The Liberal Arts Gateway initiative is one of the most successful course revitalization projects I have seen in more than 35 years in academia, and I firmly believe that its success is largely due to two key elements in the LAG philosophy: If you want to revitalize courses, you must (1) empower professors around (2) a core set of guiding values.
Empowering professors doesn’t mean asking them nicely to revamp courses or look at some outcome data. It definitely doesn’t mean ordering them to implement the latest fad some administrator picked up at a weekend conference and then label them as obstructionists because they might be a bit skeptical that a two-hour workshop trumps the lifetime they’ve dedicated to the excellence of their disciplines.
On the contrary, empowering professors means, first and foremost, invoking the passion that led each of them to give up other life and career options and take up their discipline as a life work. Just about every professor is a professor because of a desire to share that passion with students, and I contend that just about every professor who is disengaged and mechanical about teaching is a person whose passion has been squelched or squandered, most often by the very institution that is alleged to have an instructional mission to safeguard it.
The Liberal Arts Gateway is about far more than “gateway course success,” although it’s also about that obvious goal. No, the Liberal Arts Gateway is a revolution: A return to our core mission of instruction — the very reason ACC exists at all — a return to why students come through our doors in the first place. As I am fond of saying, students do not enroll in college to be advised or to admire our IT division or payroll or financial aid. The difference between college and a social club isn’t the activities; it’s the education.
Reflecting on this return to our core mission, the Liberal Arts Gateway embraces three guiding values:
- the student experience
- equity and inclusion
- responsiveness to downpath stakeholders
In this series of posts, I share some of my reflections and aspirations as one of the architects of the LAG philosophy and these guiding values.
Making student experience central
If you’ve succumbed to the superficialities of “student engagement,” you might read this guiding principle as an exhortation to start your classes sitting in a sharing circle and singing Kum By Yah. That may be a way to make students feel wanted and welcome, but let’s not go down the road of retail stores two weeks before Christmas: All smiles and waves and welcome at the door — as long as you’re there to be another Paying Customer. In my mind, that is not only disingenuous; it also sends a message that substance doesn’t matter. If you plan on teaching the excellences of your discipline, substance must matter.
There’s another way to look at making student experience central in the curriculum. Each of our students is a whole human being, with roots in a specific past and aspirations for a future. Each of those human beings was and is shaped by myriad forces, and each brings into our classrooms a wealth of experience and perspective. Why would we waste that incalculably valuable resource?
Think about the Great Conversation we’ve joined: Too often, that Great Conversation celebrated its greatness by ignoring or marginalizing the voices of Others. When it has included those voices — whether by design or by inattention — the Great Conversation becomes more inclusive, richer, more representative of the whole range of human experience.
But it’s not a freewheeling, anything-goes conversation: That’s the reason we profess “disciplines” and not chatter around a campfire. Our disciplines evolved critical tools appropriate to the tasks of engaging our subjectmatter — and the fact that those tools are not yet final and the disciplines perfected cannot be a reason to reject the disciplinarity of our disciplines in favor of campfire chatter. To the extent that our disciplines bring substance to the Great Conversation, it is in and through those critical tools and the perspectives they confer.
And this is where making student experience central to curriculum happens: We have the opportunity not merely to have our students “share their stories,” like so many exhibits in a taxidermist’s gallery. No, we have the opportunity, the duty, to empower and equip our students to engage their own experiences with and through the critical tools of our disciplines. And the perspectives that can arise when we and they succeed together can and must challenge our disciplines to be more than we professors conceived them to be, to include more of the human experience, to expand both the Great Conversation and the participants, like us, who keep the conversation going.
This approach to student experience imparts to students the critical skills of our discipline, and asks them to reflect critically on their experience itself. There is no more substantial way to welcome students than to show them how their own lives and experiences can become part of the curriculum, not as an afterthought, but as another critical tool for furthering understanding.
This is not as difficult as you might think. When I am at my best as a professor of philosophy — something, alas, that happens too infrequently as dean — I engineer ways for students to confront philosophers with the inner logic and necessities of their lived experience. The cost to me is to pay attention and take my student’s stories seriously — not wave and welcome them as yet another Paying Customer. Once I understand some of who they are, I can find or create opportunities for students to engage as whole human beings with the philosophers whose words lie there on the pages of my course.
The irony of this guiding value is that it’s also the guiding value of empowering professors — it’s just a matter of where we fall on a continuum of development of the excellences of our disciplines. If you benefit from having your experience and perspective valued, why wouldn’t your students? And if the Great Conversation benefits from informed and critical voices, then our future as liberal arts scholars depends on empowering our students to join their authentic voices with ours.
