UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

Andrew Guest

By

The Once and Future Core Course: Imagining (and Designing) the Exploration Level

Compass on a beach
Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

One major impetus for revitalizing the University Core was to provide more opportunities for creative interdisciplinary courses that could include a wide variety of perspectives, including points where the liberal arts meet professional disciplines. This was of interest to students, faculty, and administration alike, and it resulted in a proposed new “Exploration Level” of courses to follow the Foundation Level (with the Foundation Level itself being evolution of the current Core focused on introducing disciplinary lenses). 

UP faculty have seemed excited about the concept: after getting a foundation in the liberal arts, every UP student will take two courses that creatively integrate multiple Core Habits to explore timely and timeless issues of ongoing concern — sometimes through team-teaching, linked courses, or other ways of connecting across disciplines. While the Foundation Level should provide broad ‘ways of knowing’ from the liberal arts, the Exploration Level should use those ways of knowing to enable ‘ways of understanding and creating’ that are relevant to students’ lives and our society. How can we draw on different ways of knowing to better understand creative problem solving, or immigration and globalization, or justice and inequality, or what it means to live a good life, or the role of rituals in our lives, or any other of the many possible topics that deserve attention in a UP education?

Now it’s time to ask those questions and put the Exploration Level concept into practice. These evolved and new courses are going to phase into the Core in the Fall of 2022, which means Exploration Level courses need to be ready for schedule submission in the Fall of 2021. This, in turn, means the time is now to imagine and design Exploration Level courses.

While the final details of Exploration Level course types and criteria are still working through approval processes with the Curriculum and Academic Regulations (CAR) committee of the Academic Senate, a draft version is available for UP faculty and staff on pilots.up.edu/group/core-curriculum. But in hopes of sparking the type of creative thinking and updating that often happens for our courses in the summer, below is a brief summary of how we hope faculty can help enact their expressed interest in Exploration Level courses.

First, it is worth emphasizing that to be able to offer enough Exploration Level courses to make this work, many will necessarily be evolutions of current upper-division courses that are accessible for non-majors. Many of the current 300 level Theology classes, for example, will likely transition to become Exploration Level offerings (though a 300 level Theology class will non longer be a Core requirement, we expect many students will continue to take an upper-division course with Theological dimensions). Likewise, we hope many History classes, Environmental Science classes, and any other of the many 300 level courses that lend themselves to interdisciplinary inquiry will offer at least some Exploration Level seats. These courses will need to demonstrate how they will address multiple Core Habits, and will need to be approved by the Undergraduate Core Curriculum Committee and the Core Director. But we hope this provides a useful chance for faculty to think about how they are, and could be, interdisciplinary in their current courses.

Other Exploration Level courses will also build off and hopefully go beyond existing models. These should include team-taught courses (such as Theological Perspectives courses), linked courses (such as courses from English and Environmental Sciences that have been intentionally linked around themes of food), and even what we are thinking of as University Big Ideas courses (such as the Imagining our Futures class which drew on more than a dozen faculty to offer multi-disciplinary perspectives on COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and climate change). These types of courses are all described further in documents on pilots.up.edu, and will be the subject of upcoming workshops. There are also some small course development funds available to faculty interested in significantly updating existing courses or developing new courses for the Exploration Level — please see information on the pilots.up.edu Core page and also feel free to reach out to Andrew Guest (guesta@up.edu) in his Core Director role for more information.

We will start approving these courses in the Fall of 2021 so they can be put on the schedule for Fall of 2022 — though only first-year students entering in the Fall of 21 or after will have to fulfill Exploration Level requirements. In other words, the courses will be phased in over the course of about three years until all UP students need to fulfill the revitalized Core requirements. So we should have some time to work out the details, and to learn what works best. But we don’t have any time to waste in imagining (and re-imagining) what our own future Exploration Level courses could look like.

By

What Should Our Students Read? An Invitation and Introduction

An old book
(Photo by Bill Griepenstroh on Unsplash)

At its best, a liberal arts core curriculum engages students and faculty in thinking about big ideas — how is knowledge constructed; how can we make our communities more just and inclusive; how can we balance faith and reason; what can inspire wonder and curiosity. In UP’s revitalized Core, we are hoping to start introducing students to the big ideas of a UP education in our new Anchor Seminar. This one-credit course starting next Fall will be both an evolution of the current first-year workshop and a chance for faculty to start engaging students in the values of the liberal arts. Though we won’t have a great deal of time in this one course, the hope is to start students on educational journeys that include taking time to think, reflect, and learn from the wisdom of great works and thoughtful writings relevant to UP. 

So what are those great works and thoughtful writings? Answering this question is a task that the first group of Anchor Seminar faculty (including myself, Simon Aihiokhai from Theology, Karen Eifler from Education, Christi Hancock from History, Fr. Pat Hannon from English, Gregory Pulver from Performing and Fine Arts, Lisa Reed from Business, and Stephanie Salomone from Math) are working on in the run up to the first Anchor Seminar offerings in the Fall of 2021. We’re putting the answer into the form of what is tentatively titled the “Purple Book” — a living anthology of (mostly) written works that just might be representative of what is at the core of a UP education. The goal is to have something to share with all incoming UP students next academic year, and to be able to select from the Purple Book in crafting weekly meetings for our Anchor Seminar classes. 

The hope is that over time the Purple Book can feel like a community project, where we collectively share ideas about what students should read and consider as they engage their academic journey at UP. So we need your help. Within the broad frame of UP’s Core, what great works and thoughtful writings would you most want students to sample?  

The criteria we’re using at the moment suggest that material in each section of the Purple Book represent intentional selections that ideally:

  • Relate to topics taught in the UP Core Curriculum;
  • Stand the test of time (or are likely to do so);
  • Engage the attention of a first year student, in part through brevity;
  • Open opportunities for constructive discussion;
  • Represent a healthy diversity of perspectives;
  • Connect to UP’s mission and identity.

The sections are oriented by the “Habits of Heart and Mind” that organize the revitalized Core, and by the themes of the Anchor Seminar course:

  • The Liberal Arts: What is the value of free inquiry across a breadth of disciplinary perspectives? What academic skills are important to a successful liberal arts education?
  • Community: How does this particular place, as a Holy Cross institution in Portland Oregon serving a diverse student body, shape what we can and should learn?
  • Ways of Knowing: How can we respect diverse perspectives while having shared truth claims as we explore new and challenging ideas?
  • Habits of Heart and Mind (framing the UP Core Curriculum): What knowledge, skills, and values are embedded in the UP Core and in the liberal arts more broadly?
    • Literacy, Dialogue, and Expression
    • Religion, Faith, and Ethics
    • Aesthetic Inquiry, Imagination, and the Creative Process
    • Scientific and Quantitative Literacy and Problem Solving
    • Commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, and the Common Good
    • Global and Historical Consciousness
  • Hope: How might we use the values of a UP education to pursue meaningful and productive lives in a just society?

As just a few examples that only start to represent the type of mix we might ultimately land upon, for the Scientific and Quantitative Literacy and Problem Solving section we’ve been looking at readings such as Mathematics for Human Flourishing by Francis Su and “The Wonderful Mistake” by Lewis Thomas. Or, as examples related to the Global and Historical Consciousness section, we’ve been looking at readings such as In History by Jamaica Kincaid and The Truth About Alonzo by Walidah Imarisha (the latter of which being a recent Portland Magazine piece that might highlight how our own students can put history into practice). The ultimate vision is to have 5-10 readings in each section, meaning that it will be a very incomplete but suggestive list.

My Anchor Seminar faculty colleagues have been good to remind me that we also want to make things fun — bringing in playfulness and wonder when possible (leading to suggestions such as “Gateways to Wonder” by John O’Donoghue). But for me some of the most fun is in hearing about the writings and ideas that matter to my colleagues — so I’d love to hear from others in the UP community about what you think our new first year students should read. If you have suggestions, please be in touch (guesta@up.edu).

By

Teaching the Truth

Small sign saying truth on pavement
Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash

In recent weeks, months, and years, amidst a series of difficult political moments, I’ve found myself thinking regularly about the University of Portland motto: Veritas vos liberabit, or “the truth will set us free.” I assume it was originally selected for its overlapping meanings – referring both to religious truth, as in John 8:32 “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” and to truth as the object of academic inquiry. I also assume we can all agree in the abstract that shared truths are critical to a good liberal arts education at the University of Portland (and, as if to reinforce that value, our recently retired Provost even titled his departing collection of UP defining essays “Veritas vos Liberabit”). It is, in fact, a key value to a good liberal arts education anywhere – according to that contemporary arbiter of “truth” Wikipedia “The truth will set you free” is a motto shared by U.P. and other universities ranging from the University of Tennessee, to Canterbury Christ Church University in England, to the Catholic University of Uruguay, to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

 

But, given the current state of public discourse and the power our society has given to people who lie brazenly, dangerously, and pathologically, we can’t assume that our students will recognize the importance of the truth. Not, at least, without a collective commitment to understanding truth itself. This commitment is essential to our Core curriculum, it is essential to the liberal arts, and it may be more difficult to achieve than it first appears.

 

The president of Rollins College articulated this nicely in a 2018 essay on truth and the liberal arts for Inside Higher Education:

A liberally educated person is one who is free — equipped and empowered — to make up their own mind, not subject to the authority of others, not easily swayed by charlatans. If we accomplish nothing else, our graduates should have sufficient skills in reasoning and critical thinking to recognize the difference between a sound argument and demagoguery.

All that said, we academics have become shy about teaching facts. Because we are all so schooled in the tools of critique, there is hardly a truth claim that we cannot interrogate, deconstruct or criticize. Consequently, we have often substituted the teaching of intellectual skills and critical thinking for teaching with any confidence what is the case in the world.”

 

So how, in the face of both demagoguery and critical deconstruction, might we teach the truth? The only fair answer is probably: very carefully. It’s not easy, and there are real issues of power and privilege that too often shape what we accept as truth. The truth may also mean different things in different disciplines. In many academic contexts there are plural truths (though almost never, despite mean-spirited critiques, do academics really believe the truth is completely relative). And there may also be plural ways to weave discussions of truth into our classes and our curriculum.

 

In the revitalized Core we are going to try to start students thinking about truth as part of a liberal arts education in the new Anchor Seminar – an evolution of the first year workshop that all new students will take starting in the Fall of 2021. One goal for that course will be to introduce students to information literacy and academic integrity, which are both key topics if we want students to value truth. But it will be a necessarily brief introduction, and will require much support from the rest of the courses students take throughout their University of Portland education. Many UP faculty will already know better than I how to weave the value of the truth into other classes, but in hopes of sparking some further thinking on the topic here’s just a few ideas I’ve come across in my own recent truth explorations (several of which are derived from a good recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Teaching in the Age of Disinformation” and an accompanying teaching guide):

 

Teach truth when you talk about academic integrity and plagiarism. Students generally know that they shouldn’t just cut-and-paste other people’s words as their own. That doesn’t always stop them from doing it, but there is usually still a general sense that it is wrong. But I’m not sure students think about it as a threat to the truth – as a small lie that can aid and abet bigger lies. In my own classes I often just take for granted that students know they shouldn’t plagiarize – but I rarely take assignments as a chance to talk through why plagiarism is a threat not just to individual grades but also to shared truth claims. Our UP library has some useful resources related to helping students understand plagiarism on their web-site, and maybe sometimes our rubrics can occasionally open opportunities to discuss bigger ideas about the origins of ideas?

 

Teach truth by helping students develop information literacy. I generally find students to be really good at looking things up on the internet, and not really good at discerning whether the things they find are legitimate and truthful. Things that seem simple to us as academics, like the difference between peer-reviewed research and journalism, need unpacking for students. And we all know the proliferation of internet sources has made information literacy more important and more challenging. Fortunately, there are experts – including many librarians such as those in our UP team – who have ways of helping students sift information. As examples of sources I’ve seen referenced lately, here is a useful looking open-source book by a WSU-Vancouver scholar on Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers…and other people who care about facts, here’s The Debunking Handbook “written by a team of 22 prominent scholars of misinformation”, and here’s a guide to “Citizen Literacy” from the University of Louisville library.

 

Teach truth when you discuss disciplinary methods and “ways of knowing.” All academic disciplines have methodology courses that are central to their field of study both because students need to know those methods to do the discipline and because those methods are the way disciplines know their truths. Sometimes, however, we may focus more on the methods and results than we do on the discussion. The Chronicle article referenced above talks about this in relation to data science and discussions of things like COVID-19, where we often default to an over-simplified “follow the science” mantra. The suggestion there is that: “Students would benefit…if professors spent more time explaining how their discipline functions. Who do the experts turn to to understand how something in their field works? How is knowledge built? Describing to students how the World Health Organization comes up with its guidance around Covid-19, and how that differs from the CDC’s decision-making process, he says, is of greater long-term value for most students than understanding how mitochondria operate.” While this fits with the sciences, it would likely be useful for any faculty (and not just philosophers talking about epistemology) to have explicit discussions with students about how the methodologies we all teach are actually ways of defining the truth.

 

Teach truth when helping students make arguments and have discussions. One of the foundational things I tell students about social science is that claims have to be based on evidence. In the social sciences we are after empirical truths, and the scientific method provides the ultimate foundation for those truths. Sometimes I even make analogies to our legal system – for a legal claim to be valid, it has to have evidence. Lawyers can object when truth claims are just “speculation,” and my students should object when social scientists (or their peers) make claims without evidence. Yet I’m consistently amazed by how many students have been conditioned over time to start their claims with “I believe…” or “In my opinion…” Having beliefs and opinions are important and may constitute personal truths, but for an academic community (or any community) to function we have to have the types of shared truths that need real evidence. Evidence can come in many forms, and what constitutes evidence will vary by academic discipline. But evidence is a reason we know that the recent U.S. presidential election was not stolen (because our judicial system worked and dismissed the dozens of speculative cases that had no real evidence), and having respect for evidence is one critical way that the truth might indeed ultimately set us free.

By

Difficult Conversations and Liberal Arts Ideals

Conversation art - metal megaphones
Photo by Tom Hill on Unsplash

A good college education, even in the best of times, requires having difficult conversations. We can only learn and grow when confronted with new ways of thinking; engaging diverse and challenging ideas in an inclusive educational community is central to a liberal arts education and essential to the University of Portland Core curriculum. These particular times (November of annus horribilis 2020), however, are not the best – making the having of difficult conversations more fraught. And, just maybe, more important.

There is, unfortunately, no magic formula – but there are lots of recipes, and a general sense that good teaching requires thoughtful attention to creating classroom (or Zoomroom) communities that make difficult conversations healthy and educational. Michael Roth, the president of leading liberal arts university Wesleyan, writes about making “safe enough spaces” where colleges balance a careful attention to student well-being with the necessity of being exposed to different and uncomfortable viewpoints. In our deeply divided country, we need spaces where we can learn and feel a sense of inclusive community even if we don’t agree.

Some of the recipes I’ve come across are less specific to higher education, but may have relevance at this cultural moment. Organizations such as Braver Angles and Essential Partners (see also here), for example, both have guides specific to political conversations “across the red-blue divide.” James Madison University has also put out a guide for their academic community about “Facilitating Difficult Election Conversations.”

In other domains, in organizing “peer-to-peer conversations about race” last summer UP’s Office of International Education, Diversity, and Inclusion offered a “Guide to Respectful Conversations” by the non-profit Repair the World. I’ve also had psychology colleagues point me to a University of Michigan guide on “Intergroup Dialogue.”

My personal favorite, likely because it was formulated by social scientists thinking specifically about academic contexts, is the guidelines from the Heterodox Academy. The group itself tries to promote ‘viewpoint diversity’ in higher education, and I don’t always agree with all of their approach. But that, I suppose, is part of the point: to disagree, but still learn.

Their guidelines, which I do really like, include five points of emphasis:

Make your case with evidence. In my own classes I find students often default to talking about issues by prefacing “I feel that…” or “I believe that…” and those kinds of framings can be important in some contexts – it is good to have feelings and beliefs. But I tell students that in academic contexts, or at least in social science, as much as possible we want to focus on evidence – what do we know from research, observations, and direct experience?

Be intellectually charitable. This one is relatively simple: for discussion and learning, start by assuming someone you disagree with might be right. Be willing to explore a reasonable other position deeply, for the sake of understanding.

Be intellectually humble. This one is also simple: assume your position might be wrong. Be genuinely open to changing your mind.

Be constructive: This one may be the most important: don’t approach challenging academic discussions with the goal of being right or proving another wrong. Approach academic discussions as a chance to learn. As the Heterodox Academy puts it “target ideas rather than people.”

Be yourself: In our increasingly virtual lives, it can be easy to hind behind blank screens and user (rather than real) names. But we learn more when we are present with our real selves.

I’ve started sharing these ideas with my students, and keeping them in my own mind as I confront challenging conversations of both academic and non-academic types. They are surprisingly hard to execute. Respecting evidence, being charitable, being humble, being constructive, and being present are not the direction our broad cultural discourse seems to be moving. But, at least in classrooms and when trying to bring the values of the liberal arts to our students, they might help us learn from our difficult times.

Poster of the Heterodox Academy Way

By

What’s in a title (and course description)?

typewriter with the word goals
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

In much of higher education, as at UP, most course titles and descriptions have served a utilitarian function: they identify the disciplinary perspective on offer, and the basic content to be covered. Such titles and descriptions serve their purpose. They allow us to describe basic curricular components, to evaluate transfer credits, to meet accreditation requirements, etc..

Such titles and descriptions are also often dead boring. They don’t reflect the real energy, thought, and wisdom that goes into our courses. Most of our titles and descriptions don’t tantalize students and our shared educational community with all the wonderous things they can learn.

In my new role as Core director, I’ve found myself recently spending more time than I’d thought possible thinking about course titles and descriptions. Why? Because one major impetus for the Core curriculum revitalization is to bring more coherence, intention, and engagement to the shared educational experience at UP. While most of that work will happen in classrooms and the curriculum itself, some of that work starts before classes ever meet in how we think about our Core courses. The most basic manifestation of that thinking is course titles and descriptions: what, at their essence, are our courses up to?

Historically, many Core courses have doubled as disciplinary introductions. That won’t change, and there is lots of disciplinary content that is important for students to learn. But there are also many students taking Core courses who may never again need said bits of disciplinary knowledge. They will, however, need ways of thinking offered by the liberal arts. These ways of thinking, in our revitalized Core, are summarized by the six “habits of heart and mind” that organize Core classes. And we can help to make them coherent, intentional, and even tantalizing by crafting learning-centered titles and descriptions.

Making distinctions between educational materials and pedagogy that are “learning-centered” and “content-centered” is central to much contemporary educational research. The old “sage on the stage” model of education is “content-centered,” while the new interactive educational experiences we use to engage students and enhance how they learn and grow is “learning-centered.” Titles and descriptions exist at various places on the continuum between learning and content centered, with the best ones striking an engaging balance.

As one example from UP of how to strike this balance in a title, I like our English department Core course ENG 112: Thinking through Literature. The title used to be more content-centered: Introduction to Literature. But the faculty realized the course was about more than just introducing students to a discipline. It was also about helping student who might never again take a literature course to recognize the value of using literature to enhance our ways of thinking and understanding the world. All it took was a subtle, but meaningful, change of a few words.

I’ve also been playing with this shift for my department’s introductory psychology course, which we’ve forever called “General Psychology.” Fine, but not very engaging. We’re moving the title to something like “Psychological Science” to better reflect the scientific lens on offer. And I’m thinking through ways of making the shared description more inviting and learning-centered (while still under the registrar’s 60 word limit), moving from:

General Psychology offers an overview of psychological science, which uses theory and empirical methods toward understanding thought, feeling, and behavior. The course will introduce students to the methods of psychological research, and to topics including personality, learning, development, cognition, social psychology, abnormal psychology, the biological basis of behavior, and mental health.”

To something more like:

How does the mind work, and how can science help us better understand human experience? This course approaches such questions through an overview of major topics in contemporary psychology and through an integration of biological, cognitive, and sociocultural perspectives. Students will deploy a scientific lens in the exploration of human nature and examination of contemporary social problems.”

By themselves such changes may not have a huge influence on student learning experiences. But over time the hope is that they can help faculty, students, and any other interested community members to share an understanding of how we can all benefit from a broad engagement with the liberal arts and with the specific knowledge, skills, and values on offer at UP. There is even some evidence that such “invitational” framing of college courses in material such as syllabi can enhance the actual learning environment.

And Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning further offers a guide on creating good “catalogue materials” with a nice summation:

Course catalogue materials…may seem somewhat disconnected from the process of course design. You may consider these aspects of your course to be mere “advertising” (or, depending on how you believe students select their courses, to be altogether irrelevant). Yet the act of composing your course description can be a useful “self-test” on the road to great course design. Challenging yourself to describe the central issue(s) of your course, the kinds of material students will encounter, and the goals which you have for them by the end of the semester in a brief paragraph can be just the thing to clarify the voice in which your syllabus and assignment prompts will speak.”