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Faculty development programs have been around for more than a quarter of a century. As early as the 70's Jerry Gaff (Toward Faculty Renewal, 1975) identified over 200 such programs in the United States.
At that time their emphasis was a reflection of the demographics and the times; a largely middle-aged and firmly established faculty needed to be renewed or revitalized, and "personal development" or the "whole personality" of the teacher, emotional as well as intellectual, must be engaged and transformed. Today, there are a few leaders, such as Parker Palmer (The Courage to Teach, 1998) and Steven Brookfield (The Skillful Teacher, 1990), who are capturing the interest of contemporary faculty in their echoing of the holistic approach of their 70's counterparts, emphasizing more than just intellectual improvement and pedagogical skills
However, in general today's faculty development programs have many differences from earlier ones, reflecting several factors:
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societal changes affecting education and the way education is delivered to students today,
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a desire not to offend or alienate faculty with "remedial" work in teaching skills,
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significant advances in human cognition and learning theory,
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and a shift from behaviorist theories to constructivist learning theories. (Cross, 2001)
The average college student was once 18-22 years old, single, white and male, with a good college preparatory background, and he attended the same college for four years. Today, students come from multiple backgrounds with varying degrees of preparation for a college level curriculum, are often adults who are working full time with families to support, and often have accumulated credits at multiple colleges before they graduate with their final degree. This, combined with new knowledge on the learning process, has shifted the emphasis and idea of the activity of education from that of the teacher in the university classroom to that of the learning which resides within the student. Good teaching is now "student-centered," and the teacher and classroom are increasingly becoming less central and given new dimensions through such innovations as new methods of education delivery such as accelerated classes and distance learning. "Learning outcomes" have become important as teachers struggle to "produce learning" in often unprepared students and as interested parties demand accountability and evidence of student success. Faculty development programs are now called Improving Teaching and Learning (ITL) programs (Cross, 2001).
As faculty development has changed from a "self-actualization" approach to the acquisition of teaching skills that faculty may feel they should already possess after years of teaching, ITL programs are often aimed at certain groups of faculty, such as new faculty or adjunct faculty, who may be more receptive and less offended by such instruction. Other non-threatening approaches are to tailor teaching programs that are aimed at key groups of students, emphasizing learner needs, rather than teaching skills. "Targeting the learning needs of special student groups, such as ethnic and racial minorities, women, or freshmen is also a popular way to disseminate knowledge about teaching skills" (Cross, 2001, pp. 32-33). These programs are often voluntary, not mandatory, and, in keeping with a constructivist approach to education, many ITL efforts are not programmed systems imparting set teaching principles, but involve the collaboration and peer mentoring of a faculty-to-faculty exchange of resources, skills and services. This kind of voluntary teamwork may employ the strongest faculty as leaders, but all faculty contribute and participate in the development of each other, their knowledge, and the program.
At the heart of these changes is a societal paradigmatic shift, especially in the academic community, to a social constructivist world view. K. Patricia Cross's 1998 lecture at the AAHE National Conference on Higher Education discusses its application to education, learning theory and teaching in greater detail. She explains in depth recent changes in education discussed above, such as the shift from foundational or conventional views of knowledge to "nonfoundational social constructionist" views of knowledge, from cooperative learning to collaborative learning, from conventional instruction to learning communities. Other influences on education today that Cross discusses are reflective practitioners, personal and societal developmental theories of learning, and feminist influences on learning theory. The common thread of each of these new approaches is the shift from the idea of knowledge as something that is an unchanging, universal, and objective reality "out there," known by the authoritative teacher and handed down to the passive student, to the idea of knowledge as something constructed in collaboration within a community, discovered through participation and conversation with others and changing within the relative context of community.
Today's flexibility and diversity in student population, education delivery, and teaching improvement approaches extend to other faculty roles besides teaching. The idea of scholarship has broadened (see Defining Scholarship) to include more than just traditional research and publication, and to allow for a greater diversity and creativity in faculty careers today and a broader idea of what creates successful teachers. All kinds of scholarship improve teaching and provide benefits to scholar, student, and institution. (See Benefits of Scholarship.) Of the three roles of a college professor: teaching, scholarship, and service, teaching (or pedagogical skills and classroom methodologies) is most often emphasized in faculty development programs (Parilla 1986). While this may be the most direct way of affecting results in "learning outcomes," teaching is also improved through developing content knowledge through scholarship activity and intellectual endeavors. The Faculty Forum provides a balance to other faculty development approaches through assisting faculty with scholarship.
The Faculty Forum uses the current collaboration approach of reciprocal peer mentoring in community, it offers a new approach to faculty development by emphasizing scholarship to enhance teaching, and it includes broad scholarship as well as traditional scholarship in its development efforts.
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Contrasting Views of Knowledge and "Non-foundational Social Constructionism
K. Patricia Cross explains social constructionism as it applies to education and epistemology, or theories of what knowledge is, and how it is discovered or made, in her 1998 AAHE National Conference on Higher Education speech:
Kenneth Bruffee is a professor of English at Brooklyn college and an advocate of "nonfoundational social constructionism," which to my mind, is a rather awkward term for the belief that knowledge is socially constructed rather than discovered. "We construct and maintain knowledge," Bruffee says, " not by examining the world but by negotiating with one another in communities of knowledgeable peers" (1993, p. 9). Knowledge, he says, is "therefore not universal and absolute. It is local and historically changing. We construct it and reconstruct it, time after time, and build it up in layers." ( p. 222).
In contrast, the foundational or conventional view of knowledge contends that there is a reality "out there," a foundation upon which all knowledge is built. The task of learners is to discover the world that exists. That means, of course, that there is a right answer, and that the experts know what it is or have ways of eventually discovering it though objective scientific research.
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Cooperative Learning vs. Collaborative Learning
Differing epistemologies, or theories of knowledge, naturally lead to differing views of learning, or how students attain that knowledge. A "non-foundational social constructionist" view will lend itself to the idea of collaborative learning, which is similar to cooperative learning, but ultimately is subtly different in its underlying assumptions and reaches a step beyond it. K. Patricia Cross enlightens us as to the difference between cooperative vs. collaborative learning in her discussion of...
...a series of articles in Change [magazine] that contrasted cooperative and collaborative learning -- frankly a topic which, at first blush, seemed to me not something I needed to get excited about. (Whipple, 1987; Bruffee, 1995; Matthews, 1995). But reading more deeply, I discovered that while both pedagogies seemed modern and enlightened in their agreement about the virtues of active learning, students teaching students, learning the skills of teamwork, benefiting from diversity, and most of the other advantages embedded in small group learning, cooperative and collaborative pedagogies had very different ideas about the nature of knowledge and how students should go about achieving knowledge.
Briefly, cooperative learning involves the more conventional notion of cooperation, in that students work in small groups on an assigned project or problem under the guidance of the teacher who monitors the groups, making sure that students are staying on task and are coming up with the correct answers. This assumes, of course, that there is a right -- or at least a best -- answer, and that the teacher knows what it is. Cooperative learning is what I think most faculty joining the learning revolution are thinking about.
Collaborative learning is a more radical departure. It involves students working together in small groups to develop their own answer -- not necessarily a known answer -- through interaction and reaching consensus. Monitoring the groups or correcting "wrong" impressions is not the role of the teacher since the teacher is not considered the authority on what the answer should be. The teacher would be interacting along with students to arrive at a consensus.
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Conventional Instruction vs. Learning Communities
As ideas of knowledge and learning change, so must ideas about best methods of instruction. Cross continues her discussion of social constructionism and its effect on education when she explains the recent shift towards learning communities as a preferred mode of instructional delivery:
Conventional instruction is based on a hierarchical model in which those who know teach those who do not know. Ultimately, there are answers to every question, and scholarship consists of knowing the answer or knowing how to find out. Once that epistemology is accepted, students -- and yes faculty and administrators too -- can compete for who has the most or best answers. Eugene Rice notes that today's colleges and universities are widely viewed as "the place where talented men and women -- students, faculty, and administrators -- contend for competitive advantage" (Rice, 1996. p. 4). And I can't argue with that. Students are rewarded for their right answers by high grades and selection to the best colleges; faculty are rewarded for their search for right answers by research grants and tenure, and administrators compete for fame for their campus by establishing the greatest storehouses of knowledge with large libraries, computer systems with huge memories, and a prominent research faculty. In sum, the epistemology on which our current educational system is built is that knowledge is accumulated by discovering the "truth" about the reality that exists. It can be discovered through scientific research, stored in libraries and computers, and disseminated via publications and teaching. And, yes, it can be transferred from researchers to practitioners.
The contrasting epistemology that is proposed by many of the "isms" holds that knowledge is constructed by humans through social interaction. Education, therefore, should be based in learning communities where teachers and students act interdependently to construct meaning and understanding. The model is collaborative and egalitarian. According to Bruffee, social constructionism contends that "knowledge is a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers -- something people construct by talking together and reaching agreement." (1995, p. 3)
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Developmental Learning Theory
K. Patricia Cross, in her 1998 lecture at the AAHE National Conference on Higher Education, summarizes her thoughts on Perry's theory and its influence in the following way:
William Perry is perhaps the best known developmentalist to those of us in higher education. He posits nine positions of intellectual development for college students, but the three major positions can be presented briefly. The scheme starts at the low end of intellectual development, with students assuming that there is a right answer to every question, and that the answer is known by an authority -- namely the professors who are hired to teach them. Students entering college in the early stages of intellectual development have a low tolerance for ambiguity, but they can grant that in some cases we haven't found the answer yet. Their assumption, like ours as a society, is that authorities in research will tell us the answer, and if they don't know it yet, they will eventually discover it. And like students who want quick and unqualified answers, we prefer that the experts make the answers available to us in brief, clear, unambiguous form, such as the three or seven or twelve principles of learning.
At the mid-level stages of Perry's student development theory, gray areas appear as students begin to discover that authorities often disagree, and that the views of their fellow students often differ from their own. In an effort to resolve these inevitable discrepancies, students adopt an "everyone has a right to their own opinion" stance.
This middle stage seems to me to correspond in an eerie way to the developmental stage of society today, as we discover that there are many different views and that authorities often disagree. Certainly we have ample evidence that research authorities disagree on almost everything from the future of the economy to what causes cancer to how children should be raised. Thus we, as a society, have entered the mid-levels of intellectual development by contending that knowledge is a product of one's own experience and each person's experience is democratically and equally valuable. "Everyone has a right to their own opinion" we say.
There is a seemingly inexhaustible demand for participatory discussion groups and Internet exchanges on what other people think. It is not just television and radio talk shows that display an insatiable curiosity about other people's notions and experiences. Any educational conference that claims to be enlightened must present ample opportunity for discussion groups, workshops, and interactive conversations, and must keep lectures to a minimum -- and I am in favor of that. But there is a growing impatience and distrust with authoritative knowledge and "experts" in any field, but especially in the messy social sciences such as psychology, sociology, and education. Time magazine, in pondering the tendency of the American public to ignore the pronouncements of authorities, observed recently that, "Americans don't listen to pollsters and economists. They listen to neighbors, to friends, to family . . ." (January 5, 1997, p. 91). The questioning philosophical "isms" are controversial right now, but perhaps they are leading society into the mid-level stages of intellectual development by questioning authoritative answers and engaging in discourse, and listening more attentively to experience.
At the highest levels of intellectual development -- a stage rarely reached by those who have been studied -- there is an affirmation of identity through commitment and self-actualization. Developmental theorists are not very clear about the highest levels of personal development because they haven't seen much of it, and we are not very clear about what a fully-developed intellectual society would look like for the same reason. We haven't yet seen it. But most developmental psychologists are constructivists. They contend that the highest levels of personal development are reached as the person discovers that truth is relative and depends on context. There is not a single right answer, nor is one answer as good as any other. Rather, at the highest levels of development, the individual is able to evaluate truth in terms of the context in which it occurs.
For more information about William Perry's theories, see:
For more WWW sites, do a Google.com search, using:
"William Perry" and "intellectual development"
as the search terms.
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Feminist Influences on Learning Theory
The terms "feminist" and "feminine" as well as "masculine" are used here in an archetypal sense in that each gender has both attributes, masculine and feminine, in whatever portion they wish to access these qualities. The characteristics traditionally attributed to "the feminine" include intuitive knowledge, personal relating, community, conversation, sharing, dynamic fluidity, nurturing and subjectivity. These can be understood in contrast to archetypally "masculine" traits such as rational knowledge, impersonal relating, competition, heirarchy, fixedness, linear thinking, and objectivity. While our patriarchal society has traditionally lauded typically "masculine" traits, and socially encouraged and rewarded them in men (and to a lesser extent, in women), one of the significant points here is that education theory and practice, and academic world views, are shifting to an acknowledgement, appreciation, and practice of "the feminine."
This topic deserves attention here not only because it is now one of the defining factors of education delivery today, but because the Faculty Forum, in keeping with contemporary movements, is feminine in its concept and methods. Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule 1986) builds a feminist epistemology (theory of knowledge) based on many other developmental theorists, such as Carol Gilligan and William Perry, as well as their own research.
Using the metaphor of "voice" for "women's ways of knowing" as distinctly and symbolically feminine, they explain that the voice is connective and unifying, representing conversation, self expression, in community. The "eye" or vision metaphors commonly used for masculine knowledge is distancing and objective.
The stages outlined include:
Silence: A position in which one experiences oneself as mindless and voiceless and subject to the whims of external authority;
Received Knowledge: Listening to the Voices of Others - A perspective from which one conceives of oneself as capable of receiving, even reproducing, knowledge from the all-knowing external authorities but not capable of creating knowledge on one's own;
Subjective Knowledge: The Inner Voice (and) The Quest for Self - A perspective from which truth and knowledge are conceived of as personal, private, and subjectively known or intuited;
Procedural Knowledge: The Voice of Reason (and) Separated and Connected Knowing - A position in which one is invested in learning and applying objective procedures for obtaining and communicating knowledge;
Constructed Knowledge: Integrating Voices - A position in which one views all knowledge as contextual, experiences oneself as creator of knowledge, and values both subjective and objectives strategies for knowing.
These stages are roughly summarized, and Belenky and her colleagues describe the stages and their nuances and the stages and transitions within them more thoroughly. The Faculty Forum employs a methodology which involves conversation, sharing ideas, collaborative learning, discovery and development of one's own thoughts in process of self-expression with colleagues and exchange of resources, rather than receiving static knowledge from external authority. In this process, thinking, reasoning and ideas are developed to create stronger scholars, and secondarily, ties between faculty are strengthened, and the concept of collaborative learning is experienced by teachers first hand who can then bring that into the classroom more effectively.
Pat Cross elaborates on this in her 1998 lecture:
Another strong sign of a radical shift in our view of how knowledge is generated is found in the work of feminist thinkers about women as learners. Belenky and her colleagues (1986) sparked a strong strain of sympathetic recognition among women teachers and students when they demonstrated that many women display different "ways of knowing" from the male model that has dominated academe for so many years. The male model is characterized by "separate knowing" -- a way of learning that is impersonal and objective; involving detachment, critical argument, analysis, and other descriptors that we associate with the "scientific method." Many women, however, are "connected learners." "Connected learners" say the authors, "develop procedures for gaining access to other people's knowledge. At the heart of these procedures is the capacity for empathy." (Belenky, 1986, p. 113).
Blythe Clinchy describes a connected learner's search for knowledge this way: "She does not ask whether it is right; she asks what it means. When she says, 'Why do you think that?' She doesn't mean, 'What evidence do you have to back that up?' She means, 'What in your experience led you to that position?" (Clinchy, 1990, p. 122) This student's search for knowledge, argues Clinchy, is best accomplished through connected conversations, "in which each person serves as midwife to each other person's thoughts, and each builds on the other's ideas." (p. 123). At heart, a connected conversation is a learning community at its best, and it is also a reflection of changing ideas about the source of knowledge and learning.
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