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Millennial Teaching
The Mellon Foundation's National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education hooks up faculty and students across national and international boundaries
By Douglas A. Davis
When the technological and political events that now preoccupy us are exhumed and examined by historians, it will surely be remarked that never was the misfit between professors' favored styles of teaching and the actual skills and predilections brought to learning by the young so great, or so rapidly increasing. Most of us struggle daily to use the personal computers, word-and data-processing software, e-mail tools, and Web services with which we are provided. We often despair of getting a whole class to read a few paragraphs of Freud with sufficient attention that we can have a real class discussion. On the other hand, the liberal arts college student who five years ago would have described herself as "not a computer person" now spends four hours a night on America Online, even as she tries to make sense of Freud with the best of her downloaded Nine Inch Nails music collection ringing in her ears. Her male suite mate spends a good deal more time playing a (female) Barbarian character in the EverQuest online role-playing game than learning chemistry. Faculty who feel pressured to lug a laptop computer and a bag of audiovisual connectors into class wonder whether this generation can tell the difference between a glitzy Web page and an actual argument, and many students find the "monotasking" of book and lecture a weak brew to accompany the smorgasbord of media to which they are wired. Surely we liberal arts professors are at a nexus having to do with the ways we and our students use information technology.
Against this daunting backdrop, many of us also feel newly pressured to respond to world and national events with new courses concerning peoples and attitudes to which we have awakened since September 11, 2001. Liberal arts faculty are collaborating on pedagogical projects dealing with religion, culture, and identity in a world where the teachings of a great religion, Islam, are both suspect and newly fascinating, and where "students" (the literal translation of the word taliban) can mean "terrorists in training."
Today, our assumptions about pedagogy, about the nature of a liberal education, and about the effectiveness of the means by which we deliver knowledge to our students are being challenged in unprecedented ways. American academic institutions have, for the most part, been modeled on nineteenth-century English and German traditions of higher education. A college, whether or not it forms part of a larger university, has been defined in terms of a physical plant that includes housing and recreational facilities for students. It is structured around a traditional array of departments and curricula and has a large staff of administrators, faculty, and service personnel. All of this has been challenged by the growth of the Internet at a time when American economic power has been at its peak and globalization, variously defined, has been deemed an unstoppable force. Techno-optimists declare themselves ready to bring all of higher education into one domain as core resources become shareable through the Net, even as a single neocapitalist economic system spans the globe. A pretty picture to most economists, and a pretty daunting one to most faculty citizens. We find new equipment installed in our class-rooms every fall semester, but we can't find the right Web link to The Turn of the Screw, and class starts in ten minutes.
Growing Web Use
Some of us began using the Web in our teaching in the mid-1990s, and we have half a dozen years of experience with how students react to using Web pages to find out about assignments and perhaps to access their reading for the next class. Some teachers now spend as much time reading and contributing to course Web discussions as they do holding office hours. But we are only beginning to have empirical studies to justify assumptions about where we might be headed. The time has come to assess the quality and effectiveness of Internet-based pedagogy, and to seek good examples of how faculty and students can use technology to explore subjects previously deemed too demanding for the liberal arts college, or to explore traditional subjects more fully.
Many who have tried to direct an institution's growth in information technology infrastructure, or who have been involved in workshops and grants to create new courses in cyberspace, have been chastened by the experience. There is simply too much to learn for most teaching faculty to assimilate well and do the rest of their jobs. Technical support can resolve individual problems with software and hardware, but even at wealthy institutions it cannot provide the sort of constant side-of-the-desktop support many of us need to stay on top of a course Web project. When we plan a new course, we seldom have available a colleague with whom we can discuss both the field and the design of the Web site.
Technology and Middle East Studies
One of the most ambitious attempts to date to broaden the concept of information-technology-rich college teaching beyond individual professors and institutions is the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) initiative, established in September 2001 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The initiative, which works to foster collaboration among the faculties of the eighty-one liberal arts colleges that are its members, was created in response to requests from colleges that had been beneficiaries of Mellon grant monies for information technology and language instruction. Provosts and information technology professionals at these institutions agreed that promoting and sustaining collaborative use of technology to enhance teaching, learning, scholarship, and information management required computer expertise beyond that found at most individual institutions. They supported the creation of a national institute with resources to be directed at information technology projects of appropriate scope and collaborative import through regional technology centers.
One of the initiative's current projects, an ambitious response to the events of September 11, 2001, merits special attention. The institute's Web site describes its inception thus:
Recognizing that Americans tend to know little about the Arab world from which the assault emerged, and with which the United States was intensively engaged, we sought to identify and assist in the creation of learning resources for our liberal arts campuses. Reflecting on the distributed nature of Arab studies across the NITLE member colleges and universities, we determined to facilitate a collaborative effort across campuses and disciplines.
This project builds on earlier Mellon Foundation interest in Middle East languages and offers anyone with Web access an extensive and carefully constructed library of textual material and multimedia resources, organized so that faculty from a variety of disciplines can easily make use of what they need to develop courses concerned with the Arab world and with the larger contexts in which we must understand it. The project's Web site represents months of consultation with experts on Arab culture and civilization; negotiation of copyright access to hundreds of published sources; recorded interviews with experts on Arab culture, the Arabic language, Islam, and the Middle East; and construction of a Web presentation of these materials. Resources on the site are organized in ten topical modules—history; ethnicity and identity; Islam; Arab Americans; literature and philosophy; popular culture and the performing arts; family and society; art and architecture; the Arabic language; and geography, demographics, and resources—most of which contain extensive full-text materials from published scholarship as well as graphic, audio, and video resources.
The Collaborative
Having built a state-of-the-art Web resource, the initiative now encourages curriculum development and collaborative use of the Web site by means of a project dubbed al-Musharaka, Arabic for a collaborative venture. The Web site became available August 20, 2002, and faculty at member institutions are encouraged to use it to share resources for teaching about Arab culture, the Arabic language, the religion of Islam, and the Middle East. This group of faculty includes specialists in religion, history, anthropology, political science, psychology, comparative literature, art, and film and performance.
Participating faculty explored the Web site's possibilities at a training workshop in July, led by Greek and Roman studies professor Kenny Morrell of Rhodes College. At the workshop, Bryan Alexander, associate director of the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College, led us through a remarkably rich Web site developed for a course he had taught on the American experience in Vietnam. We saw how declassified political and historical documents had enabled students to collaborate with peers on other campuses in taking on the roles of North and South Vietnamese, U.S., Chinese, and Russian participants in the evolution of the Vietnam conflict. As we focused in the later days of the workshop on our own course projects, it became clear that several different levels of collaborative work on teaching about Arab culture, the Middle East, and Islam might be undertaken using the core set of resources on the Arab culture and civilization Web site. For example, colleagues on two different campuses might develop essentially the same syllabus—or decide to collaborate on a part of their syllabus readings—based on the Web site, relying on the editorial oversight, negotiation of intellectual property rights, and technical sophistication of the institute's staff instead of on limited local resources. Collaborating faculty may consult with each other about readings and multimedia resources, share lecture notes and reflections on their experiences by way of e-mail, and perhaps co-author classroom notes to aid subsequent clients of the Web site in their own courses. A higher level of collaboration might involve colleagues at the same or different institutions co-teaching their courses, sharing syllabus materials and guest lecturing in each other's classes, either in person or by Webcast, depending on their locations. Students in the two "sections" of the course might participate in the same threaded Web discussion, and they might contribute project work to a shared Web site.
Case in Point
In my own work, I am using the initiative's resources to enhance a course on adolescent psychology that I have taught for years. A Mellon sabbatical grant allowed me to develop and add to the course a laboratory section focused on survey research and participant observation. I will share topical units with colleagues at other institutions as I lead my students in data-collection exercises concerning the media preferences, Internet use, and other personality-relevant behaviors of young people in a variety of settings. One theme of the course is "personal identity in Muslim and non-Muslim settings," and I will collaborate with colleagues at Al-Akhawayn, an English-language university in Ifrane, Morocco, and with social scientists in the Netherlands who are studying Dutch youth of Moroccan background. If all goes well, my students will at times feel themselves to be both classmates of and scholarly collaborators with students in North Africa and Europe, and each student will have practice in reading across culture and religion to find a peer.
The mechanics of this collaboration involve threaded Web discussion groups and Internet chat as well as shared audio and video material collected at the several locations. If the classroom settings include seminars in which both Muslim and non-Muslim students are enrolled, both in-class discussion and the threaded discussion taking place between classes will focus on the way religion has affected these individuals' experience of their own adolescence. We will reflect on our own backgrounds even as we survey other youth about theirs. Since my Moroccan and European colleagues' institutions may not have extensive library holdings in English on the sociocultural context in which Muslim youth form their personal identity, the initiative's Web site will be essential. By logging the students' threaded discussions and surveying students about their experiences with the class, we will learn a good deal about how this kind of collaboration works. If I am able to engage a colleague who teaches a social science course that shares some of my methodological goals, I plan a more complete level of collaboration. The other instructor and I will work with our students to design and carry out studies of adolescent behavior in settings close to each campus. These short projects—to be carried out primarily by means of Web-administered surveys—will become co-authored parts of each student's work for the course, and they will be collected on the course Web site and used as a basis for further work in subsequent semesters. A collaboration, indeed.
The Future
One as yet unexamined aspect of changed professor-student interaction in recent years is the effect on what Freud would have called the "transference" relationship between them. The structure of the traditional liberal arts college seems created to instill awe on the part of the student, who sits quietly with a pad and a pen as the professor lectures, explains difficult points in the reading and the larger context in which today's topic should be understood. Since almost all faculty have been socialized in this system, we think we have a pretty good idea of how students spend their time outside the classroom—we imagine them annotating the assigned reading in light of our lectures, even as those of us who live on campus are regularly reminded of all the other pressures and temptations facing our students as they try to find time for our coursework. Look around you and ask yourself how well you compete with America Online and EverQuest for your students' attention outside of class. Will they reflect on your pedagogy twenty years from now with the same fondness you feel for a favorite professor or a mentor?
At the present pace of change, no prediction of the next decade can be confident, but my own recent experience suggests some images. Imagine a colleague who shares interest in popular theater, say, and who also happens to speak the language in which the play your students are about to read was written. Perhaps he also has students in his class who are interested in Webcasting a reading of the script in an appropriate cultural setting and can provide subtitles that your students will add to the digital video of this reading on the collaborative Web site. Imagine a class discussion of youthful identity crises in light of Liz Phair's and Cheb Khaled's music with peers who grew up on each. Imagine getting to use your colleague's lecture notes, and to have her help with yours after last week's class showed you the need to re-instruct students about the chi-square test. Imagine being able to show the provost and the people who attend your next poster session the actual Web log in which your students recorded their struggle to understand the reshaping of the child's literal thinking into formal reasoning in adolescence, and how this might relate to the taqlid-ijtihad, or "tradition-interpretation," discussion under way in Islam. If these images of richer, deeper forms of liberal learning appeal to you, why not join a collaborative in cyberspace?
Douglas Davis is Benjamin R. Collins Research Professor of Social Sciences at Haverford College and director of al-Musharaka, a collaborative project for teachers of courses on the Arab world sponsored by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education.
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