READY OR NOT
Global Challenges, College Learning, and America’s Promise
January 21-24, 2009
Seattle, Washington
HIGHLIGHTED SESSIONS
Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education
Author Peter Sacks will discuss his book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education. While we often hear about the growing divide between rich and poor in America, Sacks locates the source of this trend where we might least expect to find it – in our schools and colleges. Telling the stories of young people and families as they struggle to negotiate the educational system, Sacks creates a powerful indictment of American education that shows how schools, colleges, and universities exacerbate inequality by providing ample opportunities for advantaged students while shutting the gates on the poor – and even the middle class. At the heart of this book is the question of justice, and Sacks demands that we take a hard look at what equal opportunity really means in the United States today.
Peter Sacks, essayist and social critic, is author of Tearing Down The Gates (University of California Press, 2007) and Standardized Minds: The High Price Of America’s Testing Culture And What We Can Do To Change It (Da Capo Press, 1999)
Liberal Education: What, Why, and How?
This session will explore a broad formulation of liberal education and address the significance of that formulation for curriculum, teaching, institutional culture, and assessment in higher education. If transformational liberal education requires engaging the whole student across the educational experience, how can colleges and universities renew strategy and allocate resources effectively to support it? How can assessment be used to improve student learning and strengthen a transformational learning environment? How can institutions use the promise of liberal education to prepare competent, flexible graduates with a broad spectrum of transferable skills for life, civic participation, and work?
Carol Geary Schneider, President, AAC&U; Richard H. Hersh, Senior Fellow, Council for Aid to Education; Richard P. Keeling, Principal and Senior Executive Consultant, Richard P. Keeling & Associates, Inc.; Richard Shavelson, Professor of Education, Stanford University
Beyond General Education—Where Do We Go From Here? A Conversation with Stanley Katz
Stanley Katz, of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. A leader with deep experience and a scholar with wide-ranging interests—including the relationship of civil society and constitutionalism to democracy, the relationship of the United States to the international human rights regime, and the fate of philanthropy and non-profit institutions—Katz provides a unique perspective on college learning, America’s Promise, and the future of liberal education.
Stanley N. Katz, Faculty Chair of the Undergraduate Program and Director, Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, Princeton University
See posting from Stanley Katz in The Chronicle Review --
"The Big Questions and General Education"
Pedagogies of Engagement and Collaborative Initiatives
This session will be an opportunity to explore how contemporary, research-based pedagogies of engagement serve goals for student learning in STEM fields called for through the AAC&U LEAP initiative and by academic and corporate communities today. Participants will explore how leaders of academic departments and institutions and the corporate and business community can collaborate in regional networks to ensure that graduates have the higher-order thinking skills, the ability to problem-solve within diverse, multidisciplinary teams in ways that reflect both outcomes for engaged learning in STEM field and expectations of prospective employers and the public for 21st century graduates. Experiences from collaborating partners within PKAL’s NSF-funded Pedagogies of Engagement initiative will inform this discussion.
Judith Greiman, President, Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges; Jeanne Narum, Director, Project Kaleidoscope; James Swartz, , Dack Professor of Chemistry, Grinnell College, and Project Kaleidoscope Pedagogies of Engagement Project Coordinator; Robert K. Keating, Program Director, Office for Workforce Competitiveness, State of Connecticut
This session is sponsored by Project Kaleidoscope
Leadership in Shaping Interdisciplinary STEM Learning EnvironmentsAchieving an effective interdisciplinary (ID) environment for undergraduate STEM learning requires attention to: programmatic implications of an ID curriculum; institutional policies for building a faculty, developing budgets, shaping spaces; and understanding how people learn in such environments. Participants will explore promising practices in establishing introductory ID courses; developing ID programs such as environmental science, health and society; and creating institution-wide ID initiatives. Panelists will discuss lessons learned from the PKAL ID Initiative, funded by the Keck Foundation.
Susan Elrod, Professor of Biological Sciences and Director, Center for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Education, California Polytechnic State University; Michael Kerchner, Associate Professor of Psychology, Washington College; Stephanie Pfirman, Hirschorn Professor and Chair, Department of Environmental Science, Barnard College
This session is sponsored by Project Kaleidoscope
Show Me the Learning: Valid Assessment of Student Learning
AAC&U’s new initiative – VALUE: Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education – is a research and campus-based initiative designed to make the essential learning outcomes central to the educational experience. It will generate leadership, recommendations, examples of best practices and curricular designs, and an assessment framework. This session will introduce participants to this project, focusing on the development of rubrics for the essential learning outcomes and how they are being used to assess student learning through the work students do through the curriculum and co-curriculum. Examples of campus student e-portfolios, rubrics, and their use will be shared and demonstrated.
Terrel Rhodes, Vice President for Quality, Curriculum, and Assessment ; Ross Miller, Senior Director of Assessment for Learning, Wende Morgaine, Research Associate – all of AAC&U’s Office of Quality, Curriculum, and Assessment
Making Learning Outcomes Usable and Transparent: Mapping the Territory, Documenting the Journey
Through LEAP and its sponsorship of The New Leadership Initiative, AAC&U is playing a prominent role in helping institutions respond to calls for more attention to the assessment of student learning. This session introduces a three-year national effort to document how colleges and universities are using assessment data to improve teaching and learning and to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of best practices in the assessment of college learning outcomes. Panelists will describe the project and discuss its benefits for institutions and policy makers.
Stanley Ikenberry, Regent Professor and President Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; George Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor and Director, Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research
The Challenge of Institutional Change for Liberal Education
In “Liberal Education: What, Why, and How,” panelists advocated a broad formulation of liberal education, one that will require significant institutional renewal and change. In this session, the presenters will explore the capacity for institutional change to support such transformational learning. The range of issues discussed will include graduate preparation of faculty members, faculty development, renewal of the curriculum (and, especially, of general education), systems of accountability, pedagogy, institutional organization and structure, collaboration among faculty and student affairs professionals and programs, and commitments to assessment and evidence-based decision-making.
Richard P. Keeling, Principal and Senior Executive Consultant, Richard P. Keeling & Associates, Inc.; Richard H. Hersh, Senior Fellow, Council for Aid to Education
Leadership Decision Making: Why We Err and What We Can Do About It
With so much at stake for our students and our institutions, leadership decision making in academia can be a risky and uncertain business. Human decision making is cognitively complex enough, involving argument making, heuristic thinking, and dominance structuring. Mix in the culture of the academy, and the opportunities for error multiply exponentially. This session will help participants anticipate and recognize the threats posed by some of the most dangerous sources of human decision making error. The speakers will share easy and workable strategies that groups and individuals can use to protect against or mitigate the hazards.
Peter A. Facione and Noreen C. Facione, researchers, authors, and consultants – both of Measured Reasons LLC
Give Students a Compass: States, Systems, and New Strategies for General Education in Public Institutions
In its new project, “Give Students a Compass,” AAC&U is working with three state systems to re-map educational aims, educational practices, and assessment strategies for general education in public higher education. Participating systems will infuse general education with practices that raise the levels of performance and success of all students, especially those who remain underserved. Compass faculty and staff leaders will describe the project and consider its potential to act as a catalyst to generate change that will influence all of higher education.
Susan Albertine, Senior Director, LEAP States Initiative, AAC&U; Elisabeth Zinser, Special Assistant to the Chancellor, Oregon University System; Ken O'Donnell, Associate Dean, Academic Program Planning, California State University Office of the Chancellor; Rebecca Karoff, Senior Academic Planner, Office of Academic Affairs, University of Wisconsin System
“Give Students a Compass” is part of AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) Campaign
Getting High School Students Ready: Implications of New Directions in College Learning
AAC&U's Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative identifies the need to provide all students with more opportunities for engaged, hands-on, and integrative learning. The LEAP initiative also argues that we must provide a “compass” to help students more effectively chart their way through both high school and college and ensure that they are focused on achieving essential learning outcomes. How should high schools prepare students to be truly ready for this kind of learning? This session will ask teachers and educational leaders who are deeply involved in envisioning and implementing global education to describe new directions in independent high schools, as well as the obstacles that still stand in the way of enacting the LEAP vision for all students.
Peter Merrill, Head, Division of World Languages, Phillips Academy; Paul Miller, Director of Global Initiatives at National Association of Independent Schools; Clayton W. Lewis, Head of School, Washington International School; Debra Humphreys, Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs, AAC&U
Liberal Learning and Business Education
The Carnegie Foundation is currently studying how colleges and universities with business majors can ensure that undergraduate business students receive a good liberal-arts education. Business is now the largest undergraduate major, and a disproportionate share of first-generation college students are choosing this major. Presenters will briefly outline the study’s conceptual frame, methods, and preliminary findings, but the session will be devoted to structured inquiries on the views of participants – How they understand liberal education for business students and how they believe that education can be strengthened.
Anne Colby, Senior Scholar, Thomas Ehrlich, Senior Scholar, and William Sullivan – all of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
This session is sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Who Will Deliver on America's Promise: The Future Professoriate
The academic workforce has changed; we now need a pragmatic model of "the faculty" -whoever they are - that can preserve what is best about the American academy in a period of global as well as national change. If contingent appointments and disaggregated work are irreversible realities, what new model of the professoriate might reasonably retain essential elements common to other professions? Among these common elements are intellectual knowledge about what it means to be a member of the profession (including, but certainly not limited to, disciplinary expertise); skills that enable success carrying out professional duties (in the case of faculty, in teaching and professional service as well as research); self- awareness of the values and attitudes we most associate with the life and practices of the profession; and work conditions befitting a professional.
William M. Plater, Chancellor's Professor, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis; Judith Gappa, Professor Emerita, Purdue University; Jack Schuster, Professor of Education and Public Policy, Claremont Graduate University
Language, Literature, and Liberal Education: The Report of the MLA Teagle Working Group
A committee of the Modern Language Association reports on its Teagle Foundation-supported discussions of the difficulties and possibilities for major programs in language and literature and liberal arts education in the changing landscape of higher education. The MLA Teagle working group sought to challenge conventional thinking about undergraduate majors by inviting members from English and other languages to discuss the issues together. Topics included the perceived sense of the decline of the humanities and the liberal arts; changes in literacy and the media through which literacy is practiced; the shift from monolingualism to multilingualism; and the role of the study of languages and literature in countering class-based bifurcations of educational possibilities.
Rosemary G. Feal, Executive Director, Modern Language Association; J. Michael Holquist, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Yale University; David Marshall, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, University of California, Santa Barbara; Jenifer Ward, Associate Provost, Cornish College of the Arts
Transformational Learning through Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity: Models and Strategies to Build and Sustain an Institutional Infrastructure and Culture
This session will explore models and strategies associated with transforming institutional infrastructure and culture to effect deep learning through undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative activity.A body of knowledge has amassed in recent years clearly indicating that these engaged forms of learning yield an array of greater educational outcomes.The benefits are numerous and affect all key stakeholders: students, faculty, two-year and four-year institutions, graduate and professional institutions, business and corporate partners, and non-profit community partners.Panelists will discuss what has worked, what has not, ongoing implementation issues, and lessons-learned from their own experiences.
Jeffrey Osborn, Dean, School of Science, The College of New Jersey, and President, Council on Undergraduate Research; Nancy H. Hensel, Executive Officer, Council on Undergraduate Research
This session is sponsored by the Council on Undergraduate Research
Who Owns the Curriculum? Ideology and Partnerships in Liberal Education
This session will explore the tensions between claims that faculty are the sole arbiters of what constitutes a liberal education and counter claims that student life professionals also possess the knowledge and expertise critical to defining students’ total learning experiences. Current and past claims by such organizations as the National Association of Scholars (NAS) will be examined in light of alternative positions advocated by the American College Personnel Association (ACPA), as well as AAC&U.
Michele Holt-Shannon, Administrative Director, UNH Discovery Program, University of New Hampshire; Bruce Mallory, Provost and Executive Vice President, University of New Hampshire
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