Come to the Community-Based Learning Open House!

The new Office of Community-Based Learning is hosting an Open House to introduce itself to faculty and community partners.

Wednesday, September 23, 3-5 in the Cleary Dining Hall

There will be light refreshments and a chance to meet the CBL staff, new & old faculty, as well as many community partners from the southeastern Massachusetts area.

If you have any questions, please contact Kate Rafey, krafey@stonehill.edu or 508-565-1959

 

Hope to see you there!

 

Assessment in the Humanities

Just in time for Maria Curtin’s roundtable Monday on “Assessment Tools We All Can Use,” David Scobey writes this week in Inside Higher Ed about the resistance many faculty in the humanities feel toward assessments of student learning:

Yet (especially in a time of scarcity and crisis) it is a fair challenge to the academy that we be accountable for the vast resources and autonomy to which we lay claim-that we offer a compelling argument about our value to the larger society. Precisely because others have their own reductionist agendas of how to measure success in higher education, we need to offer our own vision of means and ends. The most self-damaging response we can make is to build a defensive bulwark of guild privileges around ourselves.

More substantively, it is not simply in our interest but in the best traditions of the humanities to pose the questions that underlie the calls for assessment. What constitutes a good liberal education, one that is emancipatory and transformative for students? What is the distinctive role of the humanities in that education? How do we know whether our educational practices embody these values? It is hard to find assessment tools that advance rich answers to these questions; all the more reason for skeptical humanists to enter the conversation.

Read the full article here.

Michael Bérubé writes on Academic Freedom

Michael Bérubé, Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University, writes this week in Inside Higher Ed about the AAUP’s “Freedom in the Classroom” report, released in June 2007:

In its discussion of “indoctrination,” for example, the statement argues that: “It is not indoctrination for an economist to say to his students that in his view the creation of markets is the most effective means for promoting growth in underdeveloped nations, or for a biologist to assert his belief that evolution occurs through punctuated equilibriums rather than through continuous processes. Indoctrination occurs only when instructors dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to contest them. Vigorously to assert a proposition or a viewpoint, however controversial, is to engage in argumentation and discussion — an engagement that lies at the core of academic freedom.”

Read the full AAUP report here.

Read Bérubé’s article here.

Innovative Pedagogies for Political Scientists: Democratic Classrooms and Jon Stewart

Inside Higher Ed‘s coverage of last month’s meeting of the American Political Science Association highlighted a number of papers dealing with pedagogical innovations:

“Political Engagement 101″ discusses a forthcoming book from Jossey-Bass, Educating for Democracy: Preparing for Responsible Political Engagement, that analyzes the effects of “a series of courses that mixed more traditional political science education with participatory politics — not in the sense of organizing rallies for presidential candidates but with activities that go beyond formal classroom instruction”:

In a course at the University of Illinois at Chicago, students study the problems facing the city, hearing from a variety of prominent political and civic leaders — and then are assigned to pick a problem and draft a major policy proposal as if they were advising a new mayor. A course at Providence College involves studying early texts about democratic theory and then organizing a classroom into perfectly democratic and purely undemocratic modes of instruction.

Probably most interesting of their findings is that, while students “reported major shifts in their ideas about how politically active they wanted to be (toward more activity), they did not change their ideologies or party identifications,” challenging critics who feel such courses risk indoctrinating students into a particular political viewpoint.

Read the entire article here.

“Jon Stewart, Oral Exams, and more” reviewed a conference session on “innovative teaching techniques.” One of the more interesting presentations detailed one professor’s choice to adopt Jon Stewart’s America the Book as the primary text for an introductory political science course. Disappointed with the ability of traditional textbooks to hold his students’ interest, Professor Ryan Lee Teten (Northern Kentucky University) adopted America the Book because he knew students would read it, and also because it opened up more possibilities for teaching critical reading skills.

Read the full article here.

Evaluating “disturbing” writing at Virginia Tech

“When Student Writing Could be a Red Flag”

The article above (from Inside Higher Ed) — about the guidelines created by Virginia Tech’s Creative Writing program to assist new instructors in determining if a student’s writing is “disturbing” enough to warrant intervention — has generated quite a bit of conversation on the Writing Program Administrators listserv.

On the WPA list, members have raised questions such as: whether student writing can be used as a marker of mental instability, if faculty can be effective evaluators of such “disturbing” writing, and how such guidelines seem to feed into growing attempts to police student expression in the name of security.

Ed Falco, director of creative writing at Virginia Tech, addresses some of these concerns in the Higher Ed article:

“The danger,” Falco says of the Virginia Tech document (which has received approvals from the university’s counseling center, legal counsel and provost’s office) “is that written guidelines can be misused….that a situation would come about where you hamper creative freedom because students are afraid to write something because they’re afraid it will get them thrown into a system.”

Yet, he adds, “After having thought about this now for several months, my feeling is that students will turn in disturbing work and that given that, it’s a good idea to have a set of guidelines to deal with that work.”