In case you don’t know about the
Liberal Arts Gateway (LAG),
you can catch up here.
This spring, the Liberal Arts Gateway passes another milestone: We’ve reached more than 6000 students with courses redesigned and taught according to the LAG philosophical framework.
We didn’t plan it this way, but LAG figured prominently in the English discipline’s program review, and the story is great for students. Students in LAG courses are succeeding at a higher rate and are better prepared for subsequent coursework. Thanks to Susy Thomason’s support, Chris Berni received a level III Fellowship to study the efficacy of the LAG approach, and her analysis is even better news. Students are succeeding and completing at a higher rate, and students of color benefit most from the LAG experience. We have growing evidence that LAG students are persisting into subsequent semesters and succeeding at a higher rate. But the most important metric of what LAG is doing for students is what students are saying. Here one striking example:
While reading about the LGBTQ community I became more culturally sensitive to their situation and gained a deeper understanding of the discrimination the community faces every day. In fact, on a recent work trip I ran into drag queens in my elevator and had an eye-opening conversation…. Had this been before taking Composition Two, I am ashamed to say that the elevator ride may have been an uncomfortable experience for me….I now make a conscious effort to deeply educate myself on all aspects of a subject before speaking or writing about it. Being tolerant is another important item on this list, as this helps me to be an objective writer and not let my personal feelings toward a topic influence my writing.
LAG Comp 2 student
This statement, and dozens like it, keep us committed to the LAG approach.
Given the title of this post, you probably think that I’m going to talk about course design principles or inclusive assignments or culturally sensitive teaching or some other best practices. You’re wrong. You’ve been led to think like that by a peculiar ideology that mistakes “professional development” for professional and personal growth. Professional development is almost always about institutional interests; consequently, it’s powered by commodified techniques — like “best practices” — and measured by quantitative metrics — like attendance at workshops.
What would “professional development” look like from the perspective of mission, intention, and trust? For a start, we’d make a stark distinction between training the primary purpose of which is to cover our institutional ass. Think: Cyber Security, or Sexual Harassment Training. Have you ever heard of someone transformed and revitalized by a Workshop on Compliance? It could happen — if we stopped thinking of the institution’s interest and placed our mission at the center of what we offer as professional development.
That is the first reason LAG works: It’s thoroughly grounded in our mission, which is to educate people. It defines teaching as a transformative practice and centers itself on the student experience: Our concern is to educate the whole person. It builds in inclusivity and equity all the way down to the level of assignments and activities. And its explicit goal is to equip students with the skills and knowledge and self-efficacy they will need not just to make it through this course or their program, but into their families, careers, and communities. LAG strives to educate people for fulfilled lives of community and purpose.
You can’t get that in a bottle. There is no workshop for it; you can’t learn it at a conference. And we had the wisdom not to try. That’s the second reason LAG works: It’s about empowering faculty growth.
A certain administrator whom we all know — and who, I have no doubt, was genuinely committed to student success — used to turn red and flex his jaw muscles like he was going to pole vault with his mandible when I talked about LAG as a faculty empowerment initiative. If your theory of change involves giving people more and more and more tools and setting higher and higher expectations to use them, you’re unlikely to catalyze real transformation, and even less likely to inspire growth. Any first-year psychotherapy intern can spot the problem with that theory of change: It doesn’t apply to human beings. Not only does it ignore purpose and belonging: It omits the sense of identity that is foundational for growth and purpose and belonging. This is why I am adamant that revitalizing gateway courses means revitalizing professors.
If you want genuine transformation around DEI (or around student-centered teaching, for that matter), the real work is and must be personal and individual, and no amount of trainings or worships can substitute for that. Personal growth happens in the context of relatedness, and that’s exactly the structure and value schema we intentionally created in LAG. Because the philosophical framework and values give people guidance and help define aspirations, it’s not a free-for-all or gripe session (which, like it or not, is a lot of what’s going on by text in practically every workshop). It’s a community united around a mission.
The LAG started as community of practice, even though we didn’t call it that. We created a community in which professors can drop their guard, be genuine about their struggles, share experiences with people who are facing the same challenges and have shared aspirations. That’s the recipe for growth — and the evidence is pretty compelling that the personal growth of professors is yielding individual success for students — especially our students of color, many of whom are most in need of the best we have to offer.
But that’s not all. Because LAG was explicitly and unapologetically about faculty empowerment, we did not adopt a deficit model. We didn’t tell professors what they didn’t know about teaching or learning or their own disciplines. Rather, with our mission firmly at the center, we committed ourselves to focusing on what each person brought to the community that might help us meet the challenges of the mission. Yes, there were heated discussions and disagreements; but we resolved to take disagreement as signs of inspiration and passion and commitment, not as failure. We learned, again and again, how to listen, how to share, and how to follow the narrative threads that bind us together.
When you read the syllabi and course designs coming out of the LAG community, you see something almost magical: Professors are doing for their students what LAG did for them: empowerment. It’s as if there is a transfer of ownership of the very process of education, from teacher to student, assignment by assignment.
I’ll mention one final ingredient before I close. In the LAG community, we resolutely refused to let institutional metrics define our goals. I’m not saying those metrics are wrong; I strive to be too much of an adult to demonize what I don’t agree with. What I am saying is that we chose to infuse our goals with the optimism and passion of our students’ aspirations for their own lives, even if we ourselves cannot articulate them in words.
It’s a testament to what and how much we got right that LAG is, after all, improving the very metrics we ignored.
