As a fledgling voice of reform in higher education, Salman Khan is an oddity. He cannot name any higher education accrediting agencies off the top of his head. He advocates for competency-based credentialing, but has never heard of Western Governors University. He is capable of talking on the phone for a full hour without using the word “disruptive” once. Until recently, he was an analyst for a hedge fund.
Here is what Khan does know: algebra, statistics, trigonometry, calculus, computer science, biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, economics, and finance -- well enough, at least, to demonstrate the concepts via brief video tutorials on Khan Academy, his free learning website. What began in 2006 as an attempt to tutor his young niece from afar has evolved into a 2,700-video library with millions of monthly visitors.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Great article about Salman Khan, creator of Khan Aademy.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age
Excellent article by Cathy Davidon in the Chronicle of Higher Education, August 26, 2011.
http://chronicle.com/article/Collaborative-Learning-for-the/128789/
Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age
Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age
Five or six years ago, I attended a lecture on the science of
attention. A philosopher who conducts research over in the medical
school was talking about attention blindness, the basic feature of the
human brain that, when we concentrate intensely on one task, causes us
to miss just about everything else. Because we can't see what we can't
see, our lecturer was determined to catch us in the act. He had us watch
a video of six people tossing basketballs back and forth, three in
white shirts and three in black, and our task was to keep track only of
the tosses among the people in white. I hadn't seen the video back then,
although it's now a classic, featured on punk-style TV shows or YouTube
versions enacted at frat houses under less than lucid conditions. The
tape rolled, and everyone began counting.
Everyone except me. I'm dyslexic, and the moment I saw that grainy tape with the confusing basketball tossers, I knew I wouldn't be able to keep track of their movements, so I let my mind wander. My curiosity was piqued, though, when about 30 seconds into the tape, a gorilla sauntered in among the players. She (we later learned a female student was in the gorilla suit) stared at the camera, thumped her chest, and then strode away while they continued passing the balls.
When the tape stopped, the philosopher asked how many people had counted at least a dozen basketball tosses. Hands went up all over. He then asked who had counted 13, 14, and congratulated those who'd scored the perfect 15. Then he asked, "And who saw the gorilla?"
I raised my hand and was surprised to discover I was the only person at my table and one of only three or four in the large room to do so. He'd set us up, trapping us in our own attention blindness. Yes, there had been a trick, but he wasn't the one who had played it on us. By concentrating so hard on counting, we had managed to miss the gorilla in the midst.
Attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain, and I believe that it presents us with a tremendous opportunity. My take is different from that of many neuroscientists: Where they perceive the shortcomings of the individual, I sense an opportunity for collaboration. Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them.
It's not easy to acknowledge that everything we've learned about how to pay attention means that we've been missing everything else. It's not easy for us rational, competent, confident types to admit that the very key to our success—our ability to pinpoint a problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in school and beyond—may be exactly what limits us. For more than a hundred years, we've been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else.
I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that's based on multitasking our attention—not by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end. For most of us, this is a new pattern of attention. Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time.
Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions—and workplaces—are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school.
The Newsweek cover story proclaimed, "iPod, Therefore I Am."
On MTV News, it was "Dude, I just got a free iPod!"
Peter Jennings smirked at the ABC-TV news audience, "Shakespeare on the iPod? Calculus on the iPod?"
And the staff of the Duke Chronicle was apoplectic: "The University seems intent on transforming the iPod into an academic device, when the simple fact of the matter is that iPods are made to listen to music. It is an unnecessarily expensive toy that does not become an academic tool simply because it is thrown into a classroom."
What had those pundits so riled up? In 2003, we at Duke were approached by Apple about becoming one of six Apple Digital Campuses. Each college would choose a technology that Apple was developing and propose a campus use for it. It would be a partnership of business and education, exploratory in all ways. We chose a flashy new music-listening gadget that young people loved but that baffled most adults.
When we gave a free iPod to every member of the entering first-year class, there were no conditions. We simply asked students to dream up learning applications for this cool little white device with the adorable earbuds, and we invited them to pitch their ideas to the faculty. If one of their professors decided to use iPods in a course, the professor, too, would receive a free Duke-branded iPod, and so would all the students in the class (whether they were first-years or not).
This was an educational experiment without a syllabus. No lesson plan. No assessment matrix rigged to show that our investment had been a wise one. No assignment to count the basketballs. After all, as we knew from the science of attention, to direct attention in one way precluded all the other ways. If it were a reality show, we might have called it Project Classroom Makeover.
At the time, I was vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke, a position equivalent to what in industry would be the R&D person, and I was among those responsible for cooking up the iPod experiment. In the world of technology, "crowdsourcing" means inviting a group to collaborate on a solution to a problem, but that term didn't yet exist in 2003. It was coined by Jeff Howe of Wired magazine in 2006 to refer to the widespread Internet practice of posting an open call requesting help in completing some task, whether writing code (that's how much of the open-source code that powers the Mozilla browser was written) or creating a winning logo (like the "Birdie" design of Twitter, which cost a total of six bucks).
In the iPod experiment, we were crowdsourcing educational innovation for a digital age. Crowdsourced thinking is very different from "credentialing," or relying on top-down expertise. If anything, crowdsourcing is suspicious of expertise, because the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we conceive to be the problem, let alone the answer.
Once the pieces were in place, we decided to take our educational experiment one step further. By giving the iPods to first-year students, we ended up with a lot of angry sophomores, juniors, and seniors. They'd paid hefty private-university tuition, too! So we relented and said any student could have a free iPod—just so long as she persuaded a professor to require one for a course and came up with a learning app in that course. Does that sound sneaky? Far be it from me to say that we planned it.
The real treasure trove was to be found in the students' innovations. Working together, and often alongside their professors, they came up with far more learning apps for their iPods than anyone—even at Apple—had dreamed possible. Most predictable were uses whereby students downloaded audio archives relevant to their courses—Nobel Prize acceptance speeches by physicists and poets, the McCarthy hearings, famous trials. Almost instantly, students figured out that they could record lectures on their iPods and listen at their leisure.
Interconnection was the part the students grasped before any of us did. Students who had grown up connected digitally gravitated to ways that the iPod could be used for collective learning. They turned iPods into social media and networked their learning in ways we did not anticipate. In the School of the Environment, one class interviewed families in a North Carolina community concerned with lead paint in their homes and schools, commented on one another's interviews, and together created an audio documentary that aired on local and regional radio stations and all over the Web. In the music department, students uploaded their own compositions to their iPods so their fellow students could listen and critique.
After eight years in Duke's central administration, I was excited to take the methods we had gleaned from the iPod experiment back into the classroom. I decided to offer a new course called "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," a title that pays homage to Daniel J. Levitin's inspiring book This Is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006), a kind of music-lover's guide to the brain. Levitin argues that music makes complex circuits throughout the brain, requiring different kinds of brain function for listening, processing, and producing, and thus makes us think differently. Substitute the word "Internet" for "music," and you've got the gist of my course.
I advertised the class widely, and I was delighted to look over the roster of the 18 students in the seminar and find more than 18 majors, minors, and certificates represented. I created a bare-bones suggested reading list that included, for example, articles in specialized journals like Cognition and Developmental Neuropsychology, pieces in popular magazines like Wired and Science, novels, and memoirs. There were lots of Web sites, too, of course, but I left the rest loose. This class was structured to be peer-led, with student interest and student research driving the design. "Participatory learning" is one term used to describe how we can learn together from one another's skills. "Cognitive surplus" is another used in the digital world for that "more than the sum of the parts" form of collaborative thinking that happens when groups think together online.
We used a method that I call "collaboration by difference." Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time cannot be solved by anyone alone, and that those who think they can act in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and staring them in the face. Collaboration by difference respects and rewards different forms and levels of expertise, perspective, culture, age, ability, and insight, treating difference not as a deficit but as a point of distinction. It always seems more cumbersome in the short run to seek out divergent and even quirky opinions, but it turns out to be efficient in the end and necessary for success if one seeks an outcome that is unexpected and sustainable. That's what I was aiming for.
I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse. There was still a lot of criticism about the lack of peer review in Wikipedia entries, and some professors were banning Wikipedia use in the classroom. I didn't understand that. Wikipedia is an educator's fantasy, all the world's knowledge shared voluntarily and free in a format theoretically available to all, and which anyone can edit. Instead of banning it, I challenged my students to use their knowledge to make Wikipedia better. All conceded that it had turned out to be much harder to get their work to "stick" on Wikipedia than it was to write a traditional term paper.
Given that I was teaching a class based on learning and the Internet, having my students blog was a no-brainer. I supplemented that with more traditionally structured academic writing, a term paper. When I had both samples in front of me, I discovered something curious. Their writing online, at least in their blogs, was incomparably better than in the traditional papers. In fact, given all the tripe one hears from pundits about how the Internet dumbs our kids down, I was shocked that elegant bloggers often turned out to be the clunkiest and most pretentious of research-paper writers. Term papers rolled in that were shot through with jargon, stilted diction, poor word choice, rambling thoughts, and even pretentious grammatical errors (such as the ungrammatical but proper-sounding use of "I" instead of "me" as an object of a preposition).
But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college—the term paper—and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?
Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent—not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.
The semester flew by, and we went wherever it took us. The objective was to get rid of a lot of the truisms about "the dumbest generation" and actually look at how new theories of the brain and of attention might help us understand how forms of thinking and collaborating online maximize brain activity. We spent a good deal of time thinking about how accident, disruption, distraction, and difference increase the motivation to learn and to solve problems, both individually and collectively. To find examples, we spent time with a dance ensemble rehearsing a new piece, a jazz band improvising together, and teams of surgeons and computer programmers performing robotic surgery. We walked inside a monkey's brain in a virtual-reality cave. In another virtual-reality environment, we found ourselves trembling, unable to step off what we knew was a two-inch drop, because it looked as if we were on a ledge over a deep canyon.
One of our readings was On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004), a unified theory of the brain written by Jeff Hawkins (the neuroscientist who invented the Palm Pilot) with Sandra Blakeslee. I agree with many of Hawkins's ideas about the brain's "memory-prediction framework." My own interest is in how memories—reinforced behaviors from the past—predict future learning, and in how we can intentionally disrupt that pattern to spark innovation and creativity. Hawkins is interested in how we can use the pattern to create next-generation artificial intelligence that will enhance the performance, and profitability, of computerized gadgets like the Palm Pilot. The students and I had been having a heated debate about his theories when a student discovered that Hawkins happened to be in our area to give a lecture. I was away at a meeting, when suddenly my BlackBerry was vibrating with e-mails and IM's from my students, who had convened the class without me to present a special guest on a special topic: Jeff Hawkins debating the ideas of Jeff Hawkins. It felt a bit like the gag in the classic Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, when someone in the line to purchase movie tickets is expounding pompously on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and then McLuhan himself steps into the conversation.
It was that kind of class.
"Jeff Hawkins thought it was odd that we decided to hold class when you weren't there," one student texted me. "Why wouldn't we? That's how it works in 'This Is Your Brain on the Internet.'"
Project Classroom Makeover. I heard the pride. "Step aside, Prof Davidson: This is a university!"
"Nonsense!"
"Absurd!"
"A wacko holding forth on a soapbox. If Prof Davidson just wants to yammer and lead discussions, she should resign her position and head for a park or subway platform, and pass a hat for donations."
Some days, it's not easy being Prof Davidson.
What caused the ruckus in the blogosphere this time was a blog I posted on the Hastac, an online network, which I co-founded in 2002, dedicated to new forms of learning for a digital age. The post, "How to Crowdsource Grading," proposed a form of assessment that I planned to use the next time I taught "This Is Your Brain on the Internet."
It was my students' fault, really. By the end of the course, I felt confident. I settled in with their evaluations, waiting for the accolades to flow, a pedagogical shower of appreciation. And mostly that's what I read, thankfully. But there was one group of students who had some candid feedback, and it took me by surprise. They said everything about the course had been bold, new, and exciting.
Everything, that is, except the grading.
They pointed out that I had used entirely conventional methods for testing and evaluating their work. We had talked as a class about the new modes of assessment on the Internet—like public commenting on products and services and leaderboards (peer evaluations adapted from sports sites)—where the consumer of content could also evaluate that content. These students said they loved the class but were perplexed that my assessment method had been so 20th century: Midterm. Final. Research paper. Graded A, B, C, D. The students were right. You couldn't get more 20th century than that.
The students signed their names to the course evaluations. It turned out the critics were A+ students. That stopped me in my tracks. If you're a teacher worth your salt, you pay attention when the A+ students say something is wrong.
I was embarrassed that I had overlooked such a crucial part of our brain on the Internet. I contacted my students and said they'd made me rethink some very old habits. Unlearning. I promised I would rectify my mistake the next time I taught the course. I thought about my promise, came up with what seemed like a good system, then wrote about it in my blog.
My new grading method, which set off such waves of vitriol, combined old-fashioned contract grading with peer review. Contract grading goes back at least to the 1960s. In it, the requirements of a course are laid out in advance, and students contract to do all of the assignments or only some of them. A student with a heavy course or workload who doesn't need an A, for example, might contract to do everything but the final project and then, according to the contract, she might earn a B. It's all very adult.
But I also wanted some quality control. So I added the crowdsourcing component based on the way I had already structured the course. I thought that since pairs of students were leading each class session and also responding to their peers' required weekly reading blogs, why not have them determine whether the blogs were good enough to count as fulfilling the terms of the contract? If a blog didn't pass muster, it would be the task of the student leaders that week to tell the blogger and offer feedback on what would be required for it to count. Student leaders for a class period would have to do that carefully, for next week a classmate would be evaluating their work.
I also liked the idea of students' each having a turn at being the one giving the grades. That's not a role most students experience, even though every study of learning shows that you learn best by teaching someone else. Besides, if constant public self-presentation and constant public feedback are characteristics of a digital age, why aren't we rethinking how we evaluate, measure, test, assess, and create standards? Isn't that another aspect of our brain on the Internet?
There are many ways of crowdsourcing, and mine was simply to extend the concept of peer leadership to grading. The blogosphere was convinced that either I or my students would be pulling a fast one if the grading were crowdsourced and students had a role in it. That says to me that we don't believe people can learn unless they are forced to, unless they know it will "count on the test." As an educator, I find that very depressing. As a student of the Internet, I also find it implausible. If you give people the means to self-publish—whether it's a photo from their iPhone or a blog—they do so. They seem to love learning and sharing what they know with others. But much of our emphasis on grading is based on the assumption that learning is like cod-liver oil: It is good for you, even though it tastes horrible going down. And much of our educational emphasis is on getting one answer right on one test—as if that says something about the quality of what you have learned or the likelihood that you will remember it after the test is over.
Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone's a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority.
Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. In addition to the content of our course—which ranged across cognitive psychology, neuroscience, management theory, literature and the arts, and the various fields that compose science-and-technology studies—"This Is Your Brain on the Internet" was intended to model a different way of knowing the world, one that encompasses new and different forms of collaboration and attention. More than anything, it courted failure. Unlearning.
"I smell a reality TV show," one critic sniffed.
That's not such a bad idea, actually. Maybe I'll try that next time I teach "This Is Your Brain on the Internet." They can air it right after Project Classroom Makeover.
Everyone except me. I'm dyslexic, and the moment I saw that grainy tape with the confusing basketball tossers, I knew I wouldn't be able to keep track of their movements, so I let my mind wander. My curiosity was piqued, though, when about 30 seconds into the tape, a gorilla sauntered in among the players. She (we later learned a female student was in the gorilla suit) stared at the camera, thumped her chest, and then strode away while they continued passing the balls.
When the tape stopped, the philosopher asked how many people had counted at least a dozen basketball tosses. Hands went up all over. He then asked who had counted 13, 14, and congratulated those who'd scored the perfect 15. Then he asked, "And who saw the gorilla?"
I raised my hand and was surprised to discover I was the only person at my table and one of only three or four in the large room to do so. He'd set us up, trapping us in our own attention blindness. Yes, there had been a trick, but he wasn't the one who had played it on us. By concentrating so hard on counting, we had managed to miss the gorilla in the midst.
Attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain, and I believe that it presents us with a tremendous opportunity. My take is different from that of many neuroscientists: Where they perceive the shortcomings of the individual, I sense an opportunity for collaboration. Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them.
It's not easy to acknowledge that everything we've learned about how to pay attention means that we've been missing everything else. It's not easy for us rational, competent, confident types to admit that the very key to our success—our ability to pinpoint a problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in school and beyond—may be exactly what limits us. For more than a hundred years, we've been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else.
I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that's based on multitasking our attention—not by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end. For most of us, this is a new pattern of attention. Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time.
Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions—and workplaces—are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school.
The Newsweek cover story proclaimed, "iPod, Therefore I Am."
On MTV News, it was "Dude, I just got a free iPod!"
Peter Jennings smirked at the ABC-TV news audience, "Shakespeare on the iPod? Calculus on the iPod?"
And the staff of the Duke Chronicle was apoplectic: "The University seems intent on transforming the iPod into an academic device, when the simple fact of the matter is that iPods are made to listen to music. It is an unnecessarily expensive toy that does not become an academic tool simply because it is thrown into a classroom."
What had those pundits so riled up? In 2003, we at Duke were approached by Apple about becoming one of six Apple Digital Campuses. Each college would choose a technology that Apple was developing and propose a campus use for it. It would be a partnership of business and education, exploratory in all ways. We chose a flashy new music-listening gadget that young people loved but that baffled most adults.
When we gave a free iPod to every member of the entering first-year class, there were no conditions. We simply asked students to dream up learning applications for this cool little white device with the adorable earbuds, and we invited them to pitch their ideas to the faculty. If one of their professors decided to use iPods in a course, the professor, too, would receive a free Duke-branded iPod, and so would all the students in the class (whether they were first-years or not).
This was an educational experiment without a syllabus. No lesson plan. No assessment matrix rigged to show that our investment had been a wise one. No assignment to count the basketballs. After all, as we knew from the science of attention, to direct attention in one way precluded all the other ways. If it were a reality show, we might have called it Project Classroom Makeover.
At the time, I was vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke, a position equivalent to what in industry would be the R&D person, and I was among those responsible for cooking up the iPod experiment. In the world of technology, "crowdsourcing" means inviting a group to collaborate on a solution to a problem, but that term didn't yet exist in 2003. It was coined by Jeff Howe of Wired magazine in 2006 to refer to the widespread Internet practice of posting an open call requesting help in completing some task, whether writing code (that's how much of the open-source code that powers the Mozilla browser was written) or creating a winning logo (like the "Birdie" design of Twitter, which cost a total of six bucks).
In the iPod experiment, we were crowdsourcing educational innovation for a digital age. Crowdsourced thinking is very different from "credentialing," or relying on top-down expertise. If anything, crowdsourcing is suspicious of expertise, because the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we conceive to be the problem, let alone the answer.
Once the pieces were in place, we decided to take our educational experiment one step further. By giving the iPods to first-year students, we ended up with a lot of angry sophomores, juniors, and seniors. They'd paid hefty private-university tuition, too! So we relented and said any student could have a free iPod—just so long as she persuaded a professor to require one for a course and came up with a learning app in that course. Does that sound sneaky? Far be it from me to say that we planned it.
The real treasure trove was to be found in the students' innovations. Working together, and often alongside their professors, they came up with far more learning apps for their iPods than anyone—even at Apple—had dreamed possible. Most predictable were uses whereby students downloaded audio archives relevant to their courses—Nobel Prize acceptance speeches by physicists and poets, the McCarthy hearings, famous trials. Almost instantly, students figured out that they could record lectures on their iPods and listen at their leisure.
Interconnection was the part the students grasped before any of us did. Students who had grown up connected digitally gravitated to ways that the iPod could be used for collective learning. They turned iPods into social media and networked their learning in ways we did not anticipate. In the School of the Environment, one class interviewed families in a North Carolina community concerned with lead paint in their homes and schools, commented on one another's interviews, and together created an audio documentary that aired on local and regional radio stations and all over the Web. In the music department, students uploaded their own compositions to their iPods so their fellow students could listen and critique.
After eight years in Duke's central administration, I was excited to take the methods we had gleaned from the iPod experiment back into the classroom. I decided to offer a new course called "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," a title that pays homage to Daniel J. Levitin's inspiring book This Is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006), a kind of music-lover's guide to the brain. Levitin argues that music makes complex circuits throughout the brain, requiring different kinds of brain function for listening, processing, and producing, and thus makes us think differently. Substitute the word "Internet" for "music," and you've got the gist of my course.
I advertised the class widely, and I was delighted to look over the roster of the 18 students in the seminar and find more than 18 majors, minors, and certificates represented. I created a bare-bones suggested reading list that included, for example, articles in specialized journals like Cognition and Developmental Neuropsychology, pieces in popular magazines like Wired and Science, novels, and memoirs. There were lots of Web sites, too, of course, but I left the rest loose. This class was structured to be peer-led, with student interest and student research driving the design. "Participatory learning" is one term used to describe how we can learn together from one another's skills. "Cognitive surplus" is another used in the digital world for that "more than the sum of the parts" form of collaborative thinking that happens when groups think together online.
We used a method that I call "collaboration by difference." Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time cannot be solved by anyone alone, and that those who think they can act in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and staring them in the face. Collaboration by difference respects and rewards different forms and levels of expertise, perspective, culture, age, ability, and insight, treating difference not as a deficit but as a point of distinction. It always seems more cumbersome in the short run to seek out divergent and even quirky opinions, but it turns out to be efficient in the end and necessary for success if one seeks an outcome that is unexpected and sustainable. That's what I was aiming for.
I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse. There was still a lot of criticism about the lack of peer review in Wikipedia entries, and some professors were banning Wikipedia use in the classroom. I didn't understand that. Wikipedia is an educator's fantasy, all the world's knowledge shared voluntarily and free in a format theoretically available to all, and which anyone can edit. Instead of banning it, I challenged my students to use their knowledge to make Wikipedia better. All conceded that it had turned out to be much harder to get their work to "stick" on Wikipedia than it was to write a traditional term paper.
Given that I was teaching a class based on learning and the Internet, having my students blog was a no-brainer. I supplemented that with more traditionally structured academic writing, a term paper. When I had both samples in front of me, I discovered something curious. Their writing online, at least in their blogs, was incomparably better than in the traditional papers. In fact, given all the tripe one hears from pundits about how the Internet dumbs our kids down, I was shocked that elegant bloggers often turned out to be the clunkiest and most pretentious of research-paper writers. Term papers rolled in that were shot through with jargon, stilted diction, poor word choice, rambling thoughts, and even pretentious grammatical errors (such as the ungrammatical but proper-sounding use of "I" instead of "me" as an object of a preposition).
But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college—the term paper—and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?
Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent—not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.
The semester flew by, and we went wherever it took us. The objective was to get rid of a lot of the truisms about "the dumbest generation" and actually look at how new theories of the brain and of attention might help us understand how forms of thinking and collaborating online maximize brain activity. We spent a good deal of time thinking about how accident, disruption, distraction, and difference increase the motivation to learn and to solve problems, both individually and collectively. To find examples, we spent time with a dance ensemble rehearsing a new piece, a jazz band improvising together, and teams of surgeons and computer programmers performing robotic surgery. We walked inside a monkey's brain in a virtual-reality cave. In another virtual-reality environment, we found ourselves trembling, unable to step off what we knew was a two-inch drop, because it looked as if we were on a ledge over a deep canyon.
One of our readings was On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004), a unified theory of the brain written by Jeff Hawkins (the neuroscientist who invented the Palm Pilot) with Sandra Blakeslee. I agree with many of Hawkins's ideas about the brain's "memory-prediction framework." My own interest is in how memories—reinforced behaviors from the past—predict future learning, and in how we can intentionally disrupt that pattern to spark innovation and creativity. Hawkins is interested in how we can use the pattern to create next-generation artificial intelligence that will enhance the performance, and profitability, of computerized gadgets like the Palm Pilot. The students and I had been having a heated debate about his theories when a student discovered that Hawkins happened to be in our area to give a lecture. I was away at a meeting, when suddenly my BlackBerry was vibrating with e-mails and IM's from my students, who had convened the class without me to present a special guest on a special topic: Jeff Hawkins debating the ideas of Jeff Hawkins. It felt a bit like the gag in the classic Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, when someone in the line to purchase movie tickets is expounding pompously on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and then McLuhan himself steps into the conversation.
It was that kind of class.
"Jeff Hawkins thought it was odd that we decided to hold class when you weren't there," one student texted me. "Why wouldn't we? That's how it works in 'This Is Your Brain on the Internet.'"
Project Classroom Makeover. I heard the pride. "Step aside, Prof Davidson: This is a university!"
"Nonsense!"
"Absurd!"
"A wacko holding forth on a soapbox. If Prof Davidson just wants to yammer and lead discussions, she should resign her position and head for a park or subway platform, and pass a hat for donations."
Some days, it's not easy being Prof Davidson.
What caused the ruckus in the blogosphere this time was a blog I posted on the Hastac, an online network, which I co-founded in 2002, dedicated to new forms of learning for a digital age. The post, "How to Crowdsource Grading," proposed a form of assessment that I planned to use the next time I taught "This Is Your Brain on the Internet."
It was my students' fault, really. By the end of the course, I felt confident. I settled in with their evaluations, waiting for the accolades to flow, a pedagogical shower of appreciation. And mostly that's what I read, thankfully. But there was one group of students who had some candid feedback, and it took me by surprise. They said everything about the course had been bold, new, and exciting.
Everything, that is, except the grading.
They pointed out that I had used entirely conventional methods for testing and evaluating their work. We had talked as a class about the new modes of assessment on the Internet—like public commenting on products and services and leaderboards (peer evaluations adapted from sports sites)—where the consumer of content could also evaluate that content. These students said they loved the class but were perplexed that my assessment method had been so 20th century: Midterm. Final. Research paper. Graded A, B, C, D. The students were right. You couldn't get more 20th century than that.
The students signed their names to the course evaluations. It turned out the critics were A+ students. That stopped me in my tracks. If you're a teacher worth your salt, you pay attention when the A+ students say something is wrong.
I was embarrassed that I had overlooked such a crucial part of our brain on the Internet. I contacted my students and said they'd made me rethink some very old habits. Unlearning. I promised I would rectify my mistake the next time I taught the course. I thought about my promise, came up with what seemed like a good system, then wrote about it in my blog.
My new grading method, which set off such waves of vitriol, combined old-fashioned contract grading with peer review. Contract grading goes back at least to the 1960s. In it, the requirements of a course are laid out in advance, and students contract to do all of the assignments or only some of them. A student with a heavy course or workload who doesn't need an A, for example, might contract to do everything but the final project and then, according to the contract, she might earn a B. It's all very adult.
But I also wanted some quality control. So I added the crowdsourcing component based on the way I had already structured the course. I thought that since pairs of students were leading each class session and also responding to their peers' required weekly reading blogs, why not have them determine whether the blogs were good enough to count as fulfilling the terms of the contract? If a blog didn't pass muster, it would be the task of the student leaders that week to tell the blogger and offer feedback on what would be required for it to count. Student leaders for a class period would have to do that carefully, for next week a classmate would be evaluating their work.
I also liked the idea of students' each having a turn at being the one giving the grades. That's not a role most students experience, even though every study of learning shows that you learn best by teaching someone else. Besides, if constant public self-presentation and constant public feedback are characteristics of a digital age, why aren't we rethinking how we evaluate, measure, test, assess, and create standards? Isn't that another aspect of our brain on the Internet?
There are many ways of crowdsourcing, and mine was simply to extend the concept of peer leadership to grading. The blogosphere was convinced that either I or my students would be pulling a fast one if the grading were crowdsourced and students had a role in it. That says to me that we don't believe people can learn unless they are forced to, unless they know it will "count on the test." As an educator, I find that very depressing. As a student of the Internet, I also find it implausible. If you give people the means to self-publish—whether it's a photo from their iPhone or a blog—they do so. They seem to love learning and sharing what they know with others. But much of our emphasis on grading is based on the assumption that learning is like cod-liver oil: It is good for you, even though it tastes horrible going down. And much of our educational emphasis is on getting one answer right on one test—as if that says something about the quality of what you have learned or the likelihood that you will remember it after the test is over.
Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone's a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority.
Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. In addition to the content of our course—which ranged across cognitive psychology, neuroscience, management theory, literature and the arts, and the various fields that compose science-and-technology studies—"This Is Your Brain on the Internet" was intended to model a different way of knowing the world, one that encompasses new and different forms of collaboration and attention. More than anything, it courted failure. Unlearning.
"I smell a reality TV show," one critic sniffed.
That's not such a bad idea, actually. Maybe I'll try that next time I teach "This Is Your Brain on the Internet." They can air it right after Project Classroom Makeover.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Excellent article about Goddard College, a small innovative liberal arts college in Vermont. Goddard pioneered the low-residency model, more commonly known today as the hybrid-online model, in which students spent most of their time studying online or otherwise away from campus but then come to campus for intensive "residency" periods. I would imagine that the interaction and energy during the residency period is more intense then the everyday experience of a student who is "in residence" full-time for an entire semester. The residency component is probably more like a conference or retreat experience.
Goddard College's Unconventional Path to Survival
A 'low residency' program brings students together, but only for one week
By Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 4, 2011
http://chronicle.com/article/Goddard-Colleges/128876/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Photo by Caleb Kenna for The Chronicle of Higher Education
"More of the citizens of this country need to develop intelligent thinking," says Goddard's president, Barbara Vacarr (left).
Plainfield, Vt.
Someone like Rod Crossman, at his stage in life and with his professional success, doesn't often seek a way to reinvent himself. Yet Mr. Crossman—a painter, an assistant professor, and an artist in residence at Indiana Wesleyan University—felt that he was merely churning out pretty work to hang on gallery walls, increasingly feeling a schism between where his career had taken him and where his passion was telling him to go.
"My art practice had become marooned in the place where it was not connected to the world," he says. "There were issues that my students were facing, and I didn't think I had the tools to help them navigate those problems. Some of the issues they were facing were just the challenges of the world that we live in." He wanted an interdisciplinary M.F.A. to reinvigorate his work at Indiana Wesleyan, where he has taught for 30 years.
He found a tiny college in rural Vermont that has blown itself up and emerged anew time and again: Goddard College. The birthplace of some important academic innovations, it has long bucked traditional notions of higher education and, like many experimental colleges, flirted with financial ruin. Its latest transformation may be its most remarkable: Reaching a nadir in its financial health in the early 2000s, it did what many colleges would consider unthinkable. The college shut down its storied, core residential program and adopted its low-residency adult program as its sole campus offering. It has since re-emerged with 10-year accreditation, the highest number of students in decades, money to spend on refurbishing its campus, a new campus in Port Townsend, Wash., and plans to expand its programs to other cities across the country. One administrator put the college's turnaround in perspective: Today, Goddard is getting a $2-million loan to build a biomass plant, but 10 years ago the college couldn't have gotten a car loan.
Innovation is the buzzword of higher education these days. People talk about leveraging technology and scaling up, about treating faculty members like hired guns, and about adopting industrial models to bring down costs and ramp up "production." All of it in a bid to offer more college degrees—more cheaply, more quickly, and some worry, of a lower quality.
None of that is happening here. Goddard faculty members, who do not have tenure but are unionized, seem fiercely devoted to the college. Students say their open-ended studies are among the most rigorous they have ever experienced. And Goddard's president, Barbara Vacarr, is downright heretical when asked how higher education can scale up and give more Americans college degrees.
Goddard's history is unusual. Its founder and longtime president did not believe in an endowment, which he thought might make campus leaders too comfortable. So the college has repeatedly experimented with new ways to offer education, in part because it has struggled financially.
As Rod Crossman, an assistant professor of art at Indiana Wesleyan U., completed Goddard's low-residency adult program, he felt "fired up about helping younger artists and being an advocate for them in building a practice that serves the world and also allows them to eat."
"I would say that more people do not need degrees—that more of the citizens of this country need to develop intelligent thinking, and higher education should be about that," she says. Goddard, after emerging from its financial straits, is ready for another bold move. "Where I see Goddard going is being very public once again about being an activist college—a college that is about not getting a degree, not getting anything really, but about human development and the kind of learning that compels people to take action in the world."
A Passion for Learning
As colleges go, Goddard was always peculiar. Royce S. (Tim) Pitkin founded the college as an offshoot of the Goddard Seminary in 1938. At Columbia University's Teachers College, Pitkin was a student of William Heard Kilpatrick, who followed John Dewey's progressive-education philosophy. So Pitkin adopted a Deweyan model for Goddard, seeking to mend the rift between daily life and learning. "Education is a process of securing a better understanding and an enriching of life, rather than the teaching of a subject matter in prescribed courses," Pitkin wrote in an early plan for the college.
Dewey held that students' passions energized their learning, so from its inception to this day, Goddard's new students begin their studies with a question: What do you want to know? With input from faculty advisers, students devise their own educational plans, including choosing books and other media to study. And they determine how they'll demonstrate what they have learned throughout.
Pitkin, who was president until 1969, did not believe in building an endowment, because he thought it might make Goddard too comfortable and hamper innovation. So the college was constantly experimenting with new models and new ways to offer education, in part because it was often struggling financially. Pitkin also thought the college's residential program should never have more than 200 students, because large numbers would hurt the community-building that was essential to the Goddard experience. But the college did try spinning off different programs and establishing alternate campuses. Most failed.
But in 1963, something truly new and successful emerged. Evalyn Bates, director of adult education at Goddard, devised the nation's first low-residency adult-education program—the idea being that students would study at home, with the exception of one week of the semester, which would be spent in intense meetings and seminars on campus. The first class of 20 students, who had to be 26 or older, was mostly women. "The folklore is that the initial recruiting list was the Smith College dropout list"—women who got married and left college early, says Josh Castle, the registrar and associate dean for enrollment.
It had tremendous appeal to people who wanted something more intense than traditional distance education, yet had families or jobs to keep in another part of the country. Within a decade, the low-residency program had 400 students and to this day has influenced similar offerings at some 60 other institutions, including Antioch University, Prescott College, the Union Institute & University, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Warren Wilson College. Ms. Vacarr, Goddard's president, who left high school at age 15 and dropped out of college to raise a family, returned to college as an adult through a low-residency program at Lesley University started by faculty who came from Goddard.
"Evalyn Bates is not known by anybody in higher education, but her legacy is profound," Mr. Castle says.
A Gathering in Plainfield
Today Goddard's low-residency program enrolls some 800 students in certificate, bachelor's, and master's programs in a dozen fields, like education, sustainability, psychology, the fine arts, and creative writing, along with the open-ended "individualized studies," the college's most popular offering. (Tuition and fees for most programs run about $16,000 per year, and most students finish in three to five semesters. More than 90 percent of students in the bachelor's program entered with credits from another college.)
This summer, M.F.A. students in the interdisciplinary-arts program gathered at Goddard the way most programs here do: Faculty members traveled from locations across America and Canada to the campus, a historic gentleman's farm, a couple of days ahead of the students. Here in a converted barn, their nameplates were hung outside empty offices that once belonged to residential faculty members.
Students, who sleep in the old dormitories, soon arrive for an intense week of meetings, private conferences, seminars, social gatherings, and meals (always with vegan options), which are frequently interrupted by someone ringing a little white bell to announce a learning activity that students have thrown together. The days typically start at 7:30 a.m. and run until 10 p.m.—or later, if students decide to stay up, talking into the night.
The residency serves as a transition from the faculty adviser (they are not called "professors") who oversaw a student's work over the past semester to a new adviser who will help that student design coursework for the coming semester. When the residency is over, the students and faculty members go home, the cleaning crews sweep through, stripping the faculty nameplates from the doors, and faculty members and students from another degree program arrive several days later. The cycle continues all year long.
After a residency, a faculty adviser will expect a "packet" of work from students every three weeks, to which the faculty member will respond with a long, detailed letter. Over the semester, the students and professors will periodically contact each other individually and in groups online and over the phone.
The conventions of distance education are widely known and accepted, but Goddard's style of teaching is markedly different—and not for everyone. With all the hype in academe about sages on stages and guides on sides, the faculty members at Goddard are truly the latter, and that seems to involve both setting aside egos and putting in more work.
"It requires a kind of commitment and risk, because you do not have the status of faculty that are dispensing information and facts," says Francis X. Charet, an expert in psychology, religion, and consciousness studies who has taught at the college for 13 years. He has seen many faculty members quit because they can't handle the pedagogical style. At Goddard, where faculty members work under short- and long-term contracts, people have also frequently left for more secure jobs. But faculty members say that turnover has slowed since the college's financial health improved.
Barriers to Innovation
Programs like this also come with major administrative hassles, especially for a college on a $13-million budget. Goddard has overlapping semesters, for example, but the National Student Clearinghouse doesn't allow it to report until all students have completed a semester; that means Goddard administrators have to write student-loan deferment letters for individual students to attest that they are still in college. Goddard has also had to fight the government on visa rules following September 11, track state rules for programs requiring licensure (like education), and put up with a rule at the Veterans Administration that doesn't recognize low-residency programs for a housing allowance.
"It is interesting that the federal government in particular is pushing for innovation, but none of the ways that schools can interact with the federal government encourage it," Mr. Castle says. And then there are acts of God: A residency has not yet been delayed or canceled because of a harsh Vermont winter, but Mr. Castle wonders if that scenario is inevitable.
For Mr. Crossman, this summer's residency was his last, in which he submitted a portfolio of critical writing, photomontage, and video, and said goodbye to friends. Over the past five semesters he studied the work of prominent thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Allan Kaprow, and Sherry Turkle. His faculty advisers may not have been painters, but that was fine with him. "In academia, especially when you have been teaching as long as I have, you become a specialist, and in some ways, that insulates you," he says. "I wanted to get outside of this specialization and this language that was almost like an echo chamber."
But he learned as much or more from his fellow students. The residency, he says, offered an opportunity to network with other artists and talk about big ideas, or even about working together someday. "There are a lot of really bright, successful people in this program," he says. "It opens up doors and possibilities." Among the people who attended the program this summer were a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, a world-class tabla player, and a performance artist who held a string of Guinness World Records, including one for riding a lawn mower from Maine to California in 1986.
And what did Mr. Crossman take away from his education? "I am wondering now if I will ever paint again," he says. "I am really fired up about helping younger artists and being an advocate for them in building a practice that serves the world and also allows them to eat. I have always been this artist that sat in my studio and painted, then threw my art out into the world. ... I want to be much more intentional about serving the community."
Distinguished Alumni
Many colleges talk about their community service, but it has always been an explicit goal of the education here. The activism and Deweyan pedagogy of both the on-campus program and the low-residency program attracted freethinkers, artists, and radicals, particularly in the college's heyday, the 1960s and 70s. Goddard harbored organizations that shaped the Vermont landscape and counterculture, like the politically activist Bread & Puppet Theatre and the Institute for Social Ecology, which focuses on sustainability research. Among the college's famous alumni are the actor William H. Macy, members of the rock band Phish, the jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp, the death-row inmate and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, and scores of writers, including David Mamet, Walter Mosley, Piers Anthony, and Mary Karr. (Goddard was a gathering place for Raymond Carver, Frank Conroy, Richard Ford, John Irving, Tobias Wolff, and other writers who taught there.)
Mark Doty, one of America's best-known poets, was a student in Goddard's low-residency M.F.A. writing program from 1978 to 1980. He says his faculty advisers pushed him to read much more deeply than he had before, but his student peers pushed even more, forcing him to strip the artificiality from his prose.
He recalls the solitude of the wooded campus and the intensity of the studies. "It was a rich time for me," says Mr. Doty, who is now a professor of English and director of the writing program at Rutgers University. "You get put in a psychic pressure cooker."
He later returned to Goddard to teach literature and writing from 1985 to 1990. When he arrived, the college had fewer than 50 students, and whether he would get paid each week on time, or at all, was always in question. He loved it, however. He'll never forget looking out his office window on his first day and seeing eight students walking across campus, stark naked and covered in mud, returning from some adventure in the forest. "I thought, Where have I landed? This is not like teaching at Boston University."
By the 1990s, Goddard College was starting to deteriorate—financially and physically. The college could not generate the critical mass needed to support a range of offerings and services, so administrators brought in a consulting company to goose enrollment by aggressively discounting tuition. Numbers went up to around 200, selectivity went way down, "and the attrition was abominable," says Mr. Castle.
The college had no money to spend on maintenance of the historic campus—and no time to do the work anyway. Goddard was cramming the low-residency programs into summer and winter breaks, when resident students were away. "Our beds were continuously full," says Mr. Castle.
By 2002, things were looking dire. Closing entirely, merging with another college, selling off programs piecemeal, and selling Goddard to a for-profit—all those options were under consideration by the Board of Trustees, says Mr. Castle. But while the residency program was failing, the low-residency program was healthy, so the board made the risky and unpopular decision to permanently shut down the residential program and make the low-residency one Goddard's primary focus.
Faculty and some alumni were embittered. Mark Greenberg, who was laid off from his job teaching American studies and humanities, believes that board members had become conservative with age, and were unwilling to support the zany antics that were associated with the residential program. Others were quick to eulogize the college. "The end of Goddard—a school deeply committed to educational experimentation—as a residential college is lamentable," said an editorial in The Boston Globe. "Goddard's board claims it terminated the on-campus program in order to maintain Goddard's independent name, since continuing residential classes would have forced the school to merge with another institution. But what is a name if the educational premise behind it no longer exists?"
The 'Real' Goddard
Goddard wasn't the college it had been, but experimentation and the progressive ideals had not disappeared. Mark Schulman, who became Goddard's president shortly after the residential program shut down, went on a listening tour to meet alumni. The residential alumni, who were livid, would complain that the "real" Goddard was dead. People in the room who graduated from the low-residency program shot back at them.
"They would say, I resent that," says Mr. Schulman, who is now president of Saybrook University. "I would just sit back and let the graduates of the adult degree programs challenge the notions of their fellow alums. And that, more often than not, would work, making people reconsider what was going on."
Dustin Byerly, who graduated from the residential program in 2001, came back in 2005 to work in the cafeteria after he was laid off from a construction job. He expected to hate what he saw, but he was blown away.
"The students seemed to be of a higher caliber, seemed to be more self-directed, confident, prepared," says Mr. Byerly, who now works as an archivist and college historian in the library. But these students were, at the core, the same kind of person he was—someone who found Goddard when traditional education failed him. "The types of individuals who are drawn to this—an education that gives them a say in what they do and empowers them in a way that they might never have been empowered before—those individuals are still the same."
In fact, faculty members and others at Goddard make a convincing case that the low-residency version of the college offers the most relevant education for modern times, particularly in its focus on localism and community-building. Peter Hocking, a faculty member in the interdisciplinary-arts program, who was an administrator at Brown University and a faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design, says that students at traditional colleges might get access to great facilities and snazzy equipment. "But the minute they graduate," he says, "their ID card gets turned off and they are not let back into those buildings, and they go into a period of crisis for two or three years of rebuilding their lives and reintegrating their practice into their lived world."
In Goddard's program, "you are not being torn from your reality," he says. "You are asked to build the ties to your reality more solidly."
Ms. Vacarr, who took over as president in July 2010, sees Goddard growing up, in a way. The college will start building an endowment to support needy students. (For now, staff members hold bake sales and dock their paychecks to contribute to a student fund.) And Goddard will push out into the world even more. The college's campus on a state park in Port Townsend was formed in partnership with a community college, the state of Washington, and nonprofit organizations. She says Goddard is now forming partnerships in other cities. This fall in Seattle, Goddard is starting a bachelor's program in education in the most ethnically diverse ZIP code in the country. The program, which will be offered in Spanish and English, is aimed at students who cannot make the trek back to Plainfield.
But Goddard, which turned inward during its latest financial crisis, will also try to recapture its role as an evangelist for progressive education. Imagine the world when Pitkin founded the college in 1938, Ms. Vacarr says: It was mired in a devastating depression, with people embracing political extremism as answers to complex problems. "Pitkin said we need a more intelligent citizenry, and I would say the same thing now," she says. But national conversations about education tend to focus on outcomes and assessment, rote memorization, and teaching to the test.
"It's despairing," she says. "We are in great need of people who can think beyond the messaging that is out there. We are not going to be able to solve some of these very complex problems, unless people can think in complex ways." She plans to carry that message beyond Goddard into higher education. And from the kinds of testimonies she hears on graduation days, she thinks Goddard graduates will, too.
Graduation day for the M.F.A. program this summer began as it could only at a place like this: Two students, a rail-thin man and a stouter companion, both dressed in stunning high heels and feather boas, stood in front of a pounding grand piano, belting out "Bridge Over Troubled Water" for a raucous audience.
When it came time to pass out degrees, the mood turned somber. Graduates stood and spoke to the crowd about mothers who died during their studies, the bonds they formed with fellow students, and the unique opportunity that Goddard gave them. One woman directly addressed her three preteen children in the audience. "I want to make a vow to them in front of all of you," she said. "I will do everything I can to find a Goddard for you."
At his turn, Mr. Crossman stood and thanked his peers for changing him. The college had taught him to break rules and abandon his long-held notions about art. He quoted the poet and philosopher Paul Valéry. "'Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.' That is another thing that Goddard taught me."
His voice faltered with emotion before he could finish his thanks, and the room exploded in applause to fill the silence.
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