Teaching

Welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week:

• Beth writes about a community college that shares Columbia’s famed core curriculum.
• Dan reports from AAC&U’s annual conference.
• We catch you up on a few good reads.

Columbia’s Famed Core Curriculum Is Taught in the Bronx

Columbia University and Hostos Community College may be less than three miles apart, but the two institutions couldn’t be more different. One is an elite university in Upper Manhattan; the other an open-access college in the South Bronx. They do, however, have something in common: Columbia’s famed core curriculum.

For the past three years, professors at Hostos have been teaching a version of the Columbia Core in their freshman composition classes. Students dive into Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. In doing so, they debate the same questions about human experience as do students at Columbia: What is freedom? What is self-awareness? What is one’s place in society?

The program is the brainchild of Andrea Fabrizio and Gregory Marks, both associate professors in Hostos’s English department. They developed the idea with the help of Roosevelt Montas, who recently stepped down as director of Columbia’s core program, and they have built core texts into two required composition courses.

Fabrizio, who is also chair of the department, says that while it may seem an odd fit – teaching dense and often difficult works to students for whom college is often a struggle – the questions these authors raise are both timeless and universal.

“You could have 15 students speaking 15 languages in your class, literally,” she says. “So these books with enduring humanistic themes — what is knowledge, what is it to be human, what is it to love — we thought it would be interesting and empowering for them to feel connected to larger academic communities.”

The Hostos program does make adjustments. Instead of 60 texts over six courses and two years, as Columbia students experience the core, undergraduates at Hostos working toward their associate degree spend two semesters studying about eight works chosen from Columbia’s master list.

A selection committee looked for works undergraduates would find most accessible. “We don’t want these students to open these books and say, Oh, this is the most boring thing I’ve ever read,” says Fabrizio. “Otherwise it feels like we’re forcing things on them that don’t mean anything to them.”

That doesn’t mean breezy reading either, though. The first texts in the two-course sequence focus on nonfiction and typically include Plato’s dialogues, Wollstonecraft, Du Bois, and founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Federalist Paper No. 10, as well as a speech by Frederick Douglass on the meaning to slaves of the Fourth of July. The second semester is dedicated to fiction and has included The Odyssey, Hamlet, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

Students reflect on the meaning of Socrates’ statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” And they are fascinated by what they learn from the founding documents. A “huge percentage” of Hostos’s students are immigrants, Marks notes, and often feel that the United States doesn’t want more people like them. So to read in the Declaration of Independence that the country was founded, in part, to open the doors wider to immigrants has been a surprise to many.

Students also connect with authors who write about feelings of alienation, conflicted identity, and oppression. They have reflected, for example, on Du Bois’s concept of double-consciousness — the sense of double identity black people carry with them in a predominantly white society — as well as about Wollstonecraft’s feminist critique of patriarchy. More than 98 percent of the student body is nonwhite.

Hostos has also put together a repository of materials for faculty members who choose to teach the core, including reflective writing exercises and questions. That resource is particularly appealing to adjuncts, who may not have much time to prepare. The professors are now in discussion with the Teagle Foundation to bring the Columbia Core project, which has been sponsored by the Apgar Foundation, to other community colleges in the City University of New York system.

Student evaluations have been “overwhelmingly positive,” says Fabrizio. One wrote that while at first she resented having to read such challenging works, she came to feel like “a real college student.”

“There’s respect for their intellect in that curriculum,” Fabrizio says. “These are things people have been talking about for thousands of years, and now you’re part of that conversation, too.”

Have you taught a classic text that connected to your students in surprising and meaningful ways? If so, drop me a line at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, and your story may appear in a future newsletter.

Can Anything Ever Tell Us How Much Students Learn?

Assessment is one of those words that can get faculty members’ hackles up.

Maybe that’s because it’s not always clear who it’s for or what purposes it serves. Maybe it’s because just about any form of assessment, like GPA, standardized tests, alumni surveys, or labor-market outcomes, has flaws.

And maybe, as I’ve been reflecting on a panel I moderated on Wednesday at the Association of American Colleges & Universities’ annual meeting, there are simply inherent tensions in assessment that reflect how higher education works, for better and worse.

The occasion for the panel was the 10th anniversary of the creation of a widely used assessment tool, Value rubrics, which were developed by faculty members under the leadership of AAC&U.

The rubrics seek to resolve some of these tensions by focusing on the authentic stuff of the classroom — assignments — while giving professors a standard means of evaluating how well students have developed skills like critical thinking or quantitative reasoning.

Looking at assignments this way can be unfamiliar for faculty members accustomed to marking papers with words like “good” or “needs work,” said Terrel Rhodes, a vice president at AAC&U who has helped lead this effort. “Rubrics gave faculty a language,” he said during the panel.

Perhaps more importantly, as Carol Geary Schneider, president emerita of the association, noted, the rubrics have helped many faculty members recognize a fundamental problem: Their assignments sometimes do little to develop deep thinking and engagement in students.

The rubrics allow ratings on a four-point scale that can be aggregated and compared. While Rhodes vowed that scores on the rubrics, whose use is being encouraged by several state governments, will never be used to rank colleges, the hunger for a meaningful measure persists.

Some of these dynamics point to a recurring tension in assessment: between balancing the goals of improving teaching and bolstering accountability. This tension also explains some faculty resistance.

And this is where some of those structural issues come in, too.

Colleges’ academic units are built on disciplines. Can you meaningfully separate the skills that the rubrics evaluate from the subject matter to which they’re attached? How well can faculty members, who are trained in a discipline, evaluate and teach these skills?

And let’s say you wanted to give stakeholders a sense of a college’s academic quality and you used something like the Value rubrics. Which ones would you use? There are, after all, 16 of them. How much can any one rubric’s score on a four-point scale really tell you?

I don’t know if these rubrics, or any tool, can answer these questions and resolve these tensions, but I’ll be fascinated to see where the field finds itself in another few years.

ICYMI

• Desperate to shrink your syllabus? Read how Tom Deans, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, got his down to two pages and why he thinks shorter is better.
• Want to encourage students to come to class more often without making it mandatory? Read about an interesting experiment by Joe Gerald and Benjamin Brady, faculty members in the University of Arizona’s College of Public Health.
• Active-learning techniques can be effective, but they can also generate resistance from faculty members and students. A new paper in PLOS One suggests that student attitudes can be gradually shifted by letting success build on success. In this case, as students in a biology program called Integrating Biology and Inquiry Skills fared well on conceptual assessments, they also perceived that their gains resulted from the curriculum. “Over time,” the authors wrote, “buy-in increased.”

Correction: Last week’s newsletter included an incorrect title for Adam Beaver, of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. He is director of pedagogy and practice, not director of the center.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive your own copy, you can sign up here.

— Beth and Dan