Framing Questions for first paper: Due October 25

Framing Questions for first cumulative paper (~5 pages, due Oct. 25 by email)

Please choose one or more of these questions or one of your own and write approximately 5 pages, due by class on Oct. 25. Please identify which question(s) you are addressing.
As you will see, several of the questions emerge from posts in our class blog.

I. In the campuses and programs we have examined thus far, how have innovative practices or pedagogical approaches been conserved? For schools that have endured over time (e.g., St. Johns, Berea College, Deep Springs), are innovative practices established at the founding of the colleges still innovative? For those that have folded, such as Black Mountain, Hutchins or the Experimental College, how did their innovations endure in other ways? How did the participants in the early educational innovations make meaning from their experiences? How does their history and identity inform the present?

II. Pick two institutions or programs that we have examined thus far and consider how each addresses the relationship between the classroom and the community.

III. “We are not impressed with current tendencies to allow or encourage each student to pursue his own ‘interests’ or to encourage students collectively to participate in curriculum determination. Students will have the rest of their lives to plan their own learning programs; in college, such planning is still the responsibility of the faculty.” (Experiment at Berkeley, 1969, p. 112)

This statement, by Alexander Meicklejohn’s student, Joseph Tussman, founder of the Experimental College at UC Berkeley, reflects the reality that schools with widely different pedagogies such as St. Johns and Black Mountain share the appellation “experimental” or “innovative”. What are the virtues or drawbacks of a fixed neo-classical curriculum vs. a progressive student-initiated curriculum. Where do experimenters such as Hutchins and Dewey agree? Where do they diverge? Why?

IV. What is the role of student labor such as is found at Berea, Antioch or Deep Springs and/or experiential learning as a component of the learning experience? Should education be preparation for a career? How might the desire to prepare for a livelihood inhibit or enhance educational innovation?

V. Discuss the role of leadership and vision in educational innovation. How essential is a strong leader? What is the responsibility of the community or leadership emerging from the grass roots? How has consensus played a role in educational innovation? Discuss, as well, the importance of an elaborated and thought-out educational plan or philosophy vs. a more organic, experiential one in the creation of innovative or experimenting campuses.

VII. In The Perpetual Dream, Grant and Reisman contend, “Perhaps both groups [of educational reformers] do share one common failing, again characteristically American: namely, to overestimate what education itself can do. Their hope was either to change the general culture….or, a bit more modestly, to produce a new generation of self-motivated, deeply interested students, not only in the selective colleges but also in the exploding institutions of near-universal higher education….” ( p. 7).

In response to this quote, do you think that the notion of education as a force for social change misguided or essential and why? How does the role of education in a democracy manifest in the colleges we have examined thus far?

VII. In Against the Current: Reform and Experimentation in Higher Education, J. Peter Euben
writes, “..alternative education has a special obligation to be both radical and conservative. It needs to be both because the modern state promotes cultural homogenization and personal fragmentation. We must be radical in resisting the homogenization not only in what we teach, but in how we teach it, to whom and where. But we also need to be conservative and traditional. We need, I think, to resist the blandishments of the here and now; and to nurture ideas, relationships and educational forms whose very persistence would be exemplary. (pp. 38-40)

Discuss Euben’s belief that alternative education ought to be both radical and conservative. How has this manifested in the campuses we have studied thus far?