Back to the Drawing Board: Interesting Article on Curriculum Redesign
May 18th, 2010I love this quote:
The failure of the students to develop a coherent understanding of the field . . . had grown out of the faculty’s failure to present the field coherently.
It’s from a story from Inside Higher Ed about an inter-disciplinary program at the University of Georgia in recreation and leisure studies. The faculty realized the program wasn’t working, and they went back to the drawing board to fix it. Good for them. I’ve been in programs that need to do this. There’s a lot of inertia in higher ed, like in other areas, so it takes some gumption to not just passively keep doing what’s been done but instead to re-imagine things from the ground up. I admire that these two institutions were willing to create something new.
The Georgia model has now been adopted at Clemson, too. There the chair of recreation and leisure studies:
[C]onvened his department to examine the nine courses typically offered to majors in the spring of their sophomore year. Like the faculty at Georgia, they tacked the courses and their learning objectives to the wall. And like the Georgia professors, they found redundancies. By the end of the meeting, they had winnowed the sophomore spring curriculum down to four essential courses — then resolved to teach the courses as one big course with four separate grades.
Pedagogically, the idea at both Georgia and Clemson is to have the course resemble an actual job: A multifaceted yet singular activity that occupies the whole day, and involves the freehand application of learned concepts to various practical tasks.
The article talks about how these efforts to reengineer the curriculum taxed faculty. They had to do the re-design work. Then they had to teach in teams; that requires greater time for coordination. Some courses were eliminated. And, theoretically at least, the demands of the new format could impinge on the “publish research” imperative that hangs over younger faculty (though some people spoken to for the article said that issu had not materialized).
The new format also increased demands on students. They could shirk less since profs. were communication with each other.
Also, I really liked this:
[O]ne distressed [student asked], “Don’t you realize we’re the multiple-choice generation?”
“We have to help them realize,” [Prof.] Powell says, “ that the world is not just full of multiple-choice questions.”
Amen that.