Month: October 2020

Change, Hope, Resilience

Optimism Lives in the “We”

Missy Alexander

I’m not going to lie; it is hard to tap into my normally optimistic perspective right now. The pandemic, social injustices, budget crises, and yes, the election, are all testing my reserve of hope. Keeping up with the daily news is enough to drive me under a rock, or at least under the covers, indefinitely. The problems are so vast as to appear insurmountable, and they are making me tired. We’re all tired, I know.

But this is no time to give in to this feeling of helplessness. It is time take a deep breath and find ways to manage this barrage of bad news and ill feeling. Higher education has a particular responsibility to illuminate paths forward because we have the skills to find those paths. We spend our lives invested in the idea that the pursuit of knowledge will make the world a better place. To be an educator is the purest expression of optimism.

Let me be clear. I have never been a blind optimist. Those who know me are well acquainted with my snarky side. I can laugh at, and be cowed by, the fallibility of human impulses as easily as anyone. I am cognizant of hidden agendas or just plain bumbling plans, and I am only surprised by these things occasionally. I am probably best described as a pragmatic optimist, accepting the hazards but seeing the potential for good anyway. It is the potential for good that I am reaching for today.

So, here I go. What is the potential for good in COVID-19? This pandemic is daunting to be sure. Most of us have never experienced anything like this level of disruption. But, of course, historians will remind us of the precedents for this experience. Whether the Bubonic Plague or the Spanish flu or Polio, we have been here before. The pace of spread may have been enhanced by the airplane, but massive outbreaks of deadly diseases are not a new thing. That doesn’t make this easier, but it helps me see the path to optimism.

For example, despite all of the political shenanigans, I remain hopeful about the development of a vaccine. We are better at this process than ever before and our tools are improving daily. Although I frequently shudder at the ways in which profit motives impact medical research, I do have confidence in scientists and their desire to get to the right answers (right for now, at least). It is in their DNA. In recent decades, we have lost our commitment to science as a social good, at least in the United States. We have ceded investigation and experimentation to for-profit entities, while slowly eroding our investment in the education and research arms that are fundamental to advancing scientific knowledge. Perhaps this pandemic can remind us of the need for science for the common good. Perhaps, in this moment, we are ready to reimagine the structure of scientific inquiry for good first and profit later.

I am also heartened by the relative effectiveness of our basic protective measures – masks, social distancing, and washing our hands – in slowing the spread of COVID-19. Where people are following these rules, we are seeing excellent results. Although we see the ridiculous politicization of these measures in the news, many of us are indeed following the guidelines. We are desperate to avoid both the illness and the next lockdown, so we comply. That is good news. But the hope comes here – most of these actions are as much about protecting others as ourselves. Our masks keep us from spreading the disease. So does that space between us. Compliance with these measures reminds me that it is possible to engage that sense of the greater good that we have been ignoring for a generation (at least). It helps me see the possibility of a return of the notion of “we.”

As for social injustices, I am grateful that this conversation has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Our history is fraught with discrimination and ill treatment of groups of people. It is also filled with steps forward (albeit, with lots of steps backward). The confluence of Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 has helped many more people understand that there are persistent injustices that need everyone’s attention. The differences in how communities are treated are no longer hidden in spread sheets; they are visible in the nightly news reports for all to see. This is the (next) moment to do that hard work of finding better paths to equity. It is the perfect opportunity to re-engage notions of our responsibility to community, not just ourselves.

In higher education, that path to equity is just as complex as it is for the larger society. This, too, has the potential to overwhelm and quell my sense of hope. But then I think about the history of education in this country and I see how far we have come. Our history of growth and change for the better helps me press ahead with ad hoc committees, climate surveys, and an honest assessment of how we are doing. These steps are daunting and, like the world outside of higher education, they are fraught with politics and fear. But the time is now, and I won’t ignore it.

As I see it, higher education has reached a point where we must be willing to fully reimagine our goals and the paths to achieving them. I know too well how challenging this is, and how many times I will rethink the questions and reorganize strategies to move forward. I could sink under the weight of it all because I feel such a deep responsibility for it. But as I write these words, I feel the optimist coming through. Why? Because I also know how much my colleagues care about their students. None of us wants to live with unfair practices and outcomes. We are predisposed to wanting to do better. It is in our DNA.

This big mess of challenges and complex problems will not keep me from hope and optimism, because I know I am not alone in the task of addressing them. That is where optimism is sustained, in the sharing of the struggle for something better. I am heartened by the opportunities for something better and I am sustained by the “we” because “we” is where optimism lives.

Higher Education, Quality

The Vision Thing

Missy Alexander

I have been thinking about vision statements this morning. In the midst of this pandemic and the accompanying financial and enrollment impact, it is hard to move from crisis management to preparing for the future. It is hard to think long term while still addressing the daily trauma that makes up this COVID-19 world. But it is time to think long term. It is time to be less reactive and more visionary.

Vision statements for universities are a relatively new development and, honestly, I am not sure they are helpful. I mean, isn’t our vision to educate people? Public education, at its core, is a strategy to achieve the national vision of equal opportunity for all. It is a vision not yet achieved, but a vision of where we hope to be as a nation at some point in the future. We hope public education also gives us an informed citizenry but mostly we support it to create pathways to opportunity. Public higher education creates access for those who are not born to privilege (money) and who are regular people seeking opportunity (as opposed to those lucky few getting full scholarships to Harvard). It is a counterweight to our socially and financially segregated society.

While public higher education institutions vary – from Community Colleges to Research Universities– it seems like the vision should echo that commitment to opportunity. Now you might be thinking that perhaps I am mixing up mission with vision. Not really, but I am linking them together. Let me demonstrate. Here is our mission statement.

Western Connecticut State University changes lives by providing all students with a high quality education that fosters their growth as individuals, scholars, professionals, and leaders in a global society.

Following the guidance provided by this perfectly reasonable definition of a mission: “A statement of why the organization exists, at the most meaningful level. It is aspirational, in that it can never be fully achieved,” I think our mission hits the mark. We know who we serve, and the goal is never fully achieved because education that transforms is always evolving.

But who do we want to be? That is the vision piece.

Visions are supposed to help us set goals to work toward. They are meant to help us figure out how we want to change or grow or evolve over some next period of time (usually attached to a five year strategic plan). I have nothing against this desire to aspire to be better, but I do wonder about the focus of those visions.

I note that many vision statements use words like “best” or “first choice” or “school of choice” or “premier” or other externally focused, competitive language. When we move from describing our purposes to defining a vision, we tend to aspire to win something. Here’s ours:

Western Connecticut State University will be widely recognized as a premier public university with outstanding teachers and scholars who prepare students to contribute to the world in a meaningful way.

This is externally facing language. It does not extend or define our strategies for changing lives. It strives for some kind of ranking among our peers. It asks for attention and acknowledgement of our value. It is nice to be recognized, but it has no path to that recognition. Honestly, it is a market focused idea, not an educationally focused one. But it doesn’t have to be this way. What if our visions were internally focused instead?

This brings me back to our mission. Our purpose is to change the lives of all students through education. Doing so requires continuous reflection and a willingness to adjust our practices to better suit the needs of the students we are serving. There are so many actions to take to do this better. For example:

  • We can improve our pedagogies, our scheduling, our support systems, the structure of the learning experiences, and so on. Those improvements should be based on our experiences and outcomes and supported by good scholarship and data analysis.
  • We could pay attention to emerging trends in careers and research and adjust our offerings to support paths to and preparation for those opportunities.
  • We might want to re-think what should be a degree and what should be a refresher or a certificate and create opportunities for our graduates to re-tool or enhance their knowledge for their own growth.

And there is so much more because our mission is so ambitious. Changing the lives of all students is a big job.

As I grapple with moving forward instead of staying in crisis mode, the difference between externally and internally focused vision statements is on my mind. We are in a difficult situation. The population of New England is shrinking and the cost of education is too steep, even at a public university. We must have a vision of what we will look like in five years, just to be able to make decisions about how to sustain ourselves in this competitive and shaken environment. But I don’t really embrace the version that is about our place in the list of other universities. It seems superficial and subject to the whims of ranking systems that do not readily apply to a university that is designed to serve the many, instead of the chosen few.

I am looking internally instead. I am thinking about how to make good decisions that support changing the lives of all students. If I had to put it into a statement, which I am not sure is truly necessary, I guess it would be something like this:

WCSU will become an organization committed to the systematic and routine analysis of our programs and processes to ensure that all students have the chance to benefit from the educational opportunities we provide.

It isn’t a glamorous vision, but it does give me a clear path forward.

Thinking

Imagining the Opportunities

Missy Alexander

Over the last two years, I’ve written about small teaching and small innovations in various forms (most recently James Lang’s work), pruning syllabi, and decluttering our service obligations. I have observed that sometimes we have committee structures that have overlapping purposes, and perhaps the elimination of one might be warranted. I have suggested that one less reading or writing assignment might make room for better feedback and revision processes that are so beneficial to the learning. I am a declutterer by nature and often pursue the notion of doing less. As I settle into inhabiting the dimensions of this COVID-19 world, I am noticing the power of less, once again.

In the beginning of this pandemic, all of the less in my life was felt as a loss. I lost my face-to-face interactions with colleagues. I lost my ability to go out and interact with friends. I lost the opportunity to perform. From that sense of loss, I started to fill in the gaps with Zoom gatherings, WebEx meetings, take out dinners, and lists of planned projects. I was trying to simulate my old life. But with a summer of socially distant gatherings ending and the specter of reduced social interaction upon me again, I am thinking a little differently. Instead of loss, I am feeling the excitement of a less frantic world.

Here is what I mean. This morning, I went to my eye doctor for a routine exam. This involves wearing masks, being let in at my appointed time, temperature taking, and so on. She is being very safe, and I felt totally comfortable. But then she dilated my eyes, and I was not sent to another room to wait. Because of all the safety precautions, my doctor no longer runs from patient to patient between treatments. So, we did something interesting – we talked and waited together. Wow. That never happens in healthcare. Except, I also talked to my dermatologist, my internist and so on, in my normal round of check-ups this fall. I also never waited for an appointment (you know sitting in a gown for 20 minutes while the doctor sees someone else). In the COVID-19 world, I actually get the healthcare I have always dreamed of. It probably isn’t efficient, and maybe – to cover the costs of their degrees, malpractice insurance, and buildings – the price might need to rise just a little for me (or we could make it so doctors don’t have to carry so much debt!), but boy was that slower environment a better health care experience.

Here’s another shift. Because I cannot go to my usual restaurants and performance spaces, I am hiking and biking more often. I am not alone. The parks and trails are full of families and friends outdoors together. We all practice trail courtesies, pulling up masks as people approach and lowering them when we’ve passed. We tend to nod or say hi, maybe just a little more than in the past, because we crave that little social interaction. These spaces are getting more diverse, too, which is awesome. So, we may have lost Disney World and other amusement parks, but you know what, I’m seeing a lot of joy. It is a slower kind of fun, without a lot of frills. There is plenty of room for conversation or just silent reflection. Hooray that our communities have invested in parks and open spaces. We all need them, now more than ever. I wonder if there will be a reversal of those diminishing attention spans we have long observed in education. I am pretty sure it will be a good year for LL Bean.

So, what about higher education? We have done a lot of work to try to make our hybrid and online environments simulate the traditional on-campus experience. What if that is the wrong move? Is it time to ask ourselves what the experiences we are trying to re-create are really doing for (in) higher education?

For example:

  1. Not every online class needs to imitate the on-ground experience. What if some classes really are simply guided reading and reflection experiences, with regular faculty feedback, but no group work, etc.? As much as I love class discussion, collaborative projects, and lots of engagement with students, maybe we could reimagine types of courses and balance them between highly interactive and mostly reflective. We would need clear guidelines, because each approach to learning is valuable, but with some clever design we might find a nice balance for everyone.
  2. When we say that taking five online classes is a lot (and it is), we should acknowledge that five on-ground classes is also a lot. Can we move to a unit/four-credit model and make four the norm? I know it is hard for some majors, but maybe it is worth the effort to simplify these variations on credit hours and make room for actual reflection, revision, and thinking.
  3. As we adjust to online office hours, might we not consider that this has been a good idea for a long time? Allowing people to schedule meetings around some principle other than, – this is my on-campus day – might really benefit our students in general. People might even have more room for conversations because they do not have to sacrifice time to drive in to campus and meet.
  4. Instead of trying to build lots of events on our campuses (often poorly attended), perhaps we should ask ourselves why are in the event-planning business in the first place. Speakers booked for academic or socio-cultural events are an important extension of academic programs and these appear to be successful via our web conferencing platforms. Indeed, we may want to move these to the web permanently. But what about everything else? Well, if they aren’t part of the curriculum, perhaps we should simply curate a list of activities in the area and let our students make their choices.

I guess what I am really thinking is that it is time to stop viewing the changes spurred on by COVID-19 as losses. This moment is an opportunity to re-think what we do. We might be able to shift to new ways of interacting with people and ideas. We might also just make room for things to emerge. So, I won’t try to simulate my old life anymore. I am ready for reimagining instead.

Critical Thinking, Engagement, Higher Education, Innovative Pedagogies

Productive Conversations

Missy Alexander

Eons ago (last Tuesday), before we learned that the President and First Lady had COVID-19, I was thinking a lot about the first presidential debate. As an educator, I’ve always encouraged my students to tune into these events as part of their obligation to be informed citizens. As a communication professor, I used to put these debates in context in terms of media employed and the stylistic elements that followed. I would provide them with excerpts from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, show clips from the Nixon and Kennedy debate, and remind them that hyperbole and mudslinging are in no way new. We would discuss the impact of the medium on these events, thinking through the biases of sound, image, and the differences between being in the room or watching from home. We also discussed rhetorical strategies and the key points of argument and persuasion. The students may have groaned at watching the debates, but they perked up in the discussion. It was fun.

Last week we saw what media ecologists might describe as the obvious “debate” style, when living in a world of instant, participatory communication, fueled by for-profit media structures. These media are antithetical to a true investigation of ideas and are devoid of a commitment to evidence. Television fully succumbed to shouting matches when we moved to 24-hour news cycles in the 80s. Time had to be filled, advertisers had to be bought with good ratings, and in the crowded world of cable TV, yelling was the winner. Indeed, through the 90s, I watched most of the shows with any kind of deliberation, become shouting matches or go off the air. Deliberation is lousy TV, after all, and not nearly “amusing” enough to survive. (1) Websites of all kinds then added immediate feedback to these shout-fests, and Facebook and Twitter helped us all promote our shouting to the world. We don’t just watch shouting, we shout along with the debaters, much in the way an audience at a pop concert no longer listens to the music but sings every song with the band. That’s not debate, that’s a chorus.

I am not going to go over what we saw on screen last Tuesday, smarter people have already done their best. What I am really thinking about is how to create some opportunities to foster productive conversations between regular people, off screen, and in non-monetized contexts. It seems to me that education is an important counterweight to all that cyber-yelling. (2) We absolutely cannot stop what is happening in all forms of electronic media. We can, however, model another way.

The good news is that education is the perfect context for this kind of modeling. We are all about argument (not yelling), evidence, and reflecting on different perspectives on a topic. Indeed, if we are not doing this, then we are not doing education. Whether we are talking about critiques of art and literature, arguments among philosophers and political theorists, or competing hypotheses about DNA, we are modeling arguments. As we sort through differences, sometimes the evidence is clear enough that we might even support a side/perspective/hypothesis (at least for now). But, not necessarily. Usually, we live with ambiguity.

But maybe it is time to be even more intentional about this, so that students really see that they are developing some good discussion skills, not just learning about a particular subject. In the past I have mentioned the idea of Debate Across the Curriculum (3) as an interesting educational strategy. Today, I am thinking about the civic learning initiatives from AAC&U. Drawing on A Crucible Moment: College and Democracy’s Future (4), they have spurred on several initiatives to try to promote teaching practices that foster engagement with democratic ideas. Well, it seems to me that productive conversations are at the heart of democratic ideas.

In a nice short summary chart called A Framework for Twenty-First-Century Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement two things really jump out at me (in 5).

  1. Understanding one’s sources of identity and their influence on civic values, assumptions, and responsibilities to a wider public. (Knowledge).
  2. Seeking, engaging, and being informed by multiple perspectives. (Skills).

Both of these are essential to supporting productive conversations. They ask us to think about our opinions/values, examine their sources, and reflect on how they shape our interactions with the world around us. This isn’t just argument for a right answer, it is a path to understanding. It is such a thoughtful phrasing, that does not seek to demean, but rather to examine. This seems like an excellent way to start showing our students that our goal is to prepare them for productive conversations, not yelling.

I think about the times I tried to discuss the semiotics with my students. Roland Barthes is engaging, but sometimes culturally distant from students in the United States (or in the 21st Century). To translate the ideas in Mythologies to my undergraduates, I often talked about hamburgers, yes, hamburgers. As a nearly life-long vegetarian, it is easy for me to access to symbolic value of hamburgers in the US. We usually had a lot of fun unpacking the ways in which refusing a hamburger can be, well, un-American. Then discussions of flags, national anthems, etc., would start to flow.

From this approach, and using myself as a foil, it seems like we could start to honestly discuss things like not standing for the national anthem or skipping the pledge of allegiance without hostility. It is not that we were all convinced of the validity of these moments of dissent, but we were all civil. We could better access understanding of that dissent by looking at our own values, their sources, and then thinking about those who disagree. On a particularly productive day we might even get to that most important of next steps –

3. Deliberation and bridge building across differences. (Skills)

This is the part that is so sorely lacking from our world right now. Our habits, like the media we use, tend toward taking sides and staying there. But important questions don’t have sides, they have nuances, deeply held convictions, counter-evidence and the need for reflection. I know I am not alone in yearning for more opportunities to build understanding with my students, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. So, let’s seize that desire and do something about it.

No, television, Facebook and Twitter “debates” are not going to improve. The media they occupy just do not support the details and the slow transformation that a depth of understanding requires. They are excellent places for slogans and barbs, but not for evaluating policy or supporting community engagement with important ideas.

But education, now that is the right place to be working on this kind of thinking. After all, we love slow. We live in an older kind of discourse that requires evidence, reflection, and fallibility. We absolutely have the time to go ahead and examine why we are disagreeing and potentially identify some paths forward.

So, let’s make modeling productive conversations a priority and let’s make sure our students recognize these as the core of what education does. In doing so we just might make the world a better place.

  1. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
  2. Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity
  3. Alfred Snider and Max Schnurer, Many Sides: Debate Across the Curriculum
  4. AAC&U, A Crucible Moment: College and Democracy’s Future
  5. Caryn McTighe Musil, Civic Prompts: Making Civic Learning Routine Across the Curriculum