Learning University

In an article, “The Learning College:  Both Learner and Learning Centered,” Terry O’Banion says that 

It is not enough to make students feel good about the environment on the campus or the services they receive.  It is not enough to impress students with the dazzling performance of great lecturers.  It is not enough to provide all the latest in information technology.  If we cannot document expanded or improved learning—however defined and however measured—we cannot say with any assurance that learning has occurred.  And it is much more likely that we will be able to document learning when we place high value on learning-centered policies, programs, and practices and when we employ personnel who know how to create learning outcomes, learning options, and learning-centered activities. 

One premise is that students, generally speaking, are not experiencing the kind of learning that the university hopes they are, that employers require, that the society needs, and that eventually those students will wish they had gained during their college years. 

Another premise is that the present organizational operation produces the students it does because it is not fully learning-centered, but remains somewhat stuck in a teaching and professor-centered delivery of content with very inadequate, even distorting, means of assessing what kinds of learning are occurring, including any higher-order thinking.  Thus, other that getting grades and credits, do we genuinely know if our students are learning in significant and enduring ways beyond absorption/memorization of content?  Based upon the present approach and reward system, authentic assessment of integrated, contextual competency is a hit and miss thing, depending upon those teachers who have risked learning about how people learn and if their own students are learning what they have assumed and wanted them to learn. 

A third premise is that the time for tinkering is past and is too incomplete an approach to result in a transformed organization and academic culture.  Higher education, nationally and internationally, is in the beginnings of a paradigm shift from teaching to learning.  Teaching-centered colleges will continue doing what they do and will continue producing graduates not well enough equipped for their projected careers and for making the greatest contributions to their societies.  And they will not be as prepared as possible for life-long learning that will improve the quality and scope of their personal lives. 

As by-products of such a focus on learning, issues of student and faculty retention are addressed (not by addressing this or that symptom, but by a systemic, organizational shift).  And the goal of an engaged university becomes much more genuine when the external engagements with the region, government agencies and private business, is matched by the internal engagement of all employees in the learning process itself.  In other words, when students are fully engaged in the Learning University, that university acquires its soul.  It is not just about its buildings, expanded numbers of students, new programs, but about its very spiritual essence, the learning experiences and outcomes of and by its students.   

The present time may be a compellingly opportune time (kairos) for colleges and universities for such a transformation of teaching, learning, scholarship, thinking, and organizational attitudes.  The best path to become a community that attracts good students, faculty, administrators and staff because of its dynamic, way-making, path-finding approach to teaching and learning, is for it to make a conscious, concerted and persevering commitment to become a Learning University.  Beyond institutional jargon and pedagogical shibboleths, including the very words like “engaged,” “active,” and even “learning-centered,” to make a real beginning (as Plato said) is to have done half the work.  A paradoxical vision quest:                                         

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.                                                      
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets) 

It would make for a good story to see the familiar and habitual as strange and to risk what needs to be risked in order for the story to unfold.

Professional Faculty Development

Professional faculty development is a way for a university to engage in continuous re-formation, even trans-formation.  It can be an agent or catalyst for individual and collegial growth, both personal and professional. Since many college and university faculty were not specifically education in how people learn and in how to teach for the best learning to occur, nor did most serve in some form of a teaching internship or apprenticeship, faculty development is key to student learning.  Faculty development in teaching, learning and scholarship that can be portrayed as follows:

• central to student learning outcomes
• a professional, ethical responsibility (to discipline, students, colleagues, institution, society, future, self)
• practical results:  more effective & enjoyable teaching and student learning
• personal development and identity
• necessary to fulfill the university’s mission and aspirations
• develops more openness and collaboration about teaching and learning among faculty, leading to a more collegial academic community and less isolation in learning to become ever-better teachers
• a factor in attracting and retaining the best faculty, which is a significant factor in attracting, retaining, and graduating students
• respects the faculty’s knowledge and experience of their disciplines, teaching and learning, and their wisdom about the profession
• generates opportunities for interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations

The process of faculty development is like the banyan tree and its compelling growth. The tree is grounded in evidence-based practice, called the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), research on how best to teach one’s discipline so that students best learn it in deep, enduring ways. Other forms of scholarship complete the foundation.Faculty development is an integrating, uniting factor for faculty of all disciplines.  It provides a forum for all methods of teaching, again serving to unite a campus in the pursuit of its mission. Thus, professional faculty development is a process never completed.  And that is a very good thing.  New roots are always needed.  Faculty development is energy, reflection, and action day by day.  

Memories of the Future

My impression is that schools try to out do each other and out do themselves in constructing facilities and programs to attract and retain students. However, in the process a central (and exquisitely simple) thing may not be given the laser-focus it deserves because it is so hidden and so obvious. That is, to attract and retain and graduate students, a university needs to remember and continually re-create why it exists: imaginative, persevering and effective support for what happens between and among students and faculty intellectually, developmentally, ethically, etc. In other words, perhaps the best student retention “initiative” is not really an initiative at all, but developing a first-class academic/intellectual climate and context for students and faculty that fully supports, encourages and rewards intellectual growth and achievement.

For me, a (perhaps “the”) key way to do that is to have an academic community/culture infused with inquiry about teaching and about learning, with an evidence-based approach to teaching the disciplines and through interdisciplinarity so that it is known how, when, why, and if students are authentically learning in significant, enduring ways, and are not stuck in first-order, lower-level thinking that results from academics being perceived by students as a required “game” where the best “players” get the best results (grades/credits/degrees). 

 The scholarship of teaching & learning (SoTL) could be the quiet and radical recalling of individuals and schools to their roots and vision for how students learn, how best to teach for that learning to occur, and how to apply and continually re-vise and re-form the teaching/learning continuum as needed so the learning continues, deepens.To have the best possible teaching and scholarly faculty simply may be the key to recruitment and intellectual growth of students.  It seems that anything else — anything — is secondary to that.  Therefore, is there anything that could attract faculty to a place in a consistent, across the disciplines way?  Again, it is my view that the key is SoTL.  If an academic culture recaptures and recapitulates its roots, its ancient heritage — teachers working with and for students in enjoyable, highly effective ways — then what students would not want to be part of it and what faculty would not see it as a compelling attraction for the kind of professional experience they inherently seek? Like a new harvest from old seeds (Thomas Merton), the contemporary university needs “memories of the future.”