Coordinated Studies: Learning from the Past, Thinking about the Future by Jeanne Hahn
Jeanne Hahn is a retired Evergreen professor who continues to support successful coordinated studies. She served on the faculty from 1972-2014, including two terms as Academic Dean, followed by a five year post retirement contract.
I begin with two perhaps bold statements. First, I believe in the transformative power of well-constructed, well-delivered coordinated studies programs for faculty, students, and for the college as a whole. Second, coordinated studies are not a model and framework stuck in the past but are acutely relevant to concrete contemporary realities in the world, in the environment, and in higher education. I will return to this briefly at the end.
I begin with a focus on the first statement. As we developed the coordinated studies framework over the first two decades, we found that an underlying culture also developed and served as a glue to the success of the programs and their rewards, not the least of which was significant faculty development and student achievement in their future life’s work. At the same time, we discovered that developing, teaching, and evaluating successful coordinated studies programs is hard work, demanding time, focus, and new learning generally absent from traditional disciplinary teaching.
We found that the fundamental elements of the framework are closely articulated and that if any one element was weakened or eliminated from a coordinated studies program, the program was undermined and sometimes failed. It is these elements and their articulation that the Coordinated Studies Endowment Current Use Fund can address and develop through summer institutes and other projects that the Fund would support.
In what follows I will briefly discuss what are considered the most important elements that make up the framework, all of which can be fruitfully addressed through the time underwritten by the Current Use Fund.
First, a coordinated studies program focuses on an integrative problem, project or theme of real and not simply academic or disciplinary significance but must be approached from multiple perspectives. This requires that students develop good problem solving and creative thinking skills.
Second, as the program theme is complex and multidimensional it requires full-time study; that is a year-long program of 16 quarter hours per quarter. Some programs would run for two quarters, and in the spring each of their faculty would offer a group contract for more specialized work in some aspect of the overall program.
Third, it also requires interdisciplinary/interdivisional (transdivisional) work on the part of both faculty and students working together to adequately investigate its stated theme. Faculty and students understand that they are traveling together on a year-long road of inquiry, exploration, and discovery.
Fourth, team teaching is truly collaborative, with faculty drawing from and building on their disciplinary backgrounds to reach beyond them and to merge them with the disciplinary knowledge of their teammates. When siloed or serial teaching occurs the program’s broad inquiry is undermined and most of the student and faculty spirit and enthusiasm are drained. This means that considerable pre-program team building is essential to the program’s success.
Fifth, all of this requires that the program has a strong and dedicated weekly faculty seminar on the program readings prior to the student seminars. In our experience this has been a major and necessary key to the success of a coordinated studies program. Without faculty seminars on each week’s reading, a program is likely to disintegrate and become siloed, with each seminar group off from the major work. For a successful program faculty need to understand and respect the perspectives and academic knowledge of their teaching partners. It is important that they attend all the lectures and teach one another in their faulty seminars. Sometimes lectures on specialized material are necessary, and for those the entire program should be in attendance.
Much of what goes into building these elements into a program comes from the early planning stages, and this is why the paid summer work is so important: getting to know your teaching partners, structuring a program that draws on everyone’s strengths, finding the right materials, agreeing on a faculty covenant, and building faculty team collaboration and friendship. The Fund portion of the Endowment is intended to provide the paid time to develop this foundation.
In returning to my second opening statement regarding the contemporary relevance of coordinated studies programs, I will first provide three titles of early programs in which I was a faculty member. These titles, I believe, speak to us today with as much urgency as they did several decades ago.
Paradigms in Crisis (1975-76, two quarters, four faculty)
The Paradox of Progress (1984-85, three quarters, four faculty)
Earth, Wealth, and Democracy’s Promise (1989-90, three quarters, four faculty)
The coordinated studies model and practices developed in the 1970s and 80s, and we were all influenced by Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, particularly his epilogue in the 1969 editions which extended his argument beyond the natural sciences, and by the 1972 Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows, et. Al.. Evergreen’s opening and early years coincided with the closing of the post-World War Two consensus and the emergence of neoliberalism, with the dawning realization of an ecological crisis, with upheaval in the universities and in most of the siloed disciplines which seemed unwilling or unable to address the developing set of new realities.
Today, at a much deeper and dangerous level, we face a different, yet in some respects, similar conjuncture. We are entering a fundamentally different world. Are we and our youth and our institutions of higher learning equipped to address it? Is a reinvigorated coordinated studies one modest but vital way?
