UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

Core Matters

As of the 2020-2021 academic year, UP is planning to implement a 'revitalized' University Core Curriculum that will phase in over several years starting in the Fall of the 2021-2022 academic year. This 'Core Matters' site was originally a space for sharing ideas about Core courses prior to revitalization; those ideas (in the form of some excellent essays) are still available in this feed published between 2018 and 2020. It is also now a space for sharing information about the revitalized Core, with links and posts to be added over time as the implementation process proceeds.

Starting Fall 2020, the Core implementation is being coordinated by Andrew Guest from the Department of Psychological Sciences in a new Core Curriculum Director position. Feel free to contact the Core Director with any questions at guesta@up.edu.

For UP community members, more technical information about the revitalized Core - including the proposal approved by the Academic Senate in November of 2019 - is available through pilots.up.edu.

Other general information, updates, and ideas are shared below...

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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.

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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

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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.”

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The Revitalized Core: A Fall 2020 Update

Door and books
Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash

Some of you may remember many eons ago, in those halcyon days pre-pandemic, that UP’s Academic Senate approved a “revitalized University Core Curriculum.” It was approved, to be specific, in November of 2019 after several years of gathering input and information, committee work, and consultation with departments across the UP community. The intention was and is to phase in the revitalized Core for entering students in the Fall of 2021. The purpose of this post is to update the UP community on where the Core revitalization process stands and on plans for moving forward.

First, a number of people have asked whether it even makes sense to proceed with implementation plans given the extraordinary circumstances of our present academic life. This is a reasonable question. UP’s academic leadership is, however, in favor of moving forward for a variety of reasons.

For one, a University Core Curriculum is a very slow moving thing that impacts all student academic experiences and requires years to revise. The UP Core was last substantively revised over 20 years ago, and our recent revitalization process is now in year 4 of a projected 8 year cycle. To stop or delay now would put much important work, and the quality of the Core, at serious risk.

Relatedly, the Core does need to be updated. Our Core is behind the academic times in regard to coverage of key topics such as diversity, equity, inclusion, and racial justice, and our Core often lacks the sense of communal, progressive, and intentional intellectual endeavor that is essential to a quality liberal arts education. The prior Core has served UP well, and offers many excellent classes, but after 20 years it needs revitalization.

At the same time, there is a clear recognition that the Core revitalization cannot proceed as it would in “normal” academic times. As we push forward, we are also actively thinking about ways to keep forward momentum without unrealistic asks of faculty and staff. We want to be in communication about what is realistic, and we are happy to compromise.

As one example, in trade for some advance planning for the start of phased implementation in the Fall of 2021 we are working to minimize (and in most cases eliminate) Core assessment exercises this 2020-2021 academic year. We will still ask people to help lay a foundation for effective assessment of the Core in the future – but given the circumstances it seems unnecessary to assess a Core that is being phased out during such as challenging year. As we push forward with the revitalization process, we’ll continue to actively find such compromises in ways that balance the quality of the future Core with the real human needs of faculty and staff.

So, what is the future of the revitalization process? One feature of the revitalized Core is a series of progressive levels for Core courses.

  • This starts with a new introductory Anchor Seminar (as an introduction to the liberal arts and to UP’s Core);
  • Continues with a “Foundation Level” largely comprised of existing Core courses;
  • Moves to an “Exploration Level” offering new interdisciplinary opportunities for courses that build on Foundation level classes;
  • And culminates with an “Integration Level” that will largely involve completing a portfolio encouraging reflection on Core educational experiences.

For the Fall of 2021, our plan is to only start the Anchor Seminar and the new Foundation Level. Because the Foundation Level is largely comprised of courses in the current Core, the new work should be minimal for most faculty and academic staff – mostly involving new student learning outcomes that can guide course organization towards consistency and coherence with a new set of six “Habits of Heart and Mind” that should be the result of a UP education. We will also be identifying approximately eight regular faculty to teach sections of the new Anchor Seminar. We hope to identify these faculty this Fall of 2020 so that departments have time to plan for the one course a faculty members gives up to teach in the Anchor Seminar. More information about teaching the new Anchor Seminar will be forthcoming.

The next phase of revitalized Core implementation for the 2022-2023 academic year will be the new “Exploration Level” courses. While the Foundation Level courses will come exclusively from CAS as UP’s liberal arts college, Exploration level courses can come from any college or professional school – as long as the courses employ a liberal arts lens. We’ll be sharing much more information about these courses over time, and will have opportunities to intentionally plan course possibilities in the 2021-2022 academic year run-up to implementation.

The final phase of revitalized Core implementation will likely start in 2023-2024 with the new integration assignment (the completion of a portfolio) in collaboration with majors. By the Fall semester of 2024, all students should be taking the revitalized Core and the current Core will be completely phased out.

Core director by a campus window
Dr. Andrew Guest is serving as Core Director as of the Fall of 2020.

We have many practical questions to deal with within this implementation timeline, and will try to provide more regular updates here and elsewhere on the UP website. if you have specific questions please reach out to me in my role as the new Core Curriculum Director – guesta@up.edu. As one near-term update priority, I am putting together a document outlining key differences between the current Core and the revitalized Core in hopes that will facilitate advising and discussions about transfer credits. I hope to post something about that here, and elsewhere, soon.

I also appreciate any follow-up questions; the essence of my job as Core Director is to generate collaborative ideas about how to make sure the revitalized Core fits our shared mission, builds on faculty expertise, and enhances the educational experience of our students!