Learning+for+Living+Action+Plan+Report

** AAC&U’s Institute on General Education, 2010 **
 * Stevenson University: Action Plan Report **

// Introduction: Problems and Solutions // Piet Heim, a Danish poet and inventor, said, “Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.” Indeed. Stevenson University’s general education reform team has certainly felt the hitting back—the perpetual reconceptualizing, the consensus building, the pain of recognition in the face of our own naiveté. The issue itself seems simple enough: our current curriculum and pedagogical processes do not meet the needs of our students and do not articulate well with the institution-wide student goals our university has recently developed. The long-term goal we have set forth in addressing that problem is somewhat less simplistic. We want to create a dynamic academic program that reflects the needs of Stevenson University students. This program—the Learning for Living Initiative—must evolve curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and campus structure and culture. It will ultimately shift the focus of Stevenson’s general education from the instructor’s assumptions to the student’s needs and intentions even while shifting the curricular burden from the student to the faculty and administration. “Learning for Living” is a descriptor that references our university motto—“For Learning, For Living—and better captures the spirit of our initiative than such terms as “general education program” or our official label for our current cafeteria-style distribution model, “the Core Curriculum.” We can now define the Learning for Living Initiative as “a program of study that equips our students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes essential for their ability to develop opportunities, solve complex problems, and experience lives that are both fulfilling and contributory.” More reductively, this goal can be termed “applied life-long learning”—a notion in line with the Stevenson mission and history.

Our immediate objective is slightly more modest: to draw from our newly designed, overarching institution-wide student learning goals in order to reconsider our Learning for Living goals and develop consensus for these goals. As part of developing consensus, we will discuss our needs, possible structures and models, and processes. // Key Principles // Of course, we have some key principles we, as a reform committee, want to keep at the forefront even as we acknowledge and respect that our colleagues may have other or even opposite ideas. One is maintaining a constant **student focus**, which may, in part, be achieved by involving students in the process and mining the research resources we already maintain. This student focus must involve **student intent**. Learning for Living is entirely compatible with Stevenson’s concept of “Career Architecture,” which purportedly aids students in making academic choices that correspond to fitting life choices. Another principle is of **curricular synthesis** that eliminates the possibility that any single course or learning experience—whether within the major or not, whether within the academic program or not—stands as a unit, discrete and nonexpansive. One more principle is directly applicable to the process of reform itself, that of **transparency**. The Learning for Living Council is and must remain an open book, readily accessible and responsible to the entire Stevenson community. All of these principles must be subject to **rigorous and meaningful assessment**—whether through the measurement of student learning or the evaluation of the overall process—and this assessment must be applied toward future maintenance and revision. By adhering to these principles, the Learning for Living Council will initiate the best curriculum for Stevenson students with the fullest backing of the Stevenson community. // Next Steps // Our first effort will be to redefine the “core curriculum” as “The Learning for Living Initiative.” While this change may seem superficial, we have come to appreciate the power of carefully constructed rhetoric. “Learning for Living” is at once familiar sounding to the Stevenson community and sufficiently expressive. Without possessing the uninspiring flavor of the phrase “general education program,” it offers a clear break with the “core curriculum” label we currently use. We then must create a clear argument for curricular and pedagogical reform to take back to our faculty. In the process we will have to make sure the university community is speaking the same language, starting with our Learning for Living Council. At present, we too often find ourselves talking at cross-purposes largely because we are using a different idiom or are using different definitions for the same words. We may need to develop a short glossary of our terms, both euphemistic and descriptive, before we address the faculty at-large. Next, or simultaneously, we will reexamine our current goals and objectives for the Learning for Living Initiative to see if we still accept them in light of our conversations in this institute and our university-wide guiding documents. These goals have evolved over time, but they presently cover four areas:  a. Communication: written, verbal, nonverbal, and technological interaction and understanding;  b. Common Ground: conscious understanding of shared human experience that can then lead to dialogue around differences on a local and global scale;  c. Intentional Thinking: application of critical thinking, creative thinking, and problem solving;  d. Learning Beyond: integration or synthesis of learning and experience. We have struggled with this last. Is it a goal, or is it more a process, a means, or a metaperspective? Does one achieve Learning Beyond, or does one just “learn beyond?” Fom here, we will refine our goals, if necessary, and, either way, take them back to our larger committee to discuss them in the university context and using our newly developed rhetoric. // Communication Strategies // Before proceeding, though, we must develop strategies about how to engage our university’s constituencies in discussing these goals over the next semester. Aside from the question of language, we will need to develop a clear plan of whom to approach and when. In August, we have been promised time to capture the entire full-time (and some part-time) faculty in a robust discussion of our ideas. Right now, rather than address such a large group, we are considering breaking them up into more manageable pieces for presentations and discussions. They will have valid questions, some of which are easily anticipated, such as, “why do we need to revise the Core Curriculum at all?” Or, “Every educated person needs to know ___, so where does your plan ensure this content?” We will have answers to such questions at the ready in language that will speak to the audience most effectively. Also, in order to gather ideas and further validate our colleagues’ concerns, we will document these discussions. Transparency ordains that these discussion notes be published, most likely on the Web, and remain fodder for further conversation. One difficulty we are still struggling with is how even to start (or, more accurately, restart) the conversation. For instance, do we say, “Because we have revised the institution-wide student learning goals, we need to revisit our goals for general education/core curriculum.”? Or do we trust that our colleagues have been following our progress reports so that we can simply state, “Our committee has developed an initial list of goals and objectives, and we very much want your thoughts and feelings about this first draft of these goals and objectives.”? Whatever the case, we need to develop guiding questions to facilitate these discussions and promote our principles. The most fundamental are “What do our students need most? Skills? Knowledge? Attitudes and habits of mind? Some precise combination? How do we know? How do we best engage our students in developing these areas of learning? Through general education or through the disciplines? Why not both simultaneously? The discussion will formally begin (or restart) in fall 2010 with an aspiration to refine or revise our goals by January 2011.

Evidence of Success of the Plan

If we have revised (or reaffirmed) goals by January 2011, we will have met our objective. LINK TO DRAFT OF NEW STUDENT LEARNING GOALS