CUNY Pathways and Faculty Governance

Last Tuesday, the City Tech College Council, the faculty governance body for the college, passed the following resolution relating to CUNY Pathways (which I have blogged about here and here):

We in United States colleges and universities have, for the most part, a century of successful tradition behind the concept of faculty governance in the area of curriculum (in others as well, but I want to stick to the case at hand). Why? There are a number of reasons, including these:

• It is only the faculty as a whole, not its leaders or representatives and certainly not those who handle the administration of the college or university, that sees the needs of education broadly enough to make useful and possible curricular policies. As both content experts and the front line of interaction with students, only the faculty is situated to effectively integrate these two critical areas.
• Though the faculty has to operate within financial guidelines established by the administration, it is not beholden to funding sources the way the administration is. In fact, one of the reasons for faculty self-governance is that it allows the administration to distance itself from faculty curricular decisions, keeping funding sources aware of the necessity for independence. When it reaches into curricular debate, it narrows that distance, threatening the independence of education as a whole.
• Faculty self-governance is in keeping with American ideals of participatory democracy, as opposed to systems of dictate from the top.
• In contemporary America, education is coming to be a political topic, its agendas set far outside of our colleges and universities--far away from our elementary schools and high schools. Education itself becomes secondary to the political motivations surrounding it. Each time we allow forces from beyond the faculty to make decisions, any decisions, we weaken the strength of educators in deciding questions of education.

Pathways may be an attempt to meet a perceived need of bringing consistency to the various CUNY campuses, and it may be that the central administration believes that it is best situated to address that need, for it stands away from the individual schools. That, though, could be an opening for the administration to take on other tasks that have been left to the faculty in the past. Maybe the CUNY administration does not mean it to be that, but a door left slightly ajar can easily blow open--much more easily than one firmly shut. And the door against administrative involvement in curricular development should be kept bolted (it has not been, but that, again, is a broader concern than I am addressing here).

The City Tech College Council is not saying that the needs Pathways is meant to meet are not worthy, simply that the method is inappropriate--for all of the reasons I put forward above and for others... not the least being that Pathways is poorly designed and is being poorly executed.

As the College Council says, it would be best, at this point, to abandon Pathways and start over. The central administration, by backing down on this, would take an important step towards re-establishing trust between itself and the faculty--and would probably be able to set in motion a process toward curricular modification that would better meet student needs than the current Pathways ever will.

There's no force to the College Council resolution, which is itself unfortunate. But it does add to the voices of CUNY faculty rising up in response to Pathways, joining the Baruch College Faculty Senate, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty of City College, the Brooklyn College Faculty Council, the Bronx Community College pathways committee and more in expressing concern over the process of creation and implementation of Pathways.

Will the central administration respond to the concerns raised in a positive way? I hope so. It would be in the best interest of all of us involved in CUNY for it to do so.

Starting Up... Where the Student Is (With Goals)

One of my teaching mantras is "start where the student is."  I've even a recent post on this blog with that as the title.  Whatever we might want or believe should be, each group of students we face in the classroom has its own strengths and weaknesses, and these need to be factored into any plan we make for moving students to where they are meeting our end-of-semester expectations.  Or end-of-degree-program expectations.  Or life expectations.

This week, the new high school that I've been promoting here and here, the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-Tech) here in Brooklyn, opened.  Today, Rashid Davis, its Founding Principal, contributed a piece to the blog Building a Smarter Planet entitled "Crossing the 'Great Divides' to Save Our Children."  He writes:

As an educator, I want to shepherd my students through their transitions from members of what the Harvard Pathways to Prosperity study calls “the forgotten half” to personifications of potential. That means understanding who they are, where they’re coming from, where they need to be, and – most importantly – how to reach them.

You can't reach students unless you spend the time listening to them, discovering just where they are.  Davis understands this, and I hope he and P-Tech can build success on this understanding.  He also points something else out: it's not just where the students are that's important, but where they want to get to and what life is like there:

• The majority of good American jobs require some form of post-secondary education or training; and

• As a cultural institution, the corporate workplace – where most of the good jobs are – operates on middle class values and behaviors.

Where the student is provides nothing but a starting point.  There also has to be a goal, one the student understands and buys into, one that schools can help clarify.  I'm glad P-Tech is aiming for that, too.  Whatever  we may think of 'middle class values and behaviors,' it is these that students of today will have to negotiate in their future lives.  A school that ignores them does the student no service.  However you slice it, "young people from difficult circumstances must overcome the dual challenges of getting an education and navigating unfamiliar waters to move from poverty to meaningful, long-term employment."

Davis is right.  Starting where the student is remains important, but understanding where they could possibly go is just as important.  P-Tech, in recognizing the former has not forgotten the latter.  By doing so, it is giving itself a structure for success that few new schools that I've encountered recently have established.

Technology and Education

For the past several weeks, I have been helping coordinate development of the English curriculum for a new public high school in Brooklyn.  Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-Tech) will open in September with cooperation between New York City College of Technology (City Tech--where I teach), the New York City Board of Education and IBM.  The idea is that the school will provide a seamless sequence from ninth grade through attainment of Associates degrees in technology or technology-related fields within six years.  All I've been doing, really, is telling a group of competent educators what the expectations are for students entering our First Year Composition course.  It quickly became clear, as I listened in on their discussions, that they don't need me to tell them what to do (as if I even could), merely to explain what their goals should be from the perspective of one of the students' potential college teachers.

That they can walk things back from there and put together an effective plan was made clear by Rashid Davis, the founding principal of the school and a man with Masters degrees from Columbia, Fordham, and Pace on top of a B.A. from Morehouse College--in addition to seven years as a teacher and eight as an administrator.  Davis and his teachers and staff are clearly able, educated, and dedicated.  It is a pleasure to watch them work as they plan for the opening of school in the fall.

There is a three-pronged approach to education at P-Tech, through Technology, Mathematics, and English.  Though I would like to see more Social Studies in the curriculum, I understand the factors that have led to a more restricted curriculum in the face of contemporary cultural demands for education more directed to jobs than to the grander vision espoused by John Dewey, where education also serves to create citizens.  Fortunately, the English part of the program, as I understand it, will include, in its readings and subsequent discussions and writings, as much as possible to make up for the lack.

One of the things I like about P-Tech is that it moves in directions opposite of the charter-school movement.  Not only is it a public school, but it is really public: As the P-Tech website says, "There are no tests to get in. Students of all abilities will be accepted."  To me, that's really cool, for it indicates that the school accepts the real challenge of education, to bring all students to the levels they can reach.  Too often, we restrict our schools (and colleges) to those who have already gained the tools (generally through family and class backgrounds) for success.  The whole idea of public education is to provide pathways for everyone, not just an elite, no matter how you might define it.

To see a new public school starting up is particularly invigorating in the current climate of compression and diminution of public education.  In today's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes:

The Center on Education Policy reports that 70 percent of school districts nationwide endured budget cuts in the school year that just ended, and 84 percent anticipate cuts this year.

In higher education, the same drama is unfolding. California’s superb public university system is being undermined by the biggest budget cuts in the state’s history. Tuition is set to rise about 20 percent this year, on top of a 26 percent increase last year, which means that college will become unaffordable for some.

The immediate losers are the students. In the long run, the loser is our country.

Let me amend that: The immediate losers are our children.  In the long run, the losers are all of us.  In other words, this is personal.  For me, to be personally involved (even if just tangentially) in something like P-Tech allows me the optimism to believe that we can turn things around.  P-Tech may not do quite everything I would like, but it is a start in the right direction, and it shows that even a business like IBM can understand the value of trying new things rather than just squeezing into nothing the most successful system of public education ever.

Kristof details what has happened to his own high school, the cutbacks that make the education he received less and less possible.  The bleeding of education affects each of our lives, even if we don't all succeed in the way Kristof has.  We're talking about our children, here.  Only a few can attend the private schools and charter schools.  The vast majority will always have to rely on the broader public-school system.

In his article, Kristof's mentions Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz's 2010 book The Race Between Education and Technology.  Though the book may be flawed in that it might seem to place education in too narrow a focus (the authors might wish they, too, had paid a little more attention to Dewey), the point Kristof takes from it is not: mass education is a primary reason for American success over the last century.  If our schools don't seem to be working (and I would disagree with that--I think the whole "failure" meme of public education is both false and fake), then the answer is not to destroy them, as too many seem to want to do these days, but to find ways of improving them.

We have a pool of talented educators, many of them still working in public education (the faculty and staff of P-Tech are not particularly unusual in their skills) and many more who could be attracted back to the profession.  Why don't we use them?  We need to reject this idea that our teachers have destroyed our schools (they have not, and the schools are still quite good) and find ways to support them and the efforts, like P-Tech, they are making to improve our educational institutions in ways that reflect both changing societal demands (and needs) and the realities of educating students for life in a world dominated by technology.

Once, our public schools made us the world-wide leaders in technology.  They can again, but we all have to support them--and that means supporting the professionalism of our teachers (and not always breathing down their necks with things like 'value added' ratings) and supporting adequate funding, even if that means, sometimes, increasing our taxes.  Paying now will produce dividends later, just as it did, as Goldin and Katz demonstrate, throughout the twentieth century.

The "Race and New Media" Conference

On May 3, 2008, the first “Race and New Media” conference will take place on the campus of New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in downtown Brooklyn close to both the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Though in an academic setting, the conference is intended to draw from the broader community as well, bringing in “outsiders” as both presenters and participants. My colleague Annie Seaton and I are the organizers, and are exploring a number of ways of expanding the conference beyond college walls. One panel, of example, will be a walking tour of a small section of Brooklyn while relevant topics are discussed.

Brooklyn native (and Harvard PhD candidate/Rockefeller Fellow) Omar Wasow has agreed to provide the keynote talk. Wasow is the co-founder and ongoing strategic advisor to BlackPlanet.com and an on-air technology analyst. Under Wasow's leadership, BlackPlanet.com became the leading website for African Americans, reaching over three million people a month. Wasow also works to demystify technology issues through regular TV and radio segments on NBC's Today Show and public radio's Tavis Smiley Show.

Tentatively, Natasha Dow Schull, Assistant Professor in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, is also scheduled to speak. Professor Schull has won fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Joel Rainey, from the Harvard History Department, a Cultural Historian, agreed to be another featured speaker.

City Tech physics professor Dr. Reginald Blake Assistant Professor, also a Visiting Research Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and director of the CUNY-wide Black Male Initiative (BMI), will provide the opening remarks.

Panel papers will deal with a range of aspect of the relationship between "race" and "new media." Included may be questions like the following: Does race work differently in the "new" media than it did in the "old" media? Network news, for instance, was widely derided as a nearly diversity-free zone. Is the blogosphere different? How do video games, blogs, chat rooms, and other forms of "new" media and "digital" or "virtual" spaces construct or reflect notions of race? What kinds of "new" identities and/or communities exist in these "new" digital spaces? How is new media being used to make connections, to empower communities, and/or to control, colonize, or dominate them? In other words, are there digital forms of "cultural" imperialism? Anyone interested in participating on a panel should sent a 250-word proposal to raceandnewmedia@gmail.com.

City Tech students will be drawn in in a number of ways. Students in my Advanced Technical Writing course will be creating and presenting one of the panels; coverage of the conference will be provided by my City Tech journalism students, who will be involved in a cooperative venture with ePluribus Media to supply information about the conference to the wider world. ePMedia will offer mentoring in such things as ethics, fact checking, and editing.

We are open to experimentation of many sorts. Contact us through the raceandnewmedia@gmail.com email address with any suggestions or proposals.

Harnessing Communication

Looking around my classrooms this fall before the official hour, I’m struck by how many more students than ever before are peering down at their desks, reading—screens, to be sure, but reading, and reading diligently. Some are staring Sidekicks, using their thumbs to respond to what they are reading, typing even more quickly than the stereotyped two-finger-typing reporter in a 1940s movie. Some have laptops—one holds an even smaller computer running the Linux she has fallen in love with.

In my Advanced Technical Writing class in a computer lab, the students—the very first day—slid before their screens and started communicating (and no, they weren’t playing games). Many of them had set up their blogs (the first assignment) and posted on them by the end of that first class. Even in my Developmental Writing class, computers show up unbidden. One student does the in-class writings on his and emails them to me during class (I keep a laptop with me, too).

“Something is happening here,” as Dylan long ago wrote, “and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” Students are writing. And on their own.

And many of us supposed teachers of writing aren’t even paying attention. We’re stuck in the 1980s and early 1990s and with the assignments and methodologies of that time. Just as Dylan’s Mr. Jones was facing a world he could not negotiate, we are failing to negotiate a universe of the written word that is fast shifting away from the one we were raised in.

Some of us even justify our inaction in the face of a changing technological world of writing by pointing to a “digital divide,” saying that only the lucky students, the ones with money and from good high schools, are able to take advantage of the new possibilities. They ought to visit my campus, no elite university, where even the kids from the worst inner-city neighborhoods are comfortable with technology in a way their older siblings cannot grasp (let alone the teacher whose cell phone is simply that—a phone). Text messaging, instant messaging, and email are facts of life to almost every college student entering this fall, no matter their backgrounds.

This resurgence of writing on the users’ own terms (certainly not on those of writing teachers) is not an example of ‘technodeterminism,’ however, with the technology responsible for a cultural change by itself. No. What we are seeing is a result of the human desire to communicate, and to do so through any avenue that is both available and effective.

And in that lies a rebuke to all of us who teach writing.

Students would have been writing with enthusiasm all along, if they had seen it as a real means of engaging with the people they want to ‘talk’ to. They always chatted—the teenager on the phone has been a cliché since the 1950s, at least. Now they are finding they can chat as easily through the written word, something we writing teachers never managed to show them.

Too many writing teachers dismiss the writings their students compose through the new technologies, holding firmly to their old ideas of what writing should be, refusing to explore means of using what the students are doing in order to turn them into enthusiastic writers in the classroom as well as on the Sidekick. They use the shorthand of the net as an excuse rather than as an opening.

Worried that the students will write “u go grl” in a paper? Don’t dismiss it. Turn it into a discussion of code switching, making sure they understand the reasons for shifting from one mode into another (something they can and will do).

The possibilities for enhancing college writing through use of what the students are now doing on their own are myriad. It only takes a little imagination on the part of the teacher to begin bringing them to reality. IM and email exchanges can morph into competent college papers, give a little encouragement.

If students can be led to see the connection between the types of writing they use to communicate with each other and the types of writing they have to do in college classes, they may learn to stop dreading the college assignments so. Many of us have been teaching students to write to sheets of paper for decades, boring our students half to death (for they are managing only half a conversation—pieces of paper don’t write back). It’s time more of us starting teaching our students to write to communicate.

No, that’s not right: they are already writing to communicate on their own. They don’t need us for that. It’s time more of us started harnessing our students’ abilities in communication to the carts of college success.