Intentionally Adrift: What The Pathways Project Can Teach Us about Teaching and Learning

Among the myriad books bemoaning the crisis in higher education published in 2011, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Arum and Roksa 2011) garnered the most attention both within and outside the academy. While Richard Arum’s and Josipa Roksa’s research deserves some of the criticism it has received (Brooks 2011), readers keep returning to the book and wondering about the authors’ conclusions. There appears amidst the cacophony of praise and blame, a grain of truth: students in general seem not to be learning as deeply and broadly as their predecessors. Arum and Roksa spread the blame around: parents focus on credentials, students focus on social life, faculty focus on research, and administrators focus on rankings and budgets. No one, they claim, is really focused on learning. Students are left without a compass, it seems, academically adrift in a boat without a rudder.

Those of us who teach literature, however, want our students to get lost, “becoming lost in that other way that isn’t dislocation but about the immersion where everything else falls away” (Solnit 2006:368). Literature professors have chosen our profession because we have all been lost in texts, reading so intently that time slips away, suspending our disbelief so that we are standing on the wall with Helen and Priam, watching the battle between the Achaeans and the Trojans. We imagine the epic poet’s audience in much the same way: transfixed by the narrative, occasionally calling out to one of the characters and then surfacing above the sea of narrative and calling on the poet to sing a particular episode that will allow them to dive in once more. When our students, denizens of the eWorld (Foley 2011-), seem too distracted to follow us into the depths of story, we blame many of the forces listed above: vocationalism, budgets, helicopter parents, and the eWorld itself for their apathy. We believe students are lost because they have not followed the literary pathways we have constructed, and, indeed, often students are lost; other times they have even abandoned the journey completely, having discovered a far more interesting (to them) pathway away from the text and toward facebook, Hulu, or Pandora. The tools for guiding them back, however, are in the study of oral traditions themselves.

Certainly any professor who has been paying attention to students over the last decade has noticed that more and more of them are firmly planted in the eWorld, and the famous Beloit College Mindset List¹ has confirmed this phenomenon. The class of 2015 has grown up with Amazon.com, swipe cards, cell phones, smart boards, and music downloads (2015 Mindset List):

Members of this year’s freshman class, most of them born in 1993, are the first generation to grow up taking the word “online” for granted and for whom crossing the digital divide has redefined research, original sources and access to information, changing the central experiences and methods in their lives.

The eWorld itself is a crucial situational factor (Fink 2003:62) that must be considered in teaching this generation of students. Just as we study the performance context of verbal art in order to more fully understand it, we need to look into the contexts of our students’ learning. Given the many parallels between the eWorld and oWorld, however, this context should be particularly familiar to scholars of oral traditions.

The Pathways Project (Foley 2011-) provides us with an excellent model not only for studying texts, but also for teaching them. As I prepared to write this essay, I took the following pathway: Systems versus Things > Reality Remains in Play > Distributed Authorship > Citizenship in Multiple Agoras > Leapfrogging the Text > Systems versus Things > Variation Within Limits > Recur Not Repeat > Proverbs > Reality Remains in Play > Variation Within Limits > Polytaxis > Agoraphobia > eAgoraphobia > Trekking through Texts > Surfing through Networks (“Bonnie’s Research Map”). The pathway allows readers to see how I navigated through the various topics and may encourage them to speculate about the choices I made as I read. In teaching, however, we often jump straight to the conclusion, providing students with facts...