For Twenty-First-Century Success, Embrace Both Tradition and Innovation

Response 2 to "Where's the Community? Redux"

Interacting with diverse communities of the future is not a choice between "producing more efficient and productive Information Age workers" (Jorge 2017: 179) or ensuring that college graduates act with a sense of personal responsibility, social justice and civic engagement. To succeed beyond college, graduates of the future must be equipped to do both.

One of the best ways to develop college graduates able to "cope with an increasingly technologized, globalized, and conflictive mid-twenty-first century society" (Jorge 2017: 179) is through service-learning opportunities while in college. The communities with which students engage during a service-learning encounter are often professional communities. And upon graduation, the most successful will enter communities of professionals, where a college degree has become the prerequisite for entry-level work that used to require a high school diploma (Burning Glass 2014) and the cost of getting that four-year degree has been increasing dramatically (National Center for Education Statistics 2015).

Including technology and technological adaptability in our pedagogy can be part of concretely preparing students for their work in the community while still in college as well as for their futures as professionals after college. This means teaching students to adapt—not just teaching them fixed skills—even as we teach adaptively. In terms of how we teach, this might mean pushing students away from the professor as primary resource; when students are in the community, the professor is neither present nor the expert. Therefore, students must develop the habit of consulting non-instructor resources to resolve problems they encounter (for example, employee manuals at the community partner organization, the community partner where necessary, and online technical support tools).

In terms of teaching adaptively while incorporating technology, faculty can require that all students use "hard skills" in their course projects. (While the humanities generally serve to develop "soft skills"—written and verbal communication, the ability to engage in critical thinking, analysis and synthesis of information—there is certainly room in the curriculum to require students to use hardware and software). This can be achieved simply by requiring that students present their assignments or final projects using technologies such as websites, social media, YouTube, iMovie, virtual meeting sites or screencasts. Whatever the course, content or project, students can use their critical thinking skills to find the best technological venue for their work. Community partners and employers are eager for students and recent graduates with these technological skills (Taylor 2015) paired with the independence, resourcefulness, problem-solving and decision-making skills that go with selecting and troubleshooting them (Adams 2014).

To provide more structure, build time into the curriculum for students to get themselves over the technological learning curve. For example, one homework assignment might be to choose a technological platform and hand in a link to the video or step-by-step tutorial used to learn about it. A week or two later, students hand in a link to a "test" sample—a generic website with no actual content in it—a "test, test, 1–2-3" YouTube video created using iMovie or screencast; or a social media handle with a compelling case for that platform's appropriateness to the project.

Instructors do not have to troubleshoot any of this technology, but do have to adapt to not being the sole experts in their courses. Tech support is readily available to students. Nearly every application has a "help" tab, many provide tutorial videos, Googling your problem as a question usually leads to a useful discussion thread with a solution, and calling the help desk is always a last resort that is best done directly by the user (and not by a faculty intermediary). This is precisely how we teach adaptively as we teach students to adapt.

To produce graduates prepared both for the professional workforce and to act with a sense of civic and personal responsibility, faculty must embrace both tradition and...