Low-tech Learning: the Other Kind of Education

In many ways, the college education has become a highly mediated experience: text books and professors tell students what to study, how to work most efficiently, what is important in their field, and how to gather and approach information. Even moving away from the instructional model where the professor is up front at the white board or screen, with all student eyes focused on the "sage on the stage," discussion tends to be carefully directed and moderated, keeping learning on track towards very specific goals outlined in syllabus and text book.

A second form of mediation occurs in the use of technology - sophisticated devices bring data and experience into the hands of all students, almost effortlessly: with the entering of a few search terms, with a few clicks on the keyboard, we all "see" the results of colonization or deforestation, the art of pre-Columbian civilizations, bird migrations shaped by light pollution. Great stuff! Our new iPads connect to the shared screen, allowing every student to see the same image at the same time, directing all attention to the same point being made.



Well, perhaps not all attention - the flip side of all this connectivity is perhaps that some of us have checked out to pursue our own dreams.








In the upcoming study away course "Seeing What's There: Bear Island," we propose an alternative: allowing students to take charge of their own learning experience. We provide the (fairly unmediated) environment (sand, sky, water), and students consider this environment from their individual, non-technology-enhanced, perspectives. We begin with basic survival: in self-devised groups, students have to plan, gather, and deploy their supplies, set up camp, feed themselves. (We may recommend googling how to get the camping stove going. In advance.) In situ, students are free to implement their individual study away proposals - the project work, laid out and approved in a written format in advance, has commenced before the study away and will be completed upon return, but here, at the center, work can be done without distractions. Obviously, there is no completely unmediated experience at a state park in North Carolina, but I think we may come fairly close.


"Students paint better outside," observes Alyssa Reiser Prince - let's see what they can create when the painting session is not defined by the daily class schedule but by daylight and dusk.

It's an experiment. It is possible that our little troop will stand, disoriented and forlorn, looking out over the vast Atlantic Ocean (or the first few miles of it), unable to put to productive use the time and space provided. Wedded to the beach as a space reserved for bikinis and frolic, they may keep to their tents in the April chills, longing for their phones. In any case, it is a tiny slice of the educational experience Coker provides - if it fails, not much is lost. The initial investment is small. But perhaps, the outing affords all of us a new perspective, an opportunity to consider how and what we learn, and an appreciation of the unmediated learning space.

Lunch with Leo - and a conversation about Learning

On Monday last week, I had lunch with Leonardo Villegas, in his third year at Coker and on his way to law school with (since this fall) a History major. (He used to be in English, but he just did not really enjoy literature that much.) We talked about learning, how we decide what we want to learn about, and how students' progress through the required course lists of majors and minors does not always connect with students' interests, passions, quests. (We did not use the word "quest.")

Leo's comment on the typical student experience: "Many students blindly take courses without knowing how they will apply to their future careers. They are not to blame completely, as only a few of them receive the insight and resources to guide them to a career path truly meant for them." 

This is a tricky one, right? We expect students to somehow make their ways, to chat with advisors, to check in with Career Services, to plan for a professional future - but students are still unsure. How do you know what you love? How can you tell what you are suited for? How do you, in the words of Joseph Campbell, follow your bliss if, enmeshed and working hard in all your classes, you can't even quite figure out what your bliss might be?

Part of the problem seems to be the compartmentalization academia is so keen on. With one foot in whatever class (biology lab, European history, the Long 18th Century of British Lit, Lifetime Fitness, Chinese language - all the directions students pursue in a given week - and that's just inside the classroom!) and another in the daily challenges of youth, it's tricky to identify an actual path or evaluate that path in relationship to bliss. Advisors want to make sure students make "progress toward degree" - this in turn requires taking lots of (seemingly) unrelated courses. But why are they unrelated?

It's a little like a dip into 19th century brain science, when phrenology imagined the brain to be divided into little areas responsible for specific pursuits: Acquisitiveness, Politeness, Combativeness, Conjugal Love. One might think that there might have been some overlap (accounting for marital fights, for example), but for the most part these were fairly discreet zones. I am a great fan of phrenology, let me be clear! As a guide to how the brain actually works, we have moved on.

So many classes, so much study time - but is anything actually learned? Why are we teaching and learning as if we were trying to cultivate many individual little islands of knowledge, when in fact we are hoping that students identify relationships between ideas, overlaps and contradictions, perhaps learn to marvel at the variety of perceptions that underpin our understanding of any given problem? To identify a path (whether toward a career choice or bliss), we need to create some sort of order in the material - but the artificial boundaries of fields of study and department divisions don't seem to be particularly helpful.

It seems that the (non-19th century) brain actually depends on making connections (there are lots of images of neurons and synapses, if you ever look up "how the brain works"), over and over again - that we need to go back and forth between ideas and approaches and processes so that learned material is connected, retained, put into relation to each other. I despair, regularly, over the fact that students have trouble relating history facts and dates (the end of slavery, the Great Migration, Jim Crow laws, etc.) to the literature they are reading (Jazz by Toni Morrison) - it's difficult to understand the significance of material presented under one name (HIS) if it seems to exist in a separate universe from another (ENG). So, dates come and dates go; books are endlessly confusing. How, in that morass of seemingly disconnected factlets, can one forge a road to bliss? If we are lucky, sometime in the third year, a student will have a moment of "aha!" - the quintessential light bulb - "I learned this in history class last semester!" And, if several aha-moments collide, we may have a bridge, the beginning of a road to bliss, or the beginning of a map that might reveal a road. It seems chancy. We could do better.

(I think Leo will be ok, though. He now has history and literature.)

Association for Interdisciplinary Studies Conference: Baltimore October 2017

About a week ago, I flew to Baltimore to attend the international conference on interdisciplinary studies organized by AIS (AIS Conference) - it was an incredibly busy and informative and helpful three-day-event consisting of presentations and conversations with dozens of people who think along similar lines, in term of research and pedagogy, as I do.

Last year, attending the conference was all about gathering input and information - I had just started the program at Coker, and mostly I wanted to make sure we were on the right track in terms of expectations and offerings, and it turned out we were! The Coker IS major is slightly more demanding and defined than what some other US colleges and universities offer, but it is also very small (this makes us flexible, or "nimble," as we say in academia) and therefore personalized.

So, last year I was primarily a listener, but this year I could also be a contributor - I shared information about the process of creating and developing the interdisciplinary major at Coker, the courses we include, the collaborations with other faculty and with administration, and our success graduating the first cohort of students last spring.  (I also showed off the fabulous Coker College campus, which was in my bag in form of a folder. Thanks, MarCom! "... and that's my office window!")

What sets the AIS conference apart from all other conferences I have attended (and I have been at this for a while!) is the genuine dedication to sharing experiences and advice with everyone, regardless of time-in-the-game or home institution. I learned about electronic portfolios, reflective writing prompts, creative capstone projects, and ways to reach out to colleagues across campus - and at one time, when I responded to an interdisciplinarian from NYU Gallatin who was looking for ways to integrate interdisciplinary work sooner in the undergraduate experience (I suggested getting the first-year-writing instructors on board, which apparently would be impossible in a large university setting - but at Coker, all it takes is a text to Margaret Godbey), I heard the words: "I envy you for where you teach." That was sort of nice.

So here are my three take-aways from the AIS conference:

• Create e-portfolios with my IS200 students in the spring, keep them going over their junior year, and mesh them with linkedin profiles in the IS400 course in preparation for graduation.
• Band together with fellow Coker professors across disciplines for an Interdisciplinary Interest Cluster (Craig Pepin, interdisciplinarian at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, generously shared his reading list).
• Take students camping! Actually, that's meant to read: Recreate an interdisciplinary Evergreen State College course titled "Seeing What's There" that combines looking at (and experiencing) landscapes with creative work. Check it out on my blog post from 10/15 - with photos!

Hold me to them! And feel free to collaborate on any of these - because, seriously, interdisciplinary work depends on working with each other. On pretty much everything.

The Evergreen State College: Coming into Interdisciplinary Studies

 This weekend, I went to the beach to clear my mind. It turns out that when you are at the beach, you don't stop thinking; you just think differently. Your mind is at leisure to wander. The sky, the pelicans, the sand, the shells - I saw what was there.

I remembered learning how to "see" - my first explorations into interdisciplinarity at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where I earned my undergraduate degree in a loosely-defined field of studies (languages, literatures, cultures?) in 1991. Evergreen provides a radical form of education, one that, from the first introductory two-quarter-long "program" (a set of courses encompassing four fields, co-taught by four professors in lectures and seminars), emphasizes connections and interrelations of disciplines. It also puts the student in control of his or her studies, something I appreciated. It was transformative: for the first time in many years, education and learning made sense to me. It was actually a lucky hit - I had no idea just how different Evergreen was from other colleges.

In the Spring of 1990, I signed up for a program titled "Seeing What's There" co-taught by my mentor Pete Sinclair (Chaucerian, writer, former mountaineer and Ranger) and his colleague Mark Levinsky (philosopher). On weekends, we traveled across the state of Washington and saw what was there. We climbed Mt. St. Helens; we hiked along a Pacific Ocean beach; we drove far into the desert of Eastern Washington. We kept very uptight naturalist's field journals according to a strict method established by Joseph Grinnell. (I still have mine.) We listened to and read poets and prose writers who wrote about landscapes. We drew, took photos, and wrote. Some of us wrote poetry and some of us wrote essays. On travel weekends in the field, we worked silently between 9 and 3. We also camped and got the vans stuck in the sand. We saw cranes - actually, we did not see them, they did not come, but we waited for them, in complete silence, for hours. There was a seriousness to the whole undertaking, an attentiveness, that was beyond structured formal education.

Upon completion of the course, I received, among other credits, two credit hours in "seeing." I am immensely proud of these credits. I learned how to see something: the variety of landscapes, the geography, the danger and pleasure in nature, the relevance of experiencing and valuing an environment, the relationship between experienced nature and written, or examined, filtered and processed, nature. I learned how difficult it is to approximate experience in writing, and I learned how to keep trying. There was, of course, group work: Janet Graham was my camping partner. We all formally presented our work at the end of the course.

My two years at Evergreen, spent on Chaucer, writing, Russian literature and culture and history (I failed the language part), on myths, on Alaskan studies (you had to be there), and on more reading and writing, prepared me perhaps better for graduate studies than a traditional course list might have. (For one thing, I would not have lasted.) I learned how to think, how to observe and analyze, how to evaluate what I saw, and how to choose and ask questions. I learned how to go after answers.

Learning is about connections, it is about relevance, and it is about seeing and experience. At Evergreen, I had the luxury of combining these pieces and earn a college degree in the process. At Coker, we can have a little bit of that, too, by offering an option to intentionally make those connections, give students the chance to engage and take charge of their education a little more. Who knows what that individual voyage will be about.

(If you look closely, you can see it's the same backpack. Someone designed it incredibly well - perhaps someone who knew about chemistry and materials and about outdoor adventure. Some interdisciplinarian, perhaps, who knew how to apply science to life.)

Real World Learning: Wear the (Intern) Hat!

What's the hardest thing to do when part of a sophomore class is an internship? Getting started! One third of the credit hours of the Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies class (35 hours of internship service) is earned by actually working in whatever field most closely or conveniently matches a student's interests - preferably not on Coker's campus. If you stay on campus, you are missing some of the funnest "real-world" aspects, and unless you want some very specific skills in Marketing and Communications or IT work, the convenience and safety of on-campus work are probably not worth it.
The internship is set up through our Office of Career Development, which has contact info for a long list of local businesses and organizations, such as the Chamber of Commerce and City Hall, Parks and Recreation, and many downtown stores, offices, and services.

Then: get ready! You need a resume and a general idea of what you want to learn about or what kind of work environment you want to experience. Think about what you can contribute to the organization, as well: tech skills? knowledge? ideas? Research the place you are interested in.
The Office of Career Development can help you set up an interview with the business or organization, or help you with contact info so you can get in touch with them yourself. Sometimes you have to be persistent!
Once you get started, be ready to be engaged. Last year, my students had all sorts of reports to share. A student whose interdisciplinary fields were writing and history put in his hours at the Hartsville Museum and walked all over downtown Hartsville to make an inventory of businesses and buildings one day - another day he helped curate an exhibit and organized artifacts. In a small business, you may be able to put your IT knowledge to work to tweak a router setup and spend hours chatting about entrepreneur challenges with the owner. And, if you are working for the City of Hartsville, one evening you may be left in charge of a busy downtown music event, directing traffic and vendors. "I'll be back in an hour - meanwhile, you wear the hat," says the City Manager, and then that's what you do: wear the hat!
The student who was left in charge that fall evening at the downtown Hartsville Block Party, wearing the hat, was terrified for one hot minute, but then he rose to the occasion - traffic was directed to parking, vendors were shown how to connect their power cables, and the music could start up. It was a lovely evening, and to this intern, the college campus, and how he thought about learning, appeared suddenly much larger. Well, perhaps not that much larger - it's still Hartsville.

Sending second-year students out in the community takes some faith, patience, and persistence - there are moments of panic, moments of boredom, transport crises, personal crises; it's sort of like sending pretty young people out to actually work. But there are also some real insights about how much creativity, flexibility, skills, and - yes: interdisciplinary thinking! - are required for a job well done. We can (and do) spend many hours reading a text book and talking about the implications of ideas, policies, and cross-disciplinary efforts, but at the end of the semester, the internship is probably the one most memorable part of the course. Totally worth the hassle.

Post-Hurricane Considerations

Last week, I did not put up a post - the weekend was consumed with not buying milk and bread, and with moving wind-vulnerable objects (lawn chairs, tools, bikes) into the wind-protected shelter of my ancient shed. The real risk to my home is the pecan tree that is leaning precariously and will probably sooner or later take down the corner of the house and the piano.

We all prepare, in some way, for weather. And then, afterwards, there is clean-up - FEMA and rescue services were rightly praised for better organization and communication than what we saw when Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. So, we are getting better at responding to extreme weather, which is probably a positive, as we are likely to see a good bit more of that in the future.

But, other than buying bread and milk, what else could we do? Acknowledging and responding to patterns in global warming, for example, comes to mind - scientists agree that man-made changes are affecting the earth's weather pattern. We must respond, and yet many of us prefer not to - we are set in our comforts, in our beliefs, and in our routines. An interdisciplinarian might be interested in asking questions about this: what would it take for an ordinary household to consider giving up fossil fuels? how could solar energy be marketed? what belief systems prevent a nation as educated and wealthy as the US from fully responding to the need to change our energy consumption and use of the environment (wetlands, forests, space in general)? These are complex issues, to be sure.

Interdisciplinarians are also aware of global issues. Hurricane Irma was tough enough on Florida and Georgia, but what about the islands in the Caribbean?

Clearly, any person interested in public health, a large field which relates several disciplines, such as medicine and epidemiology, social behavior, geography, politics, and history, would gain from having a look at the effects of Hurricane Irma.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, President Trump was asked whether the White House was reconsidering its stance of denying global warming, and his response was that this was not the time to do so; that this was the time to clean up and help victims.
I think he might be wrong.
This is indeed the time to ask and address some tough questions about how we live our lives and what effect our choices have on our global environment, and it is also the time to equip students with some skills to articulate questions about our future. Interdisciplinary Studies, with its emphasis on relationships between attitudes, science, humans, and, yes, even weather!, is an excellent starting point to provide and practice those skills.

Combining Skills and Credit Hours: The Pragmatic Approach to IS

This past week, two students came into my office, both of them in an educational pickle. (Two very different pickles.) Each had started on a track towards a major that turned out to be not sustainable. Now what?

Thirty years ago, if you went to a state college, had a work study job during the semesters and held down a full-time job in the summers, added on some reasonable support from your family, and abstained from dinners out, you could graduate in four years with a BA degree and hardly any debt.

Those days are over. The pressure is on: you have four years to get through, you take out massive loans, and at the end you better have something in your hand that counts - both in terms of actual career preparation (knowledge and skills) and signaling this preparation (the diploma).

You are pressured to choose a major and stick with it - by your parents, by your professors, and by society (all those times your parents' friends or your Aunt Ida asks you "what's your major?" - get your story straight!).

But what if you decide to change your mind? what if you started down the road of Biology and realize, two years in, that anatomy is not your thing? what if you dreamed of being a teacher since kindergarten, and then meet your first kindergarten class from the other side and say "Oh no! Ankle biters!"? what if you love dance, but injuries keep you off the stage? You have spent half your budget for your college education, and you feel stuck.

Enter Interdisciplinary Studies. We sit down together, look at your credit hour distribution in the fields you have already studied, and talk about your interests. Maybe you would be happy to combine your biology expertise with writing or drawing to work on informational material and text books? maybe you are excited to work with students one-on-one in a school setting? maybe you want to promote dance from behind the scenes? We find the courses that correspond to what you need to learn, and we work with professors who can help guide you.

This is what that can look like:

There are many careers that require organizational skills, business acumen, communication experience, and a deep understanding of how different fields come together in the real world. Often a combination of skills and knowledge from two or three different fields prepare a graduate better for a specific career than a single major might - and, since the courses in which you enroll actually often correspond very explicitly to your goals, much of what you continue to learn is directly applicable to your interests and ambitions.

Three students graduated from Coker this past spring with majors in Interdisciplinary Studies. They all had individual goals and ambitions, and we were able to create degree tracks that, although no less stringent than a single major, tapped into their potential to set them up for success.

Disciplinarity, Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity - You're Probably Doing It!

Three terms your spell check is troubled by, disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity, in fact are very common in academia - studying and teaching we encounter them every day. When we talk about General Education, we are considering strategies to encourage students to look beyond the single discipline of a field or a major - that single-field disciplinarity, which often yields a lot of deep knowledge within a specific area, can feel a little limiting when it comes to discovering contexts or solving problems.

In illustrating the limits of disciplinarity, academia has been talking about silos, huge storage units that keep everything properly contained. I am not a fan of that word, because it seems to disparage the disciplinary approach. But I did want to include the image to show how silos occur in academia. I promise, these silos contain much important knowledge! Very useful and exciting knowledge! And they are often very good at what they do.

In a General Education curriculum we expect students to take courses across several fields, but perhaps grouped around a single theme. For example, music, literature and history may all address a subject such as the African-American experience of the early 20th century. We could study all three fields and learn about jazz and blues, the poems of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and read W. E. B. Du Bois and Henry Louis Gates Jr. sequentially across three courses, and this multidisciplinary approach would create a broader understanding than a single-track approach might.

But what if we would like to know how our perception of history is shaped by the writings of Langston Hughes? If we are interested in the ways jazz music traveled north along some very specific routes during the Great Migration? How both jazz music and poetry can create personal experiences of history? Or if we want to find the beats and cadences of the blues in Sterling Brown's "Southern Road," and we would like to know more about the conditions of prison labor? When we begin to dig into these intersections and connections, we are practicing interdisciplinarity.

Each of these approaches has a place in academia - there will always be some of us who are excited by a pure science or a field of research that is clearly delineated. And there are some of us who like to look at something from different perspectives to understand it better. But some of us really like to look at the in-between, the both, or even the everything. It's all just fine, as long as we know what we are doing.

Monkey Appetite and Cave Music: TEDx Talks about crossing boundaries

Interdisciplinary studies is an academic field - but it is only useful as it reflects and relates to how professionals in the Real World approach their work: any problem they are trying to solve usually involves several angles, and the more tools you have in your toolbox, the more open you are to drawing on other fields and insights, the more likely you are to be successful.

This first TEDx talk is by a woman who works in cartography, or map making, and who starts out her presentation with the "monkey appetite" - the habit of reaching for everything that looks interesting, or for exploring all kinds of things. This researcher involves many different sciences to advance her research in maps as she gathers and understands data. You kind of have to hang in there when she talks about eye tracking and the brain, but I think even a non-scientist can appreciate the curiosity that drives this speaker’s own research across multiple boundaries.

This next speaker is for the seriously curious: He offers an account of the founding of the interdisciplinary field of acoustic archaeology (yes, sounds and caves!), which combines music, electrical engineering, and archaeology. He emphasizes the importance of collaboration and community-building across disciplines in order to create innovation. The talk introduces the concepts of interdisciplinarity: diversity, community size, dynamic participants, agents of connection, and respect for all fields. I also like the graphics!

That's it for today. One final thought: I particularly like how these two speakers promote curiosity. So often, we are told not to overthink, or to stay within the boundaries of some assignment, or to keep a focus on a specific question - but sometimes the really good stuff, the innovation, the problem solving, come when we push  those boundaries and follow instinct, or serendipity, or just the "monkey appetite."

...now vee may perhaps to begin?

You have to start somewhere - you can start with a definition, I suppose, and most of us start with the definition offered by google. It does not yield much! I demonstrate this to students in my Modern Fiction course, who are supposed to find a definition for "modernity" - and are being told that "modernity relates to being modern," which is not helpful, as we then all see.
But yes, "interdisciplinary" relates to multiple branches of knowledge, or disciplines - we may perhaps already wonder how knowledge is organized. And why! Education provides a lot of examples of such organization: courses, exams, text books, majors and minors, standards. Organization helps render an unbelievable amount of information manageable - we feel like we have mastered some part of a whole when we have read a chapter, passed an exam, earned a degree. Knowledge is framed, focused. On the other hand, those frames are somewhat arbitrary - and sometimes connections and relationships are cut off, in order to simplify what we look at.
Interdisciplinary studies allows for some of those connections and relationships to be added back in, to allow us to look at different contexts and intersections.