Is George Mason a Learning-Centered University?
David L. Potter (Provost, George Mason University)
© Copyright 1998-99 by David L. Potter (dpotter@gmu.edu) The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author. inventio is a publication of the Department of Instructional Improvement and Instructional Technologies (DoIIIT) at George Mason University, Fairfax VA.
"Is George Mason a learning-centered university?"
If we forego the urge to answer immediately "Of course!" and instead ask what might be entailed in being a learning-centered institution, we may engage in useful self-reflection. We may in that process reaffirm our institutional commitment to our central purpose--our learning mission, our essential functions--teaching, learning, scholarship and service, and our identity--how we see ourselves and how we might advantageously represent ourselves to others.
The question, and the consequent answers, may also be viewed as a response to several issues. We often are accused by outsiders of being "faculty-centered." In its extreme form, this criticism portrays us as operating the university for our convenience, inattentive to teaching--particularly undergraduates, and graduating poorly educated students. More recently, we hear advocacy for a purported antidote to this self-centeredness, a call for more "student-centered" institutions.
Carried to its extreme, this becomes a form of consumerism. If we endorse a learning-centered approach to these issues, we establish a goal that transcends the interests of any constituency and a focus that defines our respective and shared responsibilities.
The Real Problem: Students?
From the perspective of many faculty, the "real" problem is the quality of students, their qualifications and their unwillingness to take responsibility for full participation in higher education. When combined with a consumerist mentality, this is a volatile mix. At times, the measure of student quality is reduced to a preoccupation with Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of entering freshmen, despite our understanding that what good students bring goes far beyond any standardized test, and evidence that such tests are not good predictors of student performance.
In the George Mason context, this situation is exacerbated by a concern that students' energy and commitments are fragmented, with obligations to work, family and education competing, and overloaded. In more general terms, the disconnections between students' academic lives and the rest of their life experiences is at issue. Coherence and integration are missing ingredients. If we advocate learning as our measure of quality, we redirect our efforts toward strategies that enhance and deepen the learning our students achieve, and toward reconnecting their lives in support of that learning.
The Role of Technology
The role of technology in the academy is another issue that bears mention. The prospect of distance education raises a question about the role of place in our professional lives. For some, it also raises other troubling issues about the future of the profession, the makeup of the professoriate, the potential for overemphasis on workforce or economic development, the possible dissolution of important face-to-face bonds to name a few. If we assess the role of technology in relationship to its positive and negative contributions to learning, we may define an appropriate "place" for it in our institutional life.
To espouse that we become more self-consciously learning-centered is to advocate that the core of our work is learning, and that learning should be the fulcrum around which issues are considered and resolved. It also is to remind us that learning is what we do best. For many of us, that is a personal observation, shaping our identities and our choice of profession.
Implications for Faculty Work
Asserting the centrality of learning, however, does raise additional questions about our work. For example, the relationship between teaching and learning is not so clear, even though the purpose of teaching is to promote learning, to communicate what has been learned, and to strengthen students' ability to learn.
Consider the most memorable teachers each of you has had, and the remarkable variety of styles, circumstances and other factors that affected the learning you accomplished under their tutelage. Consider the question of how many students would pass your course examination six months later, the complicated relationship between learning achieved and learning lost. In making decisions about teaching, it is important to clarify the character of learning we intend and to recognize the complexities intervening between our teaching and students' learning.
The Role of Research
The role of research and scholarship and its relationship to learning also may be problematic, although the purpose of research is to create new knowledge and thereby to contribute to higher learning. The research enterprise often is vulnerable to the criticism that we are talking to ourselves, sharing our new learning with a small group of specialists who already know most of what we have to say. How can we make new knowledge more accessible and communicate it more effectively to others; how can we apply it to teaching and learning, to audiences in the broader society? How can we integrate more directly faculty scholarship and student learning, with respect to both its educational and its apprenticeship aspects?
One contribution that research can make more directly to learning is to engage in a new form of scholarship, marshalling what we know about learning as a process and applying it to the education of our students. We might envision faculty as engaged in dual scholarship, expected to be deep scholars of their respective disciplines, informed scholars of learning. Advances in several disciplines, for example neuroscience, brain research, artificial intelligence, the social sciences, educational psychology and others, are becoming available to inform and enrich our understanding of human learning. These findings, combined with our wisdom and experience as educators and with the results of recent documented successful educational reforms, can be our reference point. We need to engage with these disciplines and these other sources of knowledge about learning, and to incorporate them into our work and institutional cultures. In doing so, we need to transcend the knowledge of individuals to achieve more collective learning goals and understandings that we can accumulate and use. We need to draw on these findings to inform our pedagogy, curricula, and learning environments, and to define and refine the assessment of learning and the nature of our work.
What Do We Know about Learning?
Ted Marchese, of the American Association for Higher Education, has published a fascinating article summarizing what he calls "new conversations about learning" based on anthropology, cognitive science and workplace studies. These studies document that learning is a species characteristic, a fundamental adaptive capacity widely shared among humans, a way to make sense out of their experience of the world. This species characteristic is not always a virtue, since much of what is learned early, which develops as an individual's basic ideas of how things work, is difficult to change later.
Marchese offers several examples, including a video of Harvard graduates on commencement day answering the question of why it is warmer in summer than in winter. A remarkable proportion of these recent graduates gave the wrong answer despite their participation in college-level science courses. He cites a similar study published in the American Journal of Physics assessing the impact of college courses on student beliefs, which documents the persistence of Newtonian views of mechanics. In this instance, what students believed before the course is what they believed after, despite the right answers they gave during the course related to mechanics. And he mentions a neuroscience study of object perceptions which concluded that 80 percent of what winds up as the brain's image comes from information, ideas and feelings already in the brain, 20 percent from outside.
Marchese also describes European ethnographic studies of college students which show that surface learning-- cramming for facts rather than searching for meanings--dominates the educational system and that the predominance of surface learning increases as one moves through K-12 to higher education years. These studies report that surface learning also correlates with courses in which large amounts of material are included, coverage is a major preoccupation, learning environments are threatening and anxiety-laden, and students lack choices in what is to be studied and how. Positive correlations with deeper learning occur when students believe their own effort and control of the learning makes a difference in success.
In a similar vein, Marchese reports on a fifty-nation study of how students learn math and science. Differences among national profiles are traced to the clarity of learning goals, the number of topics covered, the opportunity to apply learning and to demonstrate understanding of concepts through problem-solving and verbalizing for meaning. For example, the average number of topics per year covered in a typical Japanese math course was found to be 6-10; the comparable number in U.S. math courses was 30-35. These anecdotal observations about learning studies suggest that knowledge of the learning process can and does make a difference.
I recently chaired a national Task Force on Student Learning appointed by the American Association for Higher Education, the American College Personnel Association and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. The charge to the task force was to be proponents for stronger collaborations between academic- and student-affairs offices on behalf of student learning. In doing its work, the task force put together some observations about learning based on our review of multiple disciplinary perspectives on the subject. We summarized these observations in the ten "principles" shown below. We then explored their implications for teaching, for learning materials and curricula, for the creation of effective learning environments and for the assessment of learning. I offer these principles as the starting point for a conversation about these implications, and how they might be transformed into concrete activities that could shape our work as teachers and our students' educational experiences as learners.
In light of these principles, how can we become a more learning-centered university?
TEN PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING
THE PRINCIPLE OF CONNECTEDNESS: Learning is fundamentally about making and maintaining connections: biologically through neural networks; mentally among concepts, ideas and meanings; and experientially through interaction between the mind and the environment, self and other, generality and context, deliberation and action.
THE PRINCIPLE OF A COMPELLING SITUATION: Learning is enhanced by taking place in the context of a compelling situation that balances challenge and opportunity, stimulating and utilizing the brain's ability to conceptualize quickly and its capacity and need for contemplation and reflection upon experiences.
THE PRINCIPLE OF AN ACTIVE SEARCH FOR MEANING: Learning is an active search for meaning by the learner-- constructing knowledge rather than passively receiving it, shaping as well as being shaped by experiences.
THE PRINCIPLE OF DEVELOPMENT AND HOLISM: Learning is developmental, a cumulative process involving the whole person, relating past and present, integrating the new with the old, starting from but transcending personal concerns and interests.
THE PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL INTERACTION: Learning is done by individuals who are intrinsically tied to others as social beings, interacting as competitors or collaborators, constraining or supporting the learning process, and able to enhance learning through cooperation and sharing.
THE PRINCIPLE OF THE LEARNING CLIMATE: Learning is strongly affected by the educational climate in which it takes place: the settings and surroundings, the influences of others, and the values accorded to the life of the mind and to learning achievements.
THE PRINCIPLE OF FEEDBACK AND USE: Learning requires frequent feedback if it is to be sustained, practice if it is to be nourished, and opportunities to use what has been learned.
THE PRINCIPLE OF INCIDENTAL LEARNING: Much learning takes place informally and incidentally, beyond explicit teaching or the classroom, in casual contacts with faculty and staff, peers, campus life, active social and community involvements, and unplanned but fertile and complex situations.
THE PRINCIPLE OF GROUNDEDNESS: Learning is grounded in particular contexts and individual experiences, requiring effort to transfer specific knowledge and skills to other circumstances or to more general understandings and to unlearn personal views and approaches when confronted by new information.
THE PRINCIPLE OF SELF-MONITORING: Learning involves the ability of individuals to monitor their own learning, to understand how knowledge is acquired, to develop strategies for learning based on discerning their capacities and limitations, and to be aware of their own ways of knowing in approaching new bodies of knowledge and disciplinary frameworks.
Acknowledgment and References
This article is adapted from a presentation to the George Mason faculty, December
1998.
American Association for Higher Education, American College Personnel Association, and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. Powerful Partnerships: A Shared Responsibility for Learning. June 1998.
Marchese, Theodore J. "The New Conversations about Learning. Insights from Neuroscience and Anthropology, Cognitive Science and Work-Place Studies." (Reviewed in manuscript.)
DAVID L. POTTER (dpotter@gmu.edu) is the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at George Mason University. Prior to coming to George Mason University, Dr. Potter served in several capacities with the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) from 1981 to 1986. Dr. Potter earned his master's and doctoral degrees at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.