Author: Matthew

An important public announcement for followers of the Dean’s Blog

You know how we have a Surgeon General whose job it is to ensure that members of the public are informed about practices that are either conducive or detrimental to good physical health? Well, I’ve realized this morning, reading Inside Higher Ed that we need an analogous role for our intellectual health. As in, the front half of mens sana in corpore sano.

Finding no suitable candidates available nearby, I have named myself Philosopher General. I will periodically issue guidelines and warnings that will help you safeguard your intellectual health. Like this:

Philosopher General’s Warning: Reading this post has been shown to cause reflection in test subjects.

Or: The deadly sins of marketable skills

You probably know that the state of Texas expects institutions of higher education to define and assess the marketable skills that students can reasonably expect to acquire in a course of study. In many programs, this is a no-brainer. There are, for instance, a fairly specific list of skills that an RN or surveyor should have on graduation that would make him or her “marketable.” This exhortation from the state is pretty vacuous when it comes to technical skills, mainly because we’re doing that anyway.

Technical skills aren’t the challenge; the challenge is what to do about so-called “soft skills.” I detest this term: If those skills were so soft, more people would have them in abundance, employers wouldn’t have to keep asking for them, and higher ed leaders wouldn’t be wringing their hands trying to figure out how to “teach” them. Just about everyone needs skills like how to communicate clearly, how to cooperate with colleagues, how to set logical priorities, etc. The challenge is to determine what those skills are and how to inculcate them in our students.

Each discipline has its special challenges here, but my focus is marketable skills in the liberal arts. You don’t have to take my word for this — after all, my degrees are in things like music, history, and philosophy. Employers themselves are telling us that they value liberal arts students as employees. And moreover, there is growing evidence to support the claim that the study of the liberal arts prepares people for career progression and growth in ways that narrower technical specialization doesn’t. But. . . .

In our zeal to help our students prepare for the future (and to satisfy the state), there are two main things that frequently go wrong.

I was in Miami last week for an Adobe conference. This is my “take-away,” as they say in the conference biz.

I’m not prone to idle praise or superlatives, but even I have to say that this conference was fantastic. It confirmed a trajectory that I’ve already been on for years: You shouldn’t have to give up a traditionalist’s commitment to scholarship to achieve digital fluency. In the past, this wasn’t easily achievable: the tools and technologies were so cumbersome that you had to take time out of your commitment to scholarship to get good enough to do anything anyone might care about. Not so today.

If you’re expecting the usual lamentations about student behavior, you may be disappointed. Instead of disparaging “students today,” etc., etc., I invite you to join me in third grade.

My teacher was Mrs. Wooley. I’m not making this up: her name actually was Mrs. Wooley, which I viewed as a gift from the gods of comedy. When I found out a couple of weeks before school started, I longed for the moment that some classmate would complain about her, so I could say, “Yep. She’s a woolly booger.”

In fairness, Mrs. Wooley was a great teacher: She told us the truth when we didn’t know what we were doing, and she was not especially kind, but she was committed to doing whatever it took to equip us to meet her expectations. And that commitment included keeping me in relative solitary confinement, in my own desk at the front of the room, right next to hers.

Also, Mrs. Wooley gave a lot of quizzes.

In the first installment of “How I learned to love HB2223,” I talked about finding love through contextualized learning, which led me to propose a couple of ideas for pairing that might seem, well, nuts. That led to an observation: There are a lot of questions about CoReq-ing, some of which even involve data.

Consider this little data snapshot from last year, courtesy of Sam Echevarria-Cruz: