Darden Business School Rediscovers Its Right Brain

Plesae scroll down to your SCUP Link, below this notice about SCUP–45.

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

---

---

SCUP Link

Darden finds a solution to teaching innovation and creativity by studying the programs in graphic arts and design schools, and schools of architecture. From Today's Campus:

Design, story, leadership, symphony, play and meaning predominate. Pink says these qualities are the new business literacy, and the MFA is the new MBA . . . Darden chose not to change a reworked MBA to an MFA, but to complement the de rigueur of accounting, finance, labor law and management with a team-based, collaborative search for creativity . . . That makes sense at a university founded by an extraordinary man who – as a horticulturist, philosopher, politician, farmer, architect, archaeologist, paleontologist, inventor, writer and U.S. president – used both sides of his brain quite well.

---

---

SCUP's Planning Institute: Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers while you engage in one of the three SCUP Planning Institute Steps. In addition to being offered on demand, on campuses to teams of campus leaders, the institute steps are also offered to all professionals at varying times and venues. Currently scheduled are:

• May 22–23, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• July 10, Minneapolis, MN - Step I (in conjunction with SCUP–45)
• October 2, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• January 21–22, Tuscon, AZ - Step II and Step III

Sustainability: Community College Course Offers Housing Solution for Families in Need in California

This brief case study outlines the process of developing and implementing an inexpensive community college course curriculum that could be used just about anywhere for outreach to families on the edge:

We have found ourselves with an unfortunate confluence involving a community that has traditionally put a low premium on education, industries that have outgrown their labor force, and a region that is so stunningly beautiful that people would rather live here in poverty than move to urban areas where there are more jobs. For many, this place has been their home for generations, and they intend to stay.

Our poverty carries the same consequences that exist wherever there is poverty: substance abuse, domestic violence, health problems, substandard housing, child neglect, and a loss of hope. No community college can cure these problems, but every community college serving an impoverished community has the obligation to boldly address them. We took a run at the housing issues that were preventing students and potential students, most of them single mothers, from focusing on their studies.

***

Minimal Costs, Life-Changing Benefits. We started with a budget of $600 for this program, anticipating that we would receive $300 in fees from students and spend perhaps twice that amount on instructor stipends and so forth. Thanks to the generosity of instructors who refused the stipend and to CRDN for not charging a facility rental fee, the entire first class cost $365, $210 of which was offset by registration fees. This is a program that can be easily replicated anywhere, including in communities without a community college partner.

At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

We have visited the MIT Introductory Physics classroom described as part of this story. It is not surprising that the flunk out rate in that class has declined to about 1/3 of what it was before the change in space and programming for that space:

But now, with physicists across the country pushing for universities to do a better job of teaching science, M.I.T. has made a striking change.

The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.

Sustainable Curriculums

Elizabeth Redden reports on some of the AASHE conference for Inside Higher Ed:

Here at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education conference, which concluded Tuesday, plenty of sessions focused on the operations side of things — energy savings, transportation demand management, and commercial composting. But also in town to give talks were a significant number of faculty members, from a wide range of disciplines, interested in leading from the classroom lectern.

“When you go back to your colleges and the math faculty say ‘I can’t do sustainability in the classroom,’ you can say, ‘No, no, I know someone who does it,’ ” said Thomas Pfaff, of Ithaca College.

Pfaff does it. As outlined on his Web site, his classes use real-world data, such as data on world grain production or atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, as a starting point for standard calculus problems. “None of this in my mind requires changing the calculus content,” said Pfaff, who said that in solving the problems students find opportunities for reflection.

“They’re not simply being told there is a problem, and I’m not telling them there is a problem…. I just give them the data and you tell me what’s going on,” said Pfaff.

How to Get the Academic Side of Things More in Synch With Sustainability

It should be especially interesting to SCUPers that some very intriguing thoughts about curriculum change are coming from the anonymous Getting to Green blogger, G. Rendell. His latest post is titled "Realistic Radicalism."

[David Orr is] quoted as saying, “The main architecture of the curricula is sacrosanct ... Conversations still don’t easily cross back and forth between disciplines. And anything that begins to threaten that structure dies a pretty quick and painful death.” . . . In a nutshell, the complexity inherent in the information we need to exist in this world intelligently has surpassed the organizational capacities of our current system of academic disciplines. . . . So here’s a modest proposal — no more single-subject, or even single-faculty (in the British usage) degrees. If your major is already trans-disciplinary, you’re fine. If you have two majors, drawing on differing academic traditions, you’re fine. However, if you’re majoring only in a subject among the humanities, you need to at least minor in a social or a physical science. If you’re majoring only in a physical science, you need to at least minor in one of the humanities or social sciences. And so forth.

As a solution to strict disciplinary thinking, this is an incomplete solution. But it’s one which could be implemented more quickly and with less resistance (note, not zero resistance) than a true trans-disciplinary reworking of the academic organization.

An Investigative Interdisciplinary Lab: The Harvey Mudd College Story

For many years now, SCUPer Jeanne Narum and Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) have been engaging in research and learning related to all aspects of improving STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education. Aspects of PKAL's research range from studying the development of faculty leadership through the design of learning space. This item is a "What Works - A PKAL Essay" titled An Investigative Interdisciplinary Lab: The Harvey Mudd College Story:

This laboratory course was developed by a small core of committed faculty with the support of the three participating departments and the vice president for academic affairs/dean of faculty.

The faculty members met once a week in the spring semester to design the laboratory with the intention of testing the proposed experiments in the following summer with a team of undergraduate students prior to the fall semester implementation. This planning time was crucial to the efficient use of the summer.

How to Reengineer an Engineering Major at a Women's College

Curriculum change with attention paid to gender: "The first women's college to offer an engineering degree, Smith is forging new paths in a field that's eager to swell its ranks in the United States. Women receive only 20 percent of bachelor's degrees in engineering, according to a new report by the National Science Board (NSB). Like a handful of other liberal arts colleges, Smith is producing graduates who've had a different type of engineering education‚ one that goes beyond technical training to focus on a broader context for finding solutions to humanity's problems; one that emphasizes ethics and communication; one so flexible that about half the students study abroad, which is rare, despite the multinational nature of many engineering jobs."