I expect that many of you have already read Cathy Davidson's The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. If not, please consider reading it if you are at all interested in what the future for higher education may look like.
The following are some of her ideas, so this is not a summary but highlights for me. If you prefer, instead, to listen to some of her thoughts, please listen to this FutureofEducation talk, moderated by Bryan Alexander.
I very much appreciated her historical approach, starting her new education by reviewing Charles Eliot's New Education from 1869, where he envisions a new system of higher education that is not grounded in medieval elitism but in the recognition that more people need to have access to more education in order to find jobs in a world influenced by the industrial revolution. And even though he was president of Harvard at this time, his realization came out of a very personal situation when he realized that he was not making enough money to survive while his independent wealth had disappeared in a recent economic crash.
Eliot's vision of engineers and managers makes sense during his time, and developing standardized testing also makes sense - what did not make sense was the standardized classroom design of bolted seats, and the industrialization of education. And today it makes even less sense to think about education, including higher education, as a pipeline into factories and to conveyor belts, and as a way to keep still many people away from access to this knowledge and these skills, while focusing on time management and people control rather than creativity.
Davidson provides provocative questions about higher education issues and interesting examples of institutions that grapple with these issues and are developing innovative solutions. Whether these are discussions about technology (is it a bane or the ultimate solution?), about funding (who should pay for what and why?), about what kinds of skills, literacies and sets of knowledge should be taught (STEM, STEAM, SHTEAM?), about the labor state of academics (tenure vs. adjunct), all of them have supportive data that is often shocking, sometimes disturbing, but, when it comes to the examples, inspiring.
Many of her examples focus on initiatives that grow students through student-centered learning in cross-disciplinary, project-based learning that reaches into communities and connects to real-life problems and issues. As she says, "The new twenty-first century education makes the academic periphery the core, emphasizing not requirements to be checked off on the way to a major and a degree (the Eliot legacy) but an intellectual toolkit of ideas and tactics that are as interactive and dexterous as ur post-Internet world demands."
One of her points is that community colleges are much better at connecting students to relevant content and more authentic learning experiences because that is their mission - research-focused universities, on the other hand, are not and cannot be interested in this kind of learning-centered mission because their funding is tied to research grants to a larger degree, and faculty time and energy is focused on these precious dollars. This becomes especially important in Southern states where state government has pulled funding for higher education at a considerably higher rate than in other parts of the US.
Some of the names associated with her examples are John Mogulescu in the CUNY system, Derek Bruff, Andrea Lunsford and her research on writing, Seymour Papert, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Tetsuya Ishida, Sha Xin Wei, Randall Bass, Patrick Awuah
One remaining thought from one of the folks discussed in the book - this country does not have a higher education or an education crisis, it has a national crisis - because if your education system is in shambles, you do not have the people power to innovate, create, and grow themselves and their society.
The exclusive focus on STEM that does not include creativity does ignore the scientific method which "is grounded in curiosity, testing, iterating, synthesizing, analyzing, problem solving, inventing. And stem needs humanities and social sciences". This, not surprisingly, leads to a high percentage of students dropping out of STEM fields while in college, and after graduation, 74% of people with STEM degrees do not stay in these fields.
The book has some great ideas that are worth exploring - maybe you find something that gives you the creative push to try something different in your classroom or in your own learning.
