| It is always helpful to know
what you’re getting into before making any commitment. From
dinner reservations, to getting married, it is always a comfort
to know the potential of any future event. Choosing a four-year
university to attend would definitely be a circumstance where it
would be helpful to recognize what lies ahead. Certainly, we as
students should have expectations regarding our education; in a
majority of our situations, we personally made a conscious decision
to attend the college we are at today. Shouldn’t we expect
the best from our choice, or at the very least have an understanding
from the school of what is “here” considered effective
learning by anticipating the curriculum?
Students want to be on the same page as the
university they attend. There should be no mystery about the courses
they enroll in, or, alternately, what is expected of them from professors.
This congruency between students and university/faculty also happens
to be a desire from the educators as well, and while how to compromise
may be personally relative, there seems to be a common thread running
through any proposed solution: what I ironically dub “broadly-focused”
schooling. Curricular debates are changing the landscape of university
educations today, and while they sometimes mask more concrete issues
of school funding, what students are
going to learn is central to the point of any education. This article
will expose various thoughts on how to come together on set criteria
for teaching that may vary on ethics, timing, and background; however,
I find that the ideas presented all strive for a similarly “widespread
focus.”
The initial take on what should be taught through
curricular debates is at first brought up by how students should
receive their introductory, undergraduate education. “How”
exactly is seen in the common idea to try and keep professors from
doing less grandstanding on a topic they love, and instead ground
courses in a more universal subject that your field is a part of.
Many feel introductory classes are no longer introductions. In a
published debate (what else) over curriculum revision, James
L. Boren and Richard L. Stein of the University of Oregon discuss
the subject as follows:
We have given up “ownership” of [majors] in exchange
for the right to be solitary
tenants of a series of isolated interllectual properties…
it’s not just that certain
disciplinary differences exacerbate disagreements over curriculum.
We have
devised a curriculum—and a way to teach it—that exaggerates
those differences
and diminishes the possibility of finding common ground. We have
organized the
workplace so that we share less and less, including (especially)
our students.
Boren and Stein identify that curriculum in
the university is set up to rigidly upon a professor’s agenda.
The instructor’s plans typically hinge upon the background
they have “expert knowledge” in. While their substantial
solution to this problem would be a “gateway” set of
courses specific to the future upper-division work of each major,
the two simply propose a common ground. So many differing cultures
and backgrounds enter a campus each year with something special
they’re bringing to the table that a frame of reference needs
to be established. Curriculum should be initially predicated to
accommodate and prepare all undergraduates for professor specialties
in the future, and not to be thrown at them on the first day of
fall quarter.
This idea to accommodate diverse backgrounds
is shared among university intellectuals, and has been expounded
upon in terms of how to approach the actual mindset of practicing
this plan in the classroom. Curriculum can certainly get more specialized
than an introductory course, but as with the case of Boren and Stein,
Penn State’s Don
Bialostosky feels that will come only with a “gateway”
introduction, and in particular by looking at past university programs.
These programs even include the ones that shaped his education.
Basing his ideas in Aristotle, curricular debates should be used
with a “deliberative rhetoric” described thusly:
A deliberative orientation would sharpen our
inquiry into how we might provide a liberal education that aims
at flexible preparedness for unforeseen crises and opportunities
and would raise our skepticism toward epideictic educational ideals
that identify with fixed canons or self-justifying disciplines.
Once again, grandstanding is opposed to, as
well as the use of any standard body of work to teach the aforementioned
“individualistic” student attitudes.
To Bialostosky, being deliberative means deciding what the most
productive and unproductive aspects and scholars from their personal
educations could be brought to bear upon the curriculum being thought
through in the present-day. Did anything waste time in the past?
What was frustrating? What led a former student to the professorial
field they are in today? Curricula should “offer all the honest
goods we have to all comers.” Administration
should shape their efforts around a set of courses that can be pared
down to a basic universal level across all professors, as well as
be provisionary to the wealth of backgrounds at the modern university.
Of course, not all curricular debates will
tend to focus on deliberative methods, and some will even be epideictic
with a strict body of work to follow. The University of Texas El
Paso’s Lawrence Johnson would like to abide by a fixed canon
in undergraduate teachings, but he would like to contextualize certain
works into a broader education framework; writings he uses should
not be pigeonholed into a course that only works for him. Using
“Ethics
and Western Culture,” Johnson states that there are particular
historical works that can be the “primary vehicle for the
development of… students’ understanding of and appreciation
for the heterogeneous roots of ethical pluralism in the West.”
He would like to use traditional texts in an untraditional manner.
To Johnson, canonical works being ingrained into the education process
is not a problem, yet the means to which they have been taught over
the past century is damaging and unethical. Everything from Plato
to Twain is twisted into a “self-promoting” professorial
point of view (bringing up an intriguing point of the political
correctness of an individual pedestal). He feels classics have
been decided upon as “classics” for a reason, yet in
the classroom they should be worked through more by students and
less wrapped around one educator’s schema. “Dead white
guy books,” to Johnson, are functioning in the various worlds
each individual student operates in. This inverts the “broad
focus” on integrating students to the university through actual
texts.
At times, skepticism in any professor’s
agenda can be so strong that some people feel using “classic”
texts in a course is impossible to do without bias. To Stanford
University’s Bliss
Carnochan, in an interview regarding his book The Battleground
of the Curriculum, education “remains a belief system that
survives not so much through institutional self-understanding as
through continued acts of faith,” later adding, “I don’t
think we know very well what we’re doing.” Carnochan
feels that the heterogeneity of colleges today—from women’s
universities, to state schools, to research institutes—should
immediately eliminate the idea of a “uniform curriculum,”
in turn allowing for complete academic freedom.
Therefore, a common frame of reference is something that does not
exist, or rather is something that should not be worried about due
to the fact that it can never be achieved. By race, religion, creed,
and simply paths of study, diversity among a student body should
never allow any uniform curriculum to be established. Unlike Johnson,
no body of work whatsoever should guide curriculum, yet like Bialostosky
the approach to this decision is based in rhetoric that looks to
the past. The demographic makeup of today’s student bodies
is unlike that of the early twentieth-century, and the curriculum
should develop along with this notion.
There is yet another alternative method for
moving through curricular debates, and the idea focuses on current
events shaping the program, rather than works written thousands
of years previous. In “To
Understand and Transform the World” Gloria T. Alter adapts
the views of E. Wayne Ross to make today’s introductory courses
“issues-centered.” History is not left for dead, but
what goes on in the classroom should be seen through the lens of
the present’s outside world. To explain: “multiple interpretations
of diverse histories and student realities can empower learners
to be more than passive recipients of information.” The past
should be viewed with the future in mind, and with differing individual
histories of students entering the university, various takes can
be presented on any collegiate material; curriculum should not be
static, but rather ever-changing through interpretation. Furthermore,
education in this “current event” format might suit
student activist groups through the
politics students attempt to deal with.
A more sensational approach to curriculum in
the university can be seen by the debates
here at UCLA. With the more fundamental aspect being described
above (as in allowing students to interpret diversity amongst each
other or through the scope of “classic” texts), UCLA
is opening up the idea of “diversity requirement” as
a part of the courses themselves. This is a strange hybrid of the
popular perspectives of a “broad focus,” where the diversity
of Alter via Ross becomes a forced variation of the subject matter
that, say, Johnson suggested. In this case, I think UCLA is acting
in the best interests of its students, yet strangely springing forth
with a “diverse” schedule that UCLA can probably only
struggle economically to provide. This school is instead on a solid,
and better, track with the lessening of overall GE requirements
and adding the GE Cluster. Incoming undergraduate students can take
a yearlong course that helps them focus on subjects of their interest,
yet spread broadly as to not focus on the “big” research
of a single faculty member. In any case, just as there is no fundamental,
established method on how to teach a class (or take one, for that
matter), there is no one fundamental way to approach curriculum;
historical texts are obviously needed to be the backbone of many
courses, but the options are open for how to use them. Curricular
debates are truly balancing acts, where a common frame of mind cannot
be skewed to the side of any individual. What we learn may, in the
end, be falling in the shadow of how we learn it.
Related Links
Adelman, Clifford. “In Affirmative Action Debates: It’s
Curriculum that Should Count.”
Curriculum Transformation. Fall 1998.
http://www.diversityweb.org/Digest/F98/debates.html
Burgan, Mary A. “A Darkling Plain?”
From the General Secretary. Winter 2003.
http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2003/03ma/03maFTGS.HTM
“Conversations For an Enlarging Public
Square.” 1997.
http://www.jtsears.com/religintr.htm
Kay, David G. “Bandwagons Considered Harmful,
or The Past as Prologue in
Curriculum Change.” UCI.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~kay/pubs/bandwagons.html
Perkins, Dianne. “Teaching Against the
Tide.” Lit Journal.
http://www.litjournal.com/docs/iss_tide.html
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