Fixing College Education: A New Curriculum for the Twenty-first Century

Chapter 4: A Curriculum Design for the Future

43 4 A Curriculum Design for the Future There is now remarkable agreement among educational thinkers about what best promotes student learning. Above all, students learn when they are engaged in the process. They respond well to high expectations, prompt feedback, and challenging problems related to their backgrounds, history, and goals. Students flourish in communities, with the support and collaboration of their peers. They develop best when the curriculum is coherent, progressive , and clear in its goals. Their learning is deepened and strengthened when it is active and related to concrete experience . Service-oriented classes and outside work/service programs contribute powerfully to learning how theory relates to practice, and to how using knowledge well depends on dealing with the social and cultural setting of one’s work. Student engagement is also deeply stimulated by contact with teachers outside of class and by extracurricular activities. To describe all the features of an ideal college here would be impossible, but one can at least imagine an ideal curriculum that would accommodate the different ways of learning and knowing that students bring with them. THE NUCLEUS The undergraduate’s education should have as its nucleus a continuous series of small classes that provide the optimum learning environment. I use the nuclear metaphor here deliberately, both to urge the centrality of this activity and also to leave ample, FIXING COLLEGE EDUCATION 44 complementary, provision in the curriculum for what I call “planetary” studies: the application of both traditional and new technological means to rounding out the student’s knowledge and experience. Practice suggests that, to give the professor intimate knowledge of each student’s character and progress, and enough time for generous conferences, an ideal class not be larger than sixteen or eighteen. However, to ensure a critical mass sufficient for a varied mix of student talents, ideas, and attitudes, it should not be smaller than ten or twelve. This kind of class is commonly called a seminar. The seminar should always have a definite subject, but its primary object should be training in intellectual skills by means of reading, scholarly investigation, discussion, and writing; and its success should thus be judged by the intellectual quality of the work done, rather than by the quantity of specific course material memorized. The teacher should provide the subject of the seminar and the initial reading or other investigative means, should supervise and occasionally join (but generally not lead) the discussions, confer with students individually on writing and general progress, act as their academic adviser, and evaluate their work. The seminar should focus on serious problems of interest to both students and teachers; thus it should often be interdisciplinary and, where the topic requires, team-taught. The reason for this is that most serious problems, like most life experiences, are interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary, problem-oriented seminars are thus ideally suited to the purposes of the nuclear part of the curriculum. Year by year the seminars should become increasingly sophisticated , so that with careful and informed advising the student’s experience in the major modes of thinking widens. The senior seminar requires a serious, major project drawing on the student ’swholeintellectualexperience.Suchprojectsdonotmerely summarize the student’s undergraduate education but may aim onward, leading toward a vocational goal, providing valid experience for employment (e.g., in business, industry, communica- A CURRICULUM DESIGN FOR THE FUTURE 45 tions, social service, or government), or toward graduate and professional studies. A series of seminars can take from a quarter to a third of the student’s work time, and since it is aimed at the most widely desired outcomes of undergraduate education—and not at narrow subject-matter specialism—can properly be called the student ’s “major.” This curricular nucleus, conscientiously administered and rigorously evaluated, would represent the faculty’s collective responsibility for each student’s intellectual development within the college curriculum. As we have seen, this responsibility is at present shamelessly neglected. It is worth noting that one of the most innovative universities in the world, Aalborg University in Denmark, reports great success with an undergraduate curriculum based heavily on seminars and problem orientation: One of Aalborg University’s trademarks is its unique pedagogic model of teaching: the problem-based, projectorganized model (PBL, Problem-based Learning). With this method a great part of the semester teaching and student work revolves around complex real-life problems or issues that the students wonder about and try to find...