in teaching and learning. No college or university can any longer imagine itself as the sole, or even the main repository of knowledge. Nor, in the longer term, can any college or university president believe that parents will continue to pay escalating tuition costs for their children to access what is already available, essentially free, on the Internet.

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