Judging by the headlines in our various trade publications, whatever higher education’s next chapter looks like, it must be innovative — OR ELSE.
With the past few years hijacked — first by emergency remote courses, and then by semi-in-person teaching — there’s no shortage of takes about how academe must either “innovate” or perish. As a chorus of op-eds, reports, deep dives, and metastudies inevitably concludes: Innovation is “imperative,” “has never been more important,” and only “disruptive innovation” will help us overcome the existential threats we face in operations and — especially — enrollment.
But what, exactly, do those panicky pleas mean by “innovation”?
In the tradition of first-year-student essays everywhere, let’s begin with a dictionary definition of innovation: “to make changes, to do something in a new way, to introduce as or as if new.” Perhaps the easy logic there is what makes the term so seductive to higher-ed leaders: The status quo is unsustainable, so we must do something new.
But too often the demand for novelty disregards existing work and dismisses those doing it. Countless faculty and staff members — you may be one of them, dear reader — have advocated for X only to see an outside consultant swoop in, suggest the exact same thing to senior leadership and be hailed as a visionary who “forced all of us to finally realize the importance of X.”
The second problem is that the avatars of innovation always seem to be people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos — you know: the lone, courageous mavericks who boldly fight the entrenched and stodgy forces of inertia. Except of course that the faces of innovation tend to be mostly white, almost always male, and often strengthen, rather than undermine, the most inequitable features of the status quo.
Perhaps worst of all, innovation is routinely used as a rationale to protect and enable actual predators. How many stories have we read just in the last few years about the “brilliant scholar” whose work was so innovative, original, or vital that it didn’t matter that he (and it’s almost always “he”) was a serial predator, pressuring students for relationships and sexual favors, or a known harasser? When the mania for innovation has so often trumped ethics in such fashion, it should give us serious pause about the concept’s use as a lodestar in any discussion of higher-ed strategy.
But what if we could approach innovation in another way? What if we could abandon the type of innovation that privileges novelty and outsider status? What if we refused to grant anyone deemed “innovative” a get-out-of-jail-free card for being a horrible person and then framed innovation in ways that would recognize the immense collective problem-solving capacity of higher education’s work force?
After all, “innovation” didn’t always mean what it does now. In fact, the word itself comes from the Latin root “innovat—,” which is best translated as “renewed” or “altered.” Specifically, the Latin verb “innovare” is the combination of “in-” (into-) and “novare” (“make new”). It suggests an object that is not brand new but rather renewed (or perhaps revitalized).
With apologies to When a Stranger Calls, the psychological horror movie, maybe the innovation should come from inside the house. Instead of seeking answers from outsiders and mavericks, we could ask ourselves: What can we renew? What can we make new? Here are three specific areas in which a more etymologically accurate approach to innovation might bear fruit in the uncertain era ahead:
Teaching and learning have always been hybrid. Embrace it. Hybrid learning was a pretty big deal before the pandemic, with a well-developed scholarly literature and community of practice. During Covid, and continuing still, hybrid is for some institutions the principal modality of teaching and learning (to say nothing of meetings and other routine institutional business). Even if we called it something else — HyFlex, flexible attendance, multimodal learning, or some cute label playing on the institution’s mascot and/or brand — almost all of us were doing hybrid as our “pandemic pedagogy.”
And we did so for compelling reasons, not least the flexibility afforded by hybrid teaching. Now, however, many campus conversations have failed to move beyond administrators wondering if Zoom-based learning is the “new normal” (based upon a superficial understanding of students’ desire for “convenience”) while exhausted faculty members listen aghast.
Yet we can’t stir things apart. The past two years have reshaped what we do in fundamental ways. As the Danish professor Rikke Toft Nørgård recently wrote: “There are no sharp contrasts between digital, online, or distributed learning environments and physical, onsite, or co-located environments. The digital is as ‘natural,’ ‘real,’ ‘authentic,’ and inherently entangled in our everyday learning interactions and experiences as nondigital forms of learning.”
That assessment points to a powerful truth: At their most effective, teaching and learning have always been a blend of two (or more) distinct “species.” Students learn both in and outside of the classroom; course content is both embodied and abstract; meaningful learning is often both affirming and unsettling; teaching has always unfolded both synchronously and asynchronously. Effective teachers intuitively approach their work as hybrid work, even if they had not previously used that terminology.
Here, then, are some questions we should ask:
- What teaching practices can we “make new” that have already been happening on our campus?
- Who has been successfully engaging students in the classroom — both in person and online?
- Whose course designs and practices are encouraging deeper connections — between students, student and instructor, and student and course material?
- What would it look like to lift up those practitioners and expand on their examples?
- And how do we do all of that without framing things in overly rigid dichotomies?
Higher education does not need to be, for example, either all HyFlex or all on site. Because, of course, it never was that simple to begin with. Both/and, as opposed to either/or, should be the guiding principle as we create our institutions’ next chapters.
We don’t have to rediscover fire to tackle the crisis of student disengagement. We just have to “foster presence.” That’s something the most effective teachers already know how to do. It means creating a classroom in which students and the instructor feel accepted for who they are as complex people. All of us are more than a name on a class roster or an avatar photo — we’re more than “that guy who sits up front” or some other superficial description.
Presence is the extent to which people in a classroom or lab are not simply physically there but feel comfortable enough to risk sharing their full cognitive and affective selves. Feeling a sense of presence sustains motivation, enables rich and meaningful engagement, and aids in retaining, analyzing, and applying course content. Presence is, therefore, a foundation for effective teaching and learning, and makes it possible for students to complete the tasks we put before them.
Creating that sort of classroom may feel like an impossible demand at a time when “a stunning level of student disconnection” seems to be the dominant feature of our educational landscape. But before colleges and universities go running to the newest ed-tech “community platform” or bring in a raft of student-success consultants for expensive “answers,” consider the ways in which none of us have been allowed to be fully present in the last two years, and how that remains an ongoing phenomenon for some students and faculty members.
So if new tech tools and consultants won’t make cultivating presence easier, what would?
Plenty of answers can be found in a body of research that already exists. It’s the same one plenty of us turned to in March 2020, when we all rushed to move our courses online. Namely: the scholarly literature — known as the “community of inquiry” framework — on how to create fully remote, asynchronous online courses with at least some degree of humanity to them. The COI framework posits that true community between learners and instructors in an online space is the product of three overlapping and interdependent factors: instructor, cognitive, and social presence. In a fully remote course, social presence means that students feel treated as more than just a username. And folks have spent years developing successful ways to achieve that in a remote, asynchronous course.
How might those ideas be translated to improve the environment of a traditional in-person classroom? What insights does this body of research have to offer us in 2022? Rather than throw money at “novel” solutions to the “great student disconnect,” what if we lifted up those in-house experts who have already been embedding these ideas into their teaching?
Create and sustain a culture of belonging. Of course, it’s hard to be present if you don’t feel like you belong. And we know that “belonging uncertainty” has long bedeviled students, many of whom operate under a working hypothesis that reads something like “people like me do not belong here.” Sadly, many students find evidence (often relatively quickly) that confirms their hypothesis. Even though the spread of inclusive teaching and DEI initiatives had blunted at least some of those feelings, the disembodied, atomized experience of pandemic pedagogy undid much of that work. Today, our students’ sense of belonging is attenuated as never before.
Belonging, as Terrell L. Strayhorn reminds us, is a basic human need, and thus a sine qua non for learning. As Strayhorn puts it: “Students face serious difficulty in attending to the tasks at hand like studying, learning, and retaining information until they resolve one of their fundamental needs — a need to belong in learning spaces.”
However often we tell students that they belong at our institutions, our words ring hollow in the face of daily microaggressions and subtle, yet insidious, forms of racism. We tell students they should be active creators of knowledge, and not just passive recipients of course content, but then they look at our syllabi and see few if any names of women and faculty of color listed as “knowledge creators.” The distance between our rhetoric and our actual course materials breeds that uncertainty about whether they belong here.
One of the most powerful educational truths driven home during the pandemic is that learning is not just a cognitive, but an affective, process. It doesn’t matter how much content a student knows if a hostile classroom climate spikes their anxiety level, preventing them from demonstrating the depth and breadth of that learning. To foster a sense of belonging with students is to free up cognitive bandwidth, enabling them to meet the challenges involved in truly meaningful learning.
Much of what we do in higher education depends on that bedrock concept. Yet in our current moment, our students’ sense of belonging is — at best — fragile and contingent. If we are engaging in the “innovative” work of renewing, of “making new” something that’s perhaps been overshadowed, we would do well to pursue a revitalized and expanded focus on student belonging.
I guarantee there are people doing important work in all three of those areas on your campus. What I can’t guarantee is that their work is being supported, resourced, affirmed, or even noticed. So start asking: Who on your campus has acted on the reality that learning has always been hybrid? How has presence been cultivated and sustained with and for your students? Where are the efforts to foster belonging — and who is doing that fostering?
As our institutions stagger into this new chapter of higher education’s history, we would do well to remember that “novel” doesn’t necessarily equate to “better.”
At a time of resource scarcity, the best course seems to be to sustain and wisely spend — rather than ignore or abandon — our own assets.
