"Walls and Gates: Conditions of Transformation" Sherry Lee Linkon, Youngstown State University Keynote address for a conference on Transforming Teaching and Learning at Elon University, August, 2007 Play opening chorus of Simon song: Once upon a time there was an ocean But now it’s a mountain range Something unstoppable set into motion Nothing is different, but everything's changed A couple of things about this song resonate for me. The first is the idea of how dramatic transformation can be, how it can change things in ways we can’t imagine, from an ocean to a mountain range. This image suggests, too, that change is natural and inevitable. It happens all the time, and always has. Nothing stays the same. Once upon a time being a college student was in itself a full-time job, and now there are students who squeeze coursework into the few hours left between their three part-time jobs and hour-long commutes. Once upon a time there were neatly bounded departments of English, History, and Sociology, and now there are open-ended interdisciplinary programs in Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Global Studies. Once upon a time, teaching was what we did in order to gain the real prize, the opportunity to do research; and now there are faculty building entire careers – at research institutions as well as liberal arts colleges – around serious work, including research, on teaching. At the same time, even as all this change occurs, higher education feels more or less the same. Nothing is different, but everything has changed. This conference is about intentional transformation, about how we might change ourselves and help to create change in others. After all, the changes I just mentioned didn’t “just happen.” As Paul Simon sings, something unstoppable was set into motion, not by nature but by people. We change students’ understanding and their ways of learning intentionally, through interventions and innovations that actively disrupt their habits and engage them in new ways of learning. We change our work and the culture of our profession as we develop new ideas, new relationships, new practices. If we want to transform higher education, whether on the level of students or on the level of the profession, we need to share ideas about what and how to change, but we also need to be mindful of the challenges involved. Transformation may be unstoppable, but it’s not easy. It may be natural, but we playing an active, productive role in shaping it requires that we understand the conditions of change. As the call for papers for this conference suggested, “transformation” in education has several meanings: transforming our students’ learning, which invites us to transform the ways we teach, which, in turn, may also involve personal transformations about how we think of ourselves as professionals and as people. Change is also happening on the broader scale of institutions and our profession itself. Across the country, universities are developing new programs, restructuring existing programs, and implementing institution-wide assessment programs, relying more on part-time faculty, expecting more from full-time faculty. Meanwhile, our profession is trying to respond to external pressures to be more economically efficient, more geared to workforce development, or more accountable for the quality of our work – all without betraying our values or losing our autonomy. Change is happening all around us, on all of these levels, and transforming any one level will encourage and possibly even require change on other levels. As I’ve been thinking about the conditions for transformation, I’ve been thinking about all of those levels. Change occurs within an interconnected web of people, sites, practices, experiences, and ideas. Transforming education is a networked practice, and each part of the web affects every other part. As I’ve been thinking about transformation, I’ve been imagining education as a wide open field, with a large wall blocking us from moving ahead. That wall is made up of the “hard obstacles,” difficulties that cannot simply be brushed aside or knocked down. But in that wall there are some vulnerable spots, some “soft obstacles” that might be turned into gates, and to do so we need tools. Let me tell you a bit about the nature of the wall, the possible openings, and the tools that I think might help us find a way to get past the wall and create real change. The wall: “Hard obstacles” – Walls: scarce resources – human and financial capital – or to put it even more bluntly, time and money -- change is hard work, requires time and energy, participation, conversation, reflection, and often incurs costs, but institutions always have limited budgets, and people have limited time and many competing commitments and interests Sometimes, that wall stops change efforts bc people assume that nothing can happen without resources – new ideas are often shunted aside because there’s no money, and some of the best ideas are never brought to fruition because no one has the time and energy to make things happen – and knowing that we don’t have the money or time stops us from moving ahead But limited resources create solid obstacles – there is simply no getting around the fact that not having enough money or time makes transformation difficult We can’t knock down the wall, but all walls have weak spots, what we might think of as “soft obstacles” or “moveable obstacles” – and those can become gates Soft obstacles: Habit: the familiarity of the existing condition – even when it doesn’t work well, if it what we’ve done before works at all, we will tend to cling to it (even if we simultaneously criticize it) Teaching – recent article in The Chronicle about how science faculty have been slow to adopt new teaching strategies, despite significant evidence that the old lecture and test model doesn’t work well and that new active-learning models work better Curriculum –- even when we begin by saying that it needs to be changed dramatically, we rely on what we know, old models, to shape the new – and it can be extremely difficult to break out of the familiar Institutions: existing structures can come to seem natural and normal, so we may resist changes ( challenges to new college structure at YSU Fear of the unknown – because we don’t know where change will take us, it’s scary – there be dragons out there, beyond the edge of the visible world For students, this might take the form of resistance to non-conventional learning strategies – they have learned to be good at a certain model, what Sam Wineburg calls “schoolish behavior,” and different ways of teaching and learning can make them feel vulnerable For faculty, new ideas about teaching create fear ( if I stop being this kind of teacher, what will happen? How will students respond? Will it work? What if it fails? What if I fail? (example of Art History colleague who recently started using a problem-based learning model – anxieties about what would happen) Conflict – always exists, inherent to social life and organizations, shapes how we interact as we pursue change, how we respond to changes, and is often created by change Conflicting values and concepts – central to current debates about accountability/assessment/accreditation bc we have different ideas about what education is for and what learning means Positional conflicts – who has authority? Whose views and contributions are valued? -- in the classroom, this might mean the almost inevitable tension (on varying levels) between students and faculty about grading and judgments; within institutions, this takes the form of rules governing what one can and cannot do, processes, as well as evaluations like tenure, promotion, and merit reviews – will my work be valued? Will I be valued? The first tool for turning these soft obstacles into openings is something we do all the time, but that we too rarely apply to ourselves: study Critical reflection and analysis of the soft obstacles Understand the history and rationales for what already exists – for our own teaching, this might simply involve reflection; for issues on the level of institutions and the profession, we may have to do some research in order to understand this Identify how it does and does not work – the value of research rather than assumption ( SoTL projects that examine “what is”; inviting students to reflect on their own practices Acknowledge the fears but also find out what previous “explorers” have encountered when they’ve made similar journeys ( scholarly teaching Examine the sources of conflict; shift the focus from people to sources Recognize and try to manage your own contributions to the conflict ( tai chi Additional conditions – raw materials and tools -- for transformation: Belief in the possibility of change ( you cannot transform people or institutions if those involved believe that transformation is impossible ( people don’t necessarily have to believe (at least at first) that change is desirable, just that it’s possible Goals that are at once structured and open-ended Change doesn’t work if the people running it – the teacher, the provost, the Secretary of Education – begin by identifying clearly what the outcome will be and then try to impose it on others But at the same time, real transformation doesn’t occur well in the complete absence of direction – we need goals, but not well-defined, tightly-bounded ones Rather, we need a clear sense of direction or purpose that allows for experimentation, improvisation, collaboration that yields new ideas, serendipity – start from problems, from broadly-defined values or interests, and question these Real transformation emerges from the process Self-aware, flexible, attentive leaders (including teachers) They have to be genuinely open to processes and outcomes that they could not imagine Transformation is not only a process of change, but also a process that is changing as it happens, and effective leaders notice and adapt to those changes Effective leaders create the conditions for change but don’t try to control it -- like good party hosts, attentive to when someone needs a fresh drink or when to change the music They are also aware and able to manage their own responses to those change (not to take things personally or to allow oneself to be too deeply invested in a particular outcome) New ideas and/or information ( change often occurs as a response to new ideas or information ( without new knowledge, people work in a vacuum; ideas and information provide inspiration, guidance, and evidence ( that includes new ways of seeing what we already (think) we know – rethinking the familiar as well as seeking out new knowledge Exchange – sharing ideas, working together – a sense of intellectual partnership Sharing ideas and perspectives as openly and transparently as possible (conflict makes that difficult) Developing new ideas together ( collaborative thinking, if not collaborative action Continuing reflection Transformation is not a closed-end process: it’s not done when the new course has been planned or a new curriculum implemented or a new institutional structure put into place. To be effective, transformation should include reflection on how well it worked, as well as reflection on the experience of change. I often ask students at the end of a course to identify how their understanding has changed and to reflect on the experiences that enable that learning; in some of the teaching and organizing projects I’ve worked on, we’ve done the same ( affect matters – how effective a change will be depends in part on how it is experienced by those involved You’ll note that my list of tools is longer than my list of obstacles. For me, this is a source of hope. It reminds me that even though the conditions that make transformation difficult are very real and significant, so too is the set of strategies on which I can draw. Those obstacles are not going to just disappear, and the work of transformation will never be easy. But, as Paul Simon reminds us, it does happen. The very fact that we are here today, talking seriously together about how our students learn and how we teach and why that matters, reflects significant changes in higher education, changes that I hope we will all continue to contribute to and that our students will benefit from. As Simon sings, once upon a time I was an ocean, now I’m a mountaintop. Who knows what we can become?