Globalization and Higher Education

Part III. Implications for Pedagogy

Implications for Pedagogy pa r t 1 i i Implications for Pedagogy Introduction • 127 • All of the writers in this volume raise questions of pedagogy and curriculum: what is teaching and learning, and what is to be taught. But in this part, these questions are addressed directly. John McDermott does not deny that globalization is a force, or that the new technologies will demand a serious rethinking of both pedagogic and curricular matters . But ultimately, for him, the question of pedagogy comes down to the relation between the teacher and the student. He acknowledges uses for the new technologies, but does not see them as being capable of replacing the face-to-face encounter of student and teacher. This is not because such technologies are less efficient or powerful modes of providing knowledge. Rather, for McDermott, as for Socrates, pedagogy can be transformative only if it involves a direct engagement of minds —student’s to teacher’s. For him, teaching is a process of helping people construct a whole way of life, a goal which, he insists, is always under attack. He does not object to vocational training, enhancing skills, including “the basics,” or promoting “civics.” But these ought not dominate the academy. Nor does he object to “research.” But, he asks, why do all professors have to make breakthroughs? Indeed, the “research university is a euphemism for trashing undergrads.” Charles Karelis, sharing many of the values urged by McDermott, focuses on the curriculum. He does not see that the tension between the university as a “used car dealership” with its eye on the market and the university as “a church” with its eye on the highest of human aspirations is necessarily fatal. He takes aim at faculties and the curriculum. His striking observation that most undergraduates lack even the vaguest idea why they must satisfy a “general education core” suggests that faculties have failed to communicate “the educational purposes of the university ,” not only to students, but to their parents and to the larger communities of which they are a part. Thus, “within the educational agenda, seen broadly, only the values of research and broadening access to education itself seem clear and compelling today. Notions such as ‘the larger significance of things,’ ‘meaningful lives,’ and ‘social criticism’ seem too vague or dogmatic to rally strong support among students, trustees, or the general public. Indeed a kind of silence about larger educational purposes seems to have created a partial vacuum in the agenda of universities, which has allowed consumer agendas to loom unduly large.” But, curiously perhaps, that this has happened should not, he says, be seen as “the fault of the academy.” Rather, he offers that the problem relates very much to what Delanty (below) sees as a crisis of modernity. Karelis concludes with some very positive suggestions: “Let us stop all this nostalgic dogmatizing about the coherence of reality and just ensure that the undergraduate experience itself is coherent enough to allow students to come to their own conclusions about the world.” “Interdisciplinary programs, learning communities, capstone courses, student portfolios—even today’s subsidized campus snack bars” are straightforward reforms within the compass of current faculties and their administrations. Jaishree K. Odin has had considerable experience with online teaching and is on top of the current research literature regarding its uses and potential. Odin sees the necessity for a paradigm shift in the educational process in response to the new technologies and the concomitant “creation of networks, multidirectional flow of information, diversity, and instant access.” She compares these changes to the transformations ultimately produced by the printing revolution. But online education, for better or for worse, has become entangled in difficulties that predate its use, difficulties well documented by other authors in this volume. These include not merely corporatization of the university, declining academic standards, decreasing faculty governance and commodification , but also a shift in the meaning and function of knowledge. Odin agrees with McDermott, both following John Dewey, that good pedagogy is student- and not teacher-oriented, and that learning, as Odin puts it, involves “a continual reorganization, reconstruction, and transformation of experience.” But for her, the new technologies can play a critical role responding to these challenges. This requires, most critically, a much deeper understanding of how learning goes on. Only then can we see how the new technologies can be exploited for effective 128 • Globalization and Higher Education...