Changing Humanities Courses to Entice More Gen Ed Enrollment: CHE Article

[ciao_yall]

Coming from STEM, it's kind of mind-bending to imagine how a third or fourth year course could be redesigned as an introductory one and having any significant value. Without all of the research and analysis skills as well as the disciplinary context developed by other courses, wouldn't the first year course be a pale shadow of its previous incarnation?

This is a disciplinary difference. In STEM the content and the skills are closely linked, or maybe even the same thing. It wouldn't make sense to redesign an advanced course as an intro course because nothing about electromagnetic theory is going to make any sense if you haven't taken classical mechanics . (I just pulled that out of the catalogue, is that even a good example?)

I'd use "thermodynamics and waves" as required for EM theory, and classical mechanics for quantum mechanics, but yes, that's the idea.

If I may bend you mind a bit. This argument sounds the same as the historians', namely "this subject that I know in such detail can only be understood with a large amount of specialized prior knowledge." The counterargument to that is that people who are not specialists teach those very things at an elementary level (in other fields).

To use EM theory as an example. For a particular subtopic in my field, it is relevant how light is absorbed and why wavelength matters to the system we study. Those are essentially electromagnetic effects, but the students are NOT physicists by any stretch. Nevertheless, I can cover the essential parts of EM theory at their level in about 10 minutes. That coverage gives them the grounding to understand the subject the I know in such detail.

These types of classes already exist. Every college has its "Physics for Poets" or "Rocks for Jocks" type classes.

[Caracal]

I would argue that these numbers indicate that far too high a percentage of the American public is not learning essential civics knowledge in either K-12 or college. The system that claims to be supplying that education isn't working effectively, whether at the primary, secondary, or post-secondary level.

First, for what its worth, I wasn't directing my comments about an animus towards the humanities to you, that was Poly and others. But to respond to a few things at the same time

1. I still am fairly perplexed about this narrative from Poly and Marshwiggle that the humanities are enticing kids into their majors who should be doing something else and will now have poor career prospects. It just isn't happening, if it was humanities majors wouldn't be in decline. The humanities majors I teach were not about to be engineering majors till a man wearing a floppy hat accosted them on the quad and brainwashed them into our cult.

2. The recent decline in humanities majors is not because of some big change in the value of a degree or the job prospects of majors. It is mostly about perception.

3. My impression is that humanities is losing students to majors like psychology and political science, not STEM. Anecdotally, my impression is that students who plan to pursue law school, or are interested in public policy, have become less likely to major in the humanities. What Poly is missing, is that a lot of the things described in the initial article are really directed towards students like those. A history major with a focus on environmental history is designed to appeal to a student who might be interested in going to law school and focusing on issues of environmental law, or wants to work on advocacy around these issues. If you draw in STEM folks, I assume it will mostly be as double majors. Nobody is going to be bamboozled.

4. On the Annenberg stuff, I think that studies of what people know about stuff are always open to lots of interpretations. I bet most of the people who can't name all the branches of the federal government did actually learn that in a class at some point. So why don't they remember it now? This actually dovetails into another one of these threads. I assume it is basically the same reason why I don't remember how to do trigonometry, or apply the Pythagorean theorem anymore. The difference is that these are relatively advanced math concepts. Not knowing the three branches of government is more like not being able to remember how to calculate a fraction or something. The reason I do know how to that is because I learned it and then it was reinforced repeatedly through grade school, I saw adults using it and then it became part of more complicated math in high school and then it became relevant to my daily life.

At any rate, the point is that people not knowing this kind of stuff is about more than school. It is about larger questions of alienation from the political system and all kinds of other stuff, including the world people grew up in. I can just about promise you that people who grew up reading newspapers and listening to news on the radio and tv are far more likely to answer those questions correctly.

[ciao_yall]

Coming from STEM, it's kind of mind-bending to imagine how a third or fourth year course could be redesigned as an introductory one and having any significant value. Without all of the research and analysis skills as well as the disciplinary context developed by other courses, wouldn't the first year course be a pale shadow of its previous incarnation?

This is a disciplinary difference. In STEM the content and the skills are closely linked, or maybe even the same thing. It wouldn't make sense to redesign an advanced course as an intro course because nothing about electromagnetic theory is going to make any sense if you haven't taken classical mechanics . (I just pulled that out of the catalogue, is that even a good example?)

I'd use "thermodynamics and waves" as required for EM theory, and classical mechanics for quantum mechanics, but yes, that's the idea.

History doesn't work that way. The difference between a 3000 level course and a 1000 level course isn't really about the topic. The differences are going to be in the amount and sophistication of the reading and the difficulty of the writing assignments. For some upper level courses, it wouldn't be possible to teach the subject with less difficult or shorter readings, but others can be adapted with some work.

It's still hard to imagine that there isn't context that needs to be covered before certain topics. For instance, if you're talking about the American constitution then the discussion would be vastly different based on whether students have studied the British parliamentary system or not. If not,   isn't it mostly a high school civics class warmed over? On the other hand, if they've studied European history, including the British parliamentary system, then all of the division of powers and checks and balances can be set clearly in the context of the kinds of problems that they were trying to prevent, which had previously occurred in Europe.

To go back to the physics example, quantum mechanics without classical mechanics would be basically a magic show. "Wow! Look at this cool thing that happens!" All of the background to explain why something happens or why it's interesting would be "beyond the scope of the course". 

By the same token, I'd assume that an upper-level history course would include a lot of references to material from previous courses which could be taken as common knowledge, whereas in an introductory course all that could be said is "Trust me, there's a reason for this."

And in terms of skills, there is the issue of a 20 page research paper becoming a 5 paragraph essay. Can that promote any of the desired deliberation and reflection?

A tale of two classes at an open enrollment Community College:

The student population ranges from fresh-out-of-high school to experienced professionals looking to expand their skills. Add a solid cohort of international students who barely passed the TESOL and refuse to sign up for ESL "because it's boring."

International Marketing - a success! Typically an upper-division or graduate level class. The available textbooks all assumed prior knowledge in Business, Economics, and Marketing. I didn't go as deep as the textbook could have gone, and spent a certain amount of time in each class reviewing basics. The students struggled a bit, still, we had a lot of real-life examples to pull from. They brought in ads from their home countries and we compared them to ones from different countries. We kept up with international news and I explained what was going on. They would go online and research basic import/export requirements for products they knew about and were interested in. We made it, and the students really did learn a lot by the end.

International Finance - a failure! Typically an upper-division or graduate level class. The available textbooks all assumed prior knowledge in Accounting, Business, Economics, Finance and Statistics. The previous instructor ignored the textbook and made the class all about import/export paperwork and forms. I tried to summarize basics and explain, but a student needed a full background on all the previous classes described to even understand what a balance sheet was, and how foreign exchange markets and contracts worked before you could get them through the chapter on How to Hedge a Balance Sheet. Real-life examples were far too esoteric. Relative prices go up and down. Yep, they know that. Here's some basics on why exchange rates change. Okay. Here's a story about why The Gap lost money in the 3rd quarter. ZZZZZZ.

So, while you can't make a basic intro class out of ANYTHING, you can, with the right level of student enthusiasm and tangible, relevant, examples, go pretty far.

[Caracal]

It's still hard to imagine that there isn't context that needs to be covered before certain topics. For instance, if you're talking about the American constitution then the discussion would be vastly different based on whether students have studied the British parliamentary system or not. If not,   isn't it mostly a high school civics class warmed over? On the other hand, if they've studied European history, including the British parliamentary system, then all of the division of powers and checks and balances can be set clearly in the context of the kinds of problems that they were trying to prevent, which had previously occurred in Europe.

To go back to the physics example, quantum mechanics without classical mechanics would be basically a magic show. "Wow! Look at this cool thing that happens!" All of the background to explain why something happens or why it's interesting would be "beyond the scope of the course". 

By the same token, I'd assume that an upper-level history course would include a lot of references to material from previous courses which could be taken as common knowledge, whereas in an introductory course all that could be said is "Trust me, there's a reason for this."

And in terms of skills, there is the issue of a 20 page research paper becoming a 5 paragraph essay. Can that promote any of the desired deliberation and reflection?

These are interesting questions, because I think it does get to basic differences in how disciplines think of knowledge and how it is arranged. Essentially I think the difference is that history has a less hierarchal structure of knowledge than a field like physics. So, yes, everything is connected and knowing about larger contexts is very important, but it gets very hard to try to figure out which contexts one needs and how much. So I'm an American social historian who studies religion. The nature of the way that graduate school training and my interests work is that my core professional training is in American History. But, obviously there is really important context for my work outside of the US. You can't understand American religion without knowing about the Anglican Schism and disputes about the Church of England, and nothing is going to make any sense if you don't have have some background in the Reformation. It doesn't stop there, of course. The people I study were obsessed with the early church, so it is good I know a little about that, and none of this makes any sense without some knowledge of the Roman Empire and Ancient Judaism and...

The problem here is that I can't actually be an expert in all this stuff. I know more than most American Historians do about Martin Luther, but compared to people who are actually experts, I'm an infant. I've read a couple books written by historians for a broad audience. Is that enough? Probably not! I suspect I'd have a deeper understanding of my own subject if I read more on Luther, or German Anabaptists, or a million other things. But you start to see the problem, if everything connects, you can never know enough.

If professional historians have this problem, you can see how complicated it gets with students. Mostly, we handle this by having prerequisites only based on skills rather than knowledge. You can't take the upper level seminar class unless you've taken the lower level paper writing course.

Back to the original example, I think some courses would not be good candidates to turn into freshman seminars. A course on the Progressive Era, or The Civil Rights Movement, might be bad choices because you would risk spending too much time on context for people without much background. The courses that would work well would be courses which covered particular topics over a long period of time. It sounds like these are the sort of courses they are talking about. The benefit of courses like these is that while plenty of background will be required, a lot of that background would be required regardless, and in the context of a lower level course it can help students think about larger questions of context and historical perspective.

[Wahoo Redux]

Summary for those who won't read a long post: In many cases, it's not negative feelings against the study of the humanities so much as frustration about fixating on the wrong problem at the expense of solving the right problem. 

Polly, you and I have cross-posted for a long time.

This is a new anxiety focused on K-12.  It used to be that the humanities should be taught by "volunteers."

You might be able to fool a less textual, less intellectual crowd with shorter memories, but you are not fooling anyone here.  Just read the comments.

And I'll ask it again: What realistic K-12 fix do you envision?  I assure you, our meager humanities budgets will go nowhere near resolving the disparities in property taxes or the sociocultural issues that cripple school boards in our society.  I live in just such a place.  Trust me, you could fire the lot of us, close up our lib arts offices, and that wouldn't even dent the money problems our school systems face.

Why not cap administrative and coaching salaries at reasonable public employee levels?  But wait...you have long championed the hard work of the administrative staff...God knows they are worth the money.

Much of the article indicates playing the game to keep humanities professors employed much more than changing the general education requirements based on what modern students need.

Well firstly, the humanities professors apparently disagree with you, as do I.  Most of us are already dismissing you opinions.  "Modern students" do need these classes.

Secondly, as I posted earlier, you infer what you want to infer no matter the source.  You, like Spork, have made up your mind already and anything you read simply confirms what you have already decided.

In the big picture, I'd be much less annoyed if people made the pitch for studying history/English/philosophy/languages focused on what is unique about those fields and how being proficient in the skills of those fields makes a better life.  History of science is very cool as a field as are many of the specialties in history.  So why jump on a current buzzword instead of spreading the joys of studying <long established history specialty X>?

Yeah, sure.  Not buying this bridge.  You're now contradicting yourself.  The minute some department chair posted the old "We'll make your mind a more interesting place to live" mantra you'd be ripping hu for wasting money on frivolous amusement or some such.

You wanna know why lib arts catalog entries use the hard-sell?

You wanna know why?

Because of people like you, Polly, challenging their reason for being.  Yup, thinkers such as yourself are denuding our higher ed landscape under the guise of piety and practicality and then you blame those folks trying to keep the breadth of education alive.

[Wahoo Redux]

...the webpage also says this...

I would argue that these numbers indicate that far too high a percentage of the American public is not learning essential civics knowledge in either K-12 or college. The system that claims to be supplying that education isn't working effectively, whether at the primary, secondary, or post-secondary level.

I just posted what was on your own source material to illustrate that you edit to come to a particular inference.

Which is exactly what you did.

[marshwiggle]

So, while you can't make a basic intro class out of ANYTHING, you can, with the right level of student enthusiasm and tangible, relevant, examples, go pretty far.

No argument there. Still, it requires some level of selectivity to get students predisposed* to the right level of enthusiasm.

*Granted the instructor has a lot to do with how students perceive the course, but ones who are only there to check boxes are unlikely to become enthusiastic no matter what. Especially if they never come to class so they never even see what the instructor does to engage them.

[Hibush]

Coming from STEM, it's kind of mind-bending to imagine how a third or fourth year course could be redesigned as an introductory one and having any significant value. Without all of the research and analysis skills as well as the disciplinary context developed by other courses, wouldn't the first year course be a pale shadow of its previous incarnation?

This is a disciplinary difference. In STEM the content and the skills are closely linked, or maybe even the same thing. It wouldn't make sense to redesign an advanced course as an intro course because nothing about electromagnetic theory is going to make any sense if you haven't taken classical mechanics . (I just pulled that out of the catalogue, is that even a good example?)

I'd use "thermodynamics and waves" as required for EM theory, and classical mechanics for quantum mechanics, but yes, that's the idea.

If I may bend you mind a bit. This argument sounds the same as the historians', namely "this subject that I know in such detail can only be understood with a large amount of specialized prior knowledge." The counterargument to that is that people who are not specialists teach those very things at an elementary level (in other fields).

To use EM theory as an example. For a particular subtopic in my field, it is relevant how light is absorbed and why wavelength matters to the system we study. Those are essentially electromagnetic effects, but the students are NOT physicists by any stretch. Nevertheless, I can cover the essential parts of EM theory at their level in about 10 minutes. That coverage gives them the grounding to understand the subject the I know in such detail.

These types of classes already exist. Every college has its "Physics for Poets" or "Rocks for Jocks" type classes.

No, not at all. These are intermediate or advanced classes in a different (STEM) subject.

[marshwiggle]

1. I still am fairly perplexed about this narrative from Poly and Marshwiggle that the humanities are enticing kids into their majors who should be doing something else and will now have poor career prospects. It just isn't happening, if it was humanities majors wouldn't be in decline. The humanities majors I teach were not about to be engineering majors till a man wearing a floppy hat accosted them on the quad and brainwashed them into our cult.

Only speaking for myself, but here's where I'm coning from.
To clarify:
1. "A" students who graduate with any degree, including one in the humanities, shouldn't have great trouble getting employed.
2. Anyone smart enough to get a PhD, including one in the humanities, should be smart enough to find decent employment somewhere.
3. Motivated students who know they want to study the humanities should be encouraged to do so, as they will benefit greatly.

My complaints:
1. In order to keep enrollment numbers up, unmotivated mediocre students will be encouraged to enroll in humanities subjects, and even major in them. When these students graduate with "C"s, they have a hard time getting work, because they haven't really developed many of those "communication" and "critical thinking" skills.

This in itself is not the problem. The problem is when articles talk about graduates not being able to find jobs, mostly they're talking about these. However, instead of placing the responsibility on the graduate to put in the necessary effort, university administrators and faculty members will shake their heads sadly, and blame "the government" or "the economy", and imply that all graduates face similar hardships.

It is unfair and disingenuous to suggest that all programs are equally responsible for these problems. And as I said, the problem is more of intake than of the program content.

2. A similar problem exists with PhDs. The majority of the "adjunct problem" is confined to the humanities, but the whole system gets blamed. The reality is that the problem is with individuals who are smart enough to get other jobs, but have lashed themselves to the mast of jobs in academia, even though there would not be enough even if all part-time positions were consolidated into full-time positions. And again, administrators and faculty don't place this on the students, but rather blame "the government" or "the economy", or better yet, "the undervaluing of education", when as I said, there' wouldn't be enough faculty jobs even if there were NO adjunct positions AT ALL.


So, in summary, if supporters of the humanities are going to try and deflect blame for problems of certain of their graduates who have unrealistic expectations, then I am not willing to calmly accept it. And I am not going to encourage sending all kinds of people to university who don't know why they're going other than they think it's a golden ticket. That magical thinking should be rejected, not embraced, by anyone who is part of the system.

[Caracal]

My complaints:
1. In order to keep enrollment numbers up, unmotivated mediocre students will be encouraged to enroll in humanities subjects, and even major in them. When these students graduate with "C"s, they have a hard time getting work, because they haven't really developed many of those "communication" and "critical thinking" skills.


So, in summary, if supporters of the humanities are going to try and deflect blame for problems of certain of their graduates who have unrealistic expectations, then I am not willing to calmly accept it. And I am not going to encourage sending all kinds of people to university who don't know why they're going other than they think it's a golden ticket. That magical thinking should be rejected, not embraced, by anyone who is part of the system.

You've created an imaginary problem. There aren't enough humanities majors to be responsible for any broader problems in higher education. The idea that we are attracting a disproportionate number of unmotivated students is just nonsense that isn't backed up by anything besides your own biases. It doesn't really make much sense. I'm quite sure that more popular majors attract more unmotivated students and probably a higher proportion because unmotivated students are just going to do things that seem standard and easy. We have some business faculty here. I'm sure you have some great students, but I'm also betting you see a lot of not great ones too. And nobody is talking about humanities majors not being able to find jobs, because in fact, they do find jobs at comparable rates to other majors.

In some cases, I think the lower compensation they get in those jobs is messed up, especially for the pretty large proportion who go into secondary teaching, but in general you've just invented this pretend world that doesn't exist.

[Wahoo Redux]

My complaints:
1. In order to keep enrollment numbers up, unmotivated mediocre students will be encouraged to enroll in humanities subjects, and even major in them. When these students graduate with "C"s, they have a hard time getting work, because they haven't really developed many of those "communication" and "critical thinking" skills.


So, in summary, if supporters of the humanities are going to try and deflect blame for problems of certain of their graduates who have unrealistic expectations, then I am not willing to calmly accept it. And I am not going to encourage sending all kinds of people to university who don't know why they're going other than they think it's a golden ticket. That magical thinking should be rejected, not embraced, by anyone who is part of the system.

You've created an imaginary problem. There aren't enough humanities majors to be responsible for any broader problems in higher education. The idea that we are attracting a disproportionate number of unmotivated students is just nonsense that isn't backed up by anything besides your own biases. It doesn't really make much sense. I'm quite sure that more popular majors attract more unmotivated students and probably a higher proportion because unmotivated students are just going to do things that seem standard and easy. We have some business faculty here. I'm sure you have some great students, but I'm also betting you see a lot of not great ones too. And nobody is talking about humanities majors not being able to find jobs, because in fact, they do find jobs at comparable rates to other majors.

In some cases, I think the lower compensation they get in those jobs is messed up, especially for the pretty large proportion who go into secondary teaching, but in general you've just invented this pretend world that doesn't exist.

There are reasons I ignore Marshy.

[marshwiggle]

My complaints:
1. In order to keep enrollment numbers up, unmotivated mediocre students will be encouraged to enroll in humanities subjects, and even major in them. When these students graduate with "C"s, they have a hard time getting work, because they haven't really developed many of those "communication" and "critical thinking" skills.


So, in summary, if supporters of the humanities are going to try and deflect blame for problems of certain of their graduates who have unrealistic expectations, then I am not willing to calmly accept it. And I am not going to encourage sending all kinds of people to university who don't know why they're going other than they think it's a golden ticket. That magical thinking should be rejected, not embraced, by anyone who is part of the system.

You've created an imaginary problem. There aren't enough humanities majors to be responsible for any broader problems in higher education. The idea that we are attracting a disproportionate number of unmotivated students is just nonsense that isn't backed up by anything besides your own biases. It doesn't really make much sense. I'm quite sure that more popular majors attract more unmotivated students and probably a higher proportion because unmotivated students are just going to do things that seem standard and easy. We have some business faculty here. I'm sure you have some great students, but I'm also betting you see a lot of not great ones too. And nobody is talking about humanities majors not being able to find jobs, because in fact, they do find jobs at comparable rates to other majors.

In some cases, I think the lower compensation they get in those jobs is messed up, especially for the pretty large proportion who go into secondary teaching, but in general you've just invented this pretend world that doesn't exist.

There are reasons I ignore Marshy.

Except that you don't:

Marshy is also ironic because he's...well, he's Marshy.  It's what he does.

Oh Marshy...

Reeeeeeaaaally Marshy?  You think?

How utterly perceptive!

Gosh you are smart.

You do obviously read my posts; however you often avoid actually addressing any of my points specifically. So I don't know what your actual objections are.

[writingprof]

And because they are built around classic works, the courses are designed to engage undergraduates in ways that a traditional composition class typically does not.

Right, because a "typical" composition class is so woke that "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is now verboten.  It would be hilarious (and would confirm my view of the world) if the pendulum is now swinging in the other direction and Purdue et al. are enticing students with texts that are actually good, despite the fact that many of them were written by white people (or, in the case of King, black people who practiced "respectability politics").

[larryc]

The link is now paywalled, unfortunately.

Plus this thread is full of personal insults. So lose/lose.

[apostrophe]

And because they are built around classic works, the courses are designed to engage undergraduates in ways that a traditional composition class typically does not.

Right, because a "typical" composition class is so woke that "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is now verboten.  It would be hilarious (and would confirm my view of the world) if the pendulum is now swinging in the other direction and Purdue et al. are enticing students with texts that are actually good, despite the fact that many of them were written by white people (or, in the case of King, black people who practiced "respectability politics").

What?