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During the financial crisis of 2007-08, many experienced what literary scholars call a “crisis of representation.” Globally, more than $ 15 trillion seemed to evaporate and people were wondering, “Wait a second, what is money? How could all this value disappear? If this thing that represented that other thing can disappear, was there ever something there in the first place?
Those of us who teach in universities are going through something similar because of COVID-19. The loss of most physical markers of academic life, with no classrooms or offices, and students instead transmitted to our homes via Zoom, has forced us to question what a university is and what higher education means.
In 2020, the answer is not obvious, and not just because the pandemic-induced economic crisis will likely cause a large number of small universities, especially in the United States, to disappear like a lot of money. Virtual teaching, such as online business, socializing, or prayer, is nothing like reality. Subtract the life in the dorm, the parties, the physical classrooms, and office hours in the actual offices from the higher education experience, and what’s left is pretty sterile.
But this reduced environment may also be revealing something essential that had been hidden by all the climbing walls, cafeterias and culture wars, that is, the mechanism by which learning occurs. What should students be able to do at the end of the course that they cannot do at the beginning? What happens when we ask that question? By building their courses backwards in this way, teachers could add the necessary skills in stages. This simple idea is not exactly new, but it is not at the center of current debates about higher education.
Partly because professors have not organized themselves to answer the essential question of what and how universities teach, that task has increasingly fallen to the administrators responsible for “assessment.” A set of “measurable objectives” is established in various planning and accreditation documents, and the “student outcomes” are standardized at the institutional level. Many teachers fear that these administrative structures and restrictions are gaining acceptance during the pandemic. Online courses can be monitored and recorded, and can come to resemble algorithms rather than learning communities.
But long before college presidents had an MBA and academic human resource managers had more job security than professors, higher education in America had its own planning document: the humble syllabus.
Many teachers worry that the curriculum has fallen prey to too many bureaucratic requirements, including quasi-legal disclaimers on academic honesty, accommodations for special learning needs, and complaint policies. However, in essence, the syllabus is a writing that a teacher creates to imagine a community in the classroom.
That is not the traditional view, of course. In the middle of the 20th century, the syllabus was primarily a list of knowledge that a teacher gave to students. But today, the curriculum is an opportunity to plot a story in which students, not teachers, are the protagonists. Designing one gives any teacher the opportunity to do what good writers do and to empathically engage with the experiences of others. That way, teachers can create classes that take students through difficulties and change to a new place.
We are not advocating that each class be in some way “vocational”, much less sentimentalizing the hard work of learning. Rather, teachers should plan their courses in reverse by developing assignments (readings, experiments, and projects) in a progression for students to learn. how as much as what, week to week, even class to class.
Technology of all kinds can be critical, and especially now, when most of us are teaching on screen. But it is, and should be, a tool, not a proxy. No classroom teacher ever thought that the blackboard or chalk was doing the teaching, yet today we run the risk of imagining that our sophisticated technology can make up for the lack of solid and practical pedagogy. Teachers wondering how technology can improve their teaching are asking the wrong question.
Using the pandemic to reinvent teaching goals could be the unexpected bright side of a miserable situation. Teachers may find within this crisis an opportunity to rethink the precious dynamics of the classroom. After all, teaching students how to learn and learn to do things in themselves beyond the classroom, is the necessary gift of education to society.
Giving that gift, and making sure it is received, will require a great deal of good writing – not the bureaucratic or throwaway kind, but something more imaginative. It may not sound like the curriculum you remember from your college days, but it is what we need now.
As Winston Churchill said near the end of World War II: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The COVID-19 crisis is the most serious that American higher education has ever faced. The opportunity is ours to waste.
Editor’s Note: William Germano is Professor of English at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art’s Center for Writing. Kit Nicholls is Director of The Cooper Union’s Writing Center for the Advancement of Science and Art. They are the co-authors of Program: the remarkable, hassle-free document that changes everything (Princeton University Press, 2020). The opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Reporter.
Contributed by William Germano and Kit Nicholls
