I won’t spend the whole week recapitulating Rice’s De Lange conference on “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow” (see yesterday’s post on “Seeding Social Media”) but I did want to draw folks’ attention to one more thing: William Bowen’s talk on technology and changing American priorities related to higher education.
Bowen describes the financial and demographic challenged facing higher education, and argues for a more technologically coherent platform that would help colleges deliver courses in online or blended formats. ITHAKA has made his report available for download, and it’s certainly worth reading--not least because the written report is more nuanced than the public presentation.
Because shared governance has long been an interest of mine, I wanted to highlight Bowen’s call for faculty simultaneously to cede control over curricular delivery *and* to be more forgiving of administrative missteps:
the biggest obstacle to experimentation with new teaching methods is the time-consuming, costly, and frustrating process of trying to get timely (and binding) decisions made by potential test-bed institutions locked into centuries-old governing structures . . .
To be absolutely blunt, it is time for individual faculty to give up, cheerfully and not grudgingly, any claim to sole authority over teaching methods of any kind.
And on forgiving administrators:
It will be far easier to recruit and retain leaders such as Clark Kerr if academia is able, somehow, to establish an attitude of trust that is forgiving of errors (or at least of some errors) as we try out new approaches to teaching and learning.
I would be willing to admit that faculty should frequently extend to colleagues freedom to experiment, especially since what goes on in a classroom is so often a closed box anyway. However, I also think it’s fair for faculty to have questions about the way such experiments impact the shop floor: will an experimental online course count toward regular course load? Will on-campus students be taking it? Is the course conceived as something for full credit, or is it more of a lifelong-learning exercise?
It also seems disingenuous not to acknowledge that sometimes an “individual faculty member’s desire to experiment” is a thinly-veiled cover for an administrative initiative. Careful questioning seems reasonable.
(It’s also a little weird to decry faculty obstructionism given the way contingency has gutted shared governance at many non-elite schools.)
Calls for reforming shared governance would be more effective if administrators could acknowledge the role they have played in contributing to faculty skepticism. Denouncing faculty efforts to pay attention to aspects of their work that they take seriously isn’t helpful.
What steps can be taken to build trust between administrative and faculty governance bodies? What has worked on your campus? Share in comments!
Photo “No Consensus” by Flickr user Jaskirat Singh Bawa / Creative Commons licensed BY-SA-2.0
