Academic Disciplines and Student Learning

Report on a Listening

March 10, 2006

The Teagle Foundation gathered eighteen participants—faculty members, college presidents and administrators, foundation colleagues, and board members—for a Listening on the relationship between academic disciplines and undergraduate student learning. The impetus for the Listening arose from two sources: (1) the need for a fresh look at disciplinary learning and its role in a liberal arts education, and (2) the debates about general education, the role of the major, and the "pre-professional courses" in undergraduate education.

Prior to the Listening, participants were provided with an excerpt from Derek Bok's book, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More (Princeton University Press, 2006), and a list of guided questions intended to frame the day's discussion. They were, broadly:

1. What do today's undergraduates need to know, especially in regards to preparation for advance academic work?

2. What do today's undergraduates need to know if they are not headed for academia or a related "learned profession"?

3. Can we—colleges, universities, and all those invested in higher education—do better?

4. Are we being ambitious enough and what do we really want for our students?

5. If the goal of an undergraduate education is to develop certain habits of mind and cognitive capacities—such as analytical reasoning, clarity of written and oral expression, alertness to moral and ethical issues, etc.—then what happens to the major?

6. Should the Teagle Foundation be active in this area, and if so, how? What will success—for the Foundation and for the sector at large—look like?

Led by Bob Connor, the discussion was complex and touched upon many issues that inevitably raised more questions than answers. The summary below attempts to organize the larger discussion into the various intertwining conversations that took place.

• The state of the disciplines: Are the disciplines in fact a pedagogical tool towards an end, that is, are they are not so much about learning content, but how learning gets done? Asked another way, are what disciplines offer a system for identifying and analyzing evidence, for making connections that then enable a deeper, more complex understanding of the world around us? One participant argued that disciplines are a "project of inheritance"—inventions that have proliferated over time and have passed on from one generation to the next without much subtraction. As such, what is their relevance today? Have the disciplines as a whole lost their effectiveness? Are they merely conventions and clichés that are guided by repetition and rather than advancement?



• The role of the major (the concentration): What is a major? What should a major do? What will a student do with a major? How much does the major—and specifically the structure of it—factor into student learning? Like the disciplines, is the undergraduate major a pedagogical tool that brings students to a level of sophisticated understanding, enabling them to grapple with problems and questions that do not have clear answers and solutions? But in the long run, just how important is the major? One college president described a study undertaken by her college which asked alumni, "How do they remember their college years?" The results demonstrated that the major almost never fits into their alumni's recollection, whereas cognitive skills do. What does this mean?



• Faculty, departments, and institutions: Are faculty doing a good job of describing the major and their discipline to students? In turn, are students receptive to these bounded habits of mind and training? If so, how receptive are they? One participant suggested that departments are structures created to understand knowledge whose production and shape are constantly changing. Given this, should it be a surprise that there is a "crisis" of departments and the major? Do institutions provide faculty with enough structures to effectively and sincerely interrogate the disciplinary curriculum they offer? Or do faculty feel they are under constant threat of a backlash in that they will not get tenure, nor will they be rewarded otherwise if they do not adhere to and agree with the prevailing campus culture?



• The relationship between institutions and intellectual pursuits: How do institutions—both individual campuses and higher education as a whole—affect the pursuit of knowledge? Do institutions replicate structures that often make those who are apart of them—faculty, administrators, etc.—unhappy? If so, what about institutions foster this practice?



• The relationship between the undergraduate major and graduate study: To what extent do graduate school admissions look for and desire undergraduates with strong disciplinary training? Who are applying and getting into Ph.D. programs? How has the changing nature of success, and especially the growing number of acceptable careers and professions, affected students' movement towards graduate school?



• Towards assessment?: One participant suggested that an evaluation of the major should start with student learning outcomes and then work backwards since concentration requirements are too individual and idiosyncratic to a discipline, and often times, to an institution as well. Another participant suggested that colleges and universities need to complicate the "feed-back loop" so that it entails constant pedagogical experimentation—which, admittedly, is already being done—and, more importantly, involves continued appraisal of those experiments' results. Assessment, another participant argued, should be done, not just to prove a department's or institution's worth to external constituencies, but to know more about faculty teaching and student learning so that they can be better done. There is evidence too—such as diminished funding from foundations and potential employers' sense that college graduates, even those from elite institutions, cannot write—that an assessment of student learning outcomes may be more necessary that most faculty are willing to admit.

The Listening concluded with recommendations of possible initiatives the Foundation can undertake in this area. These included:

• Creating "safe spaces" and convening multi-institutional groups to talk about disciplinary issues. As a means of getting at these issues, it might be helpful to figure out what questions institutions are ready to ask at this point.



• Reaching out and mobilizing department faculty chairs and other leaders to bring together various campus constituencies—across all fields—in small clusters to discuss the major (articulate goals, assess progress towards those goals, and disseminate these results in such a way that maximizes public understanding).



• Investigating the intersection of faculty evaluations, the major, and grade inflation and assessing each one. Start out by looking at the major, examining long-term outcomes and conducting a longitudinal study that asks students about their majors 10 years, 15 years, 20 years out, etc. Then take the information and results from this study, looking at them within the context of faculty evaluations and grade inflation, before teasing out those implications.



• Engaging in external (cross-institutional and amongst multiple constituencies including those outside academia) and internal (between administration and faculty) dialogues on assessment.



• Designing a program that teaches pedagogical strategies to faculty and graduate students (this approach emphasizes the importance of the classroom).



• Creating competitive reward structures for academic departments as a unit, recognizing their demonstrated improvement in teaching and learning.



• Bringing together multi-institutional collaboratives to think about the goals of the major, and then disseminating the information and results of their conversations to disciplinary societies and beyond.



• Focusing on writing—What does it mean to write well? How can faculty ensure that their students leave college with this skill? What do faculty need to do so that when their students pursue careers outside academia and such, they are able to write as their employers wish them to?

One participant suggested that these ideas and possible projects are not exclusive of one another, that convergences can be found and developed. Another means of bringing together some of these recommendations is to engage in campus-based conversations about this topic, or piggy-back dialogues at national association of departments and/or council on humanities meetings, or to engage in a review process that hones in on the issues and then has the relevant disciplinary society review what is presented to them before going forward with an specific initiative.

Cheryl D. Ching
March 21, 2006