The Standing Committee on the Curriculum presented their proposal for the Olympia Undergraduate College at the 2021 Winter Week 6 Faculty Meeting. Click the link below to download the proposal. The Agenda Committee currently expects to conduct voting on the proposal at the Winter Week 10 meeting.
Documents for Review
Week 6 Faculty Meeting Live Notes – This document contains feedback captured during the Week 6 Faculty Meeting discussion.
Instructions
Use the comment box below for asynchronous feedback and discussion of the Olympia Undergraduate College Model proposal.
Note: The discussion of this proposal has been moved from the Agenda Committee Canvas portal to this site to broaden feedback and input to be inclusive of students, staff and emeritus faculty. To read or leave comments, you will need to login with your Evergreen credentials.
I am bringing all posts (with permission of authors) from the Canvas site to this forum, one by one. The first post was from Drew Buchman:
Here’s a source of data relevant to the proposal, although it is broken down into a number of separate documents (sorry!) so it may take a bit of searching to find what you’re looking for:
https://www.evergreen.edu/institutionalresearch/studentexperiencesurvey
Paul McMillin replied to Drew:
Hi Drew,
I have a couple of times made the deep dive into this survey data. But, to the extent that the SCC has developed aspects of the current proposal on the basis of data, it would be most helpful if the SCC would cite that data for us. Or, at least the 2 or 3 data points that played the biggest role in your thinking. Otherwise, we spend a long time looking at a lot of data, and guessing at which data might have influenced the proposal. And I don’t doubt that specific data has been cited in particular times and places. It would still be helpful to have that in one place, easy to access.
I should add that I don’t think all ideas have to be data driven. I think that lots of good ideas and proposals are not data-driven. It is just that if any aspects of the SCC proposal are responding to data, it would be great to make that explicit, complete with citation to the data that was used. In fact, without this, I tend to discount claims to be responding to the data or to be data-driven. In short, whenever anybody claims to have the support of the data, they ought to have the most relevant data at hand and point others to it.
Frederica Bowcutt replied to Paul:
I agree with Paul that “whenever anybody claims to have the support of the data, they ought to have the most relevant data at hand and point others to it.” The interpretation of evidence is not always simple due to confounding factors. As a result, I want to consider for myself whether the conclusions that others make and the policy changes that are proposed based on those interpretations and conclusions make sense to me. Clearly we will never have all the information we might want to make fully informed decisions. However, to the extent possible, we can reduce the risks of major decisions through collective deliberation and collaborative decision making that is as informed as possible based on the evidence we do have. Also, as we ask our students, those making claims need to consider the counterarguments. Major structural changes are being proposed to the curriculum. What unintended consequences might there be for faculty and students in 16 quarter program that offer various part-time options? How will this impact the coherency of programs, faculty workload, and class dynamics? What if the changes fail to attract students while accelerating enrollment decline because students who are still drawn to our unique pedagogy no longer see a good home for themselves at Evergreen? What if we pivot to present ourselves as more conventional just as other leaders in higher education reform shift successfully to embrace interdisciplinarity, learning communities, and other innovations we have historically been a leader in?
What less drastic changes can we make now that draws on previous work and our existing strengths? How might we more effectively market the paths? Could our various Centers function as organizational hubs of lecture series that could be modestly credit-bearing, e.g. 2 units? With minimal changes could the Centers also play a role in making ILC, internship and capstone opportunities for students more visible? How might we incentivize retired faculty with PRCs to offer some of the part-time options envisioned by FLEX? What can we learn from our colleagues in EWS about successfully delivering interdisciplinary part-time offerings? How can we tap into the wisdom of our emeritus faculty to help advise us during this perilous time for the college?
Marja Eloheimo separately posted the following (I removed the email signature information):
I was advised that the comments I made at the 2-17 meeting should be posted here, probably instead of sending them out by email.
***
Hello Colleagues,
I read some prepared comments at the last NAD meeting on February 17th. Afterwards, I was asked by one faculty member to email them to everyone. Here they are, polished up a bit for clarity. Thank you in advance if you choose to read and consider them.
Best to all as we navigate these difficult times. And thanks to all who are working so earnestly to make Evergreen the best it can be.
***
In a previous NAD meeting, I heard something that disturbed me. In response to concerns that were expressed about the visibility of interdisciplinary and interdivisional offerings at Evergreen, it was stated more than once that what prospective and current students really need is to be able to see their potential routes within disciplines. That need has already been well established; I don’t think anyone questions it. But what I believe is missing is that students also need to be able to see how they can learn and grow and plan across disciplines. They need structure and guidance in that, too.
There’s a prevailing attitude at Evergreen that interdisciplinarity just happens. It’s a long-standing belief that simply putting two or more faculty with discipline-based expertise together will result in quality interdisciplinary studies. Fortunately, that does often happen, especially when the disciplines are in the same broad division and have epistemologies and methodologies somewhat in common.
However, there are faculty among us who keep trying to create a visible presence for interdivisionality; faculty who have long focused their studies, thinking, writing, and teaching on topics and issues that are inherently interdivisional. Teaching well across different epistemologies and methodologies benefits from leadership by faculty with longstanding interest, commitment to, and expertise in doing just that.
A corollary of this belief about interdisciplinary teaching at Evergreen is a belief about interdisciplinary learning at Evergreen. There seems to be a belief that, since nothing new in the NAD proposals will prevent students from managing to find their interdisciplinary way through a landscape of disciplines, our work is done. But it really isn’t.
I’m disturbed when I continue to hear discipline-based or division-focused faculty pushing back on the faculty whose teaching careers, professional commitments, and areas of focus are interdivisional. Why do that? Why not, first, acknowledge that interdivisional expertise is a thing, accept that that some faculty have more of this expertise than others, and respect them for it.
Please know that I’m not focusing this on myself. Please don’t let whatever shortcomings you may perceive in my 33 years of interdivisional adjunct teaching at Evergreen stop you from hearing my message.
We have among us faculty with interdivisional graduate degrees (sometimes as double doctoral majors or in a combination of MA/PhD ); faculty with experience examining the nuances of interdisciplinarity (for example, have you thought much about the distinction between transdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity and why, pedagogically, it might matter?); and faculty with career-long commitments to issues that require interdivisional problem solving. Why would those who don’t have as much of this kind of background and interest reject or diminish the pedagogical judgment and leadership of those who do?
More and more students understand that the demands of both the present and the future require interdisciplinary (often interdivisional) knowledge and skills. Many colleges and universities understand this too. Many of them feature and articulate their interdisciplinary studies. Clearly, they are doing a better job at conveying their interdisciplinarity than we — a champion of interdisciplinary study since the 1970s — are doing. Here’s one example of this. It’s literally the first example that came up when I searched on college interdisciplinary programs.
Evergreen is ranked #139 out of 140 in College Factual’s list of Best Schools for Multi/Interdisciplary Studies 2021. Western Washington is #21. On the Washington list, Evergreen comes in at #8, afterWestern Washington, Seattle U, UW Tacoma, Whitworth, UW Bothell, Washington State, and Eastern Washington. We don’t show up at all on the lists for ‘Far West Region’ or the ‘Best Multi/Interdisciplinary Colleges for Non-Traditional Students.’ This shows that not only is interdisciplinarity worth ranking – that is to say, students want and need it – but Evergreen is barely on the map. This is crazy for a college that was founded on interdisciplinarity, diversity, and working across differences, etc.
Existing students interested in interdivisionality are also sometimes experiencing trauma from some of our discipline-based faculty. I currently have a student who worked recently in a program that emphasized western science. One faculty ‘saw’ her and supported her interdivisional interests. The other faculty diminished her, asking if her area of interdivisional interest was even still ‘a thing.’ This student continues to work through residual emotion from this belittling of her deeply held interdivisional commitments.
So, what to do?
First, I’d urge us all to accept and value interdivisionality and stop bickering about it. Let faculty with expertise and interest take leadership in this aspect of the curriculum.
One actionable task – if the faculty committed to developing interdivisionality think it’s a good idea — would be to create a subsidiary or affiliate of the SCC that is tasked with identifying interdivisional programs, organizing and creating mechanisms to make them visible for existing students, and providing material that outward facing IT people could use in marketing for prospective students. I have more thoughts about the sub-tasks involved in this but there’s no point in mentioning them unless the idea were to take hold. I defer to others on this.
Another actionable approach that builds upon existing commitments is to elevate, support, and model interdivisional studies through the Climate Center, particularly if western science faculty, humanities and social science faculty, and Indigenous studies faculty will work together to create and deliver programs that are worthy of the task that climate change demands. I hope we will do this. I also hope that it will inspire a broader commitment to interdivisional studies – and interdivisional faculty — as we go forward. None of us want Evergreen to stay #139 on anybody’s list of best schools for multi/interdisciplinary studies. Often crises ask us to change not just what we do, but also how we think.
Sincerely, your colleague,
Marja
Eloheimo_comments _NAD_2-17-21.pdf
[ sharing here a note I sent 2/2 to the SCC workgroup; these thoughts are my own and should not to be taken as a statement from the SCC workgroup ]
RE: in place of the nos, what?
dear colleagues –
I am writing to repeat my proposal for THE THREE NICHES. Please see attached 30 pp. white paper
Just kidding.
I wanted to make a case for framing this dynamic process we are in by telling it like it is.
Evergreen does not have departments.
It never has, and it never will.
They were abolished, along with grades, along with majors, before the College even began.
This poses an organizational problem that the College needs to address periodically.
In the absence of departments, how do you organize curriculum?
The other abolitions can help clarify the situation.
In the absence of grades we created a system that uses narrative evaluations + credits; in the absence of majors we evolved into “specialty areas” and “planning units” then “emphases” and “paths.”
One consequence of our originary negations: as the old forms fail to serve their purpose, new forms need to be conjured to meet our primary objective, namely, to clear away obstacles to learning. How do we as a community and an institution organize ourselves to do that? This is the question that the college poses in its very essence.
My wager is that naming the problem we are attending to in the language of abolition does two things:
(A) it anchors us in historical fact: this is who we are as an institution – no departments, no grades, no majors, etc. I think faculty, staff, students, and alumn are craving bold, empirical poles to identify around. Especially as we approach the 50th that seems an important signal to be pumping out. This helps clarify the problem in terms that maintain our commitment to standing as a legitimate alternative to business-as-usual higher ed. If we are not that we fail on the face of it.
(B) at the same time it opens the potential for thinking more creatively and collaboratively in terms of how we go about reconstructing structures in the absence of those received forms. Abolition is not a solution so much as the creation of a problem. I think Jefferson and co. understood this all too well when they use the word “abolish” in the Declaration.
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
The keyword “abolition” is central to the project of democracy, in other words.
And as the aftermath of the Civil War teaches: the fact of abolition does nothing to predict what will get composed in place of the forms that have been obviated. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is especially clear about this. Abolition, she says, is a theory and practice of change and of making things .
In other words: a constant project of “reconstruction” is something that abolition requires and presupposes.
There are multiple precedents here. Not just W.E.B. Du Bois, but also Ivan Illich (convivial reconstruction) and of course John Dewey who located “reconstruction” at the core of his philosophical project…. To say nothing of our 50-year history!
I’ve got plenty more to say about this, as you might expect. But who cares what I have to say (you’ve already heard it all and so have I): I think faculty are craving the chance to think deliberately and strategically with each other about these kinds of things. I think students and staff as well, each in their own way. People both on campus and off are ready for real conversations on these topics. A skillfully facilitated conversation. Anchored in data, common ground, and perhaps even shared visions
Bigger picture, my wager is that strategically deploying “abolition” as a theme or subtheme would give us incredible cache in a crowded higher ed landscape so that’s another plus – it helps us begin to theorize our practice both internally and externally, and it helps us continue to make waves that the Hampshires and others will never be able to make (letalone surf).
Here below: a few sentences from David Graeber about consensus and democracy. Forgive me for returning us to our charge so assiduously, but I am really really attached to the word “consensus” (first sentence second graf: “The SCC’s task is to complete development of a consensus undergraduate schools model for the Olympia campus by the end of winter quarter 2021”)
Yours in study
/ Eirik
David Graeber on consensus, from THE DEMOCRACY PROJECT (Speigel and Grau 2013) 196, 202-3
Consensus is not just a set of techniques. When we talk about process, what we’re really talking about is the gradual creation of a culture of democracy. This brings us back to rethinking some of our most basic assumptions about what democracy is even about. […]
Consensus is an attempt to create a politics founded on the principle of reasonableness — one that, as feminist philosopher Deborah Heikes has pointed out, requires not only logical consistency, but “a measure of good judgment, self-criticism, a capacity for social interaction, and a willingness to give and consider reasons.” Genuine deliberation, in short. As a facilitation trainer would likely put it, it requires the ability to listen well enough to understand perspectives that are fundamentally different from one’s own, and then try to find pragmatic common ground without attempting to convert one’s interlocutors completely to one’s own perspective. It means viewing democracy as common problem solving among those who respect the fact they will always have, like all humans, somewhat incommensurable points of view.
This is how consensus is supposed to work: the group agrees, first, to some common purpose. This allows the group to look at decision making as a matter of solving common problems. Seen this way, diversity of perspectives, even a radical diversity of perspectives, while it may cause difficulties, can also be a tremendous resource. After all, what sort of team is more likely to come up with a creative solution to a problem: a group of people who all see matters somewhat differently, or a group of people who all see things exactly the same?
As I’ve already observed, spaces of democratic creativity are precisely those where very different sorts of people, coming from very different traditions, are suddenly forced to improvise. One reason is because in such situations, people are forced to reconcile divergent assumptions about what politics is even about.
First–thank you to John C for making this forum available to Evergreen staff–I appreciate it. I’m aware that matters of curriculum directly affect faculty, and I hope that fellow staff members who also spend time with students–current and prospective, will choose to engage in these important converations about our institution.
The comment I will offer regarding the SCC proposal in question is that I see improved equity in being a reason for pursuing this course. However, it isn’t clear to me from reading the proposal how it acheived or what barriers to equity are being addressed. Similarly to comments that are requesting snippets of data that have imformed the proposal, it would be helpful to understand what barriers to equity it is addressing, and how the proposal addresses those barriers. Thank you!