Curriculum Reform Manifesto:
Principles for Rethinking Undergraduate Curricula for the 21st Century:
The current crisis of the university is intellectual. It is a crisis of purpose, focus and content, rooted in fundamental confusion about all three. As a consequence, curricula are largely separate from research, subjects are taught in disciplinary isolation, knowledge is conflated with information and is more often than not presented as static rather than dynamic. Furthermore, universities are largely reactive rather than providing clear forward-looking visions and critical perspectives. The crisis is all the more visible today, as the pace of social, intellectual and technological change inside and outside the universities is increasingly out of step. While universities worldwide are undergoing many, often radical, structural transformations, ranging from the Bologna Process in Europe and the Exzellenzinitiative in Germany to the rapid expansion of universities in India and China, the accelerating decline of public investments in universities in the United States and elsewhere and an ever growing demand for university access everywhere, much less attention has been paid to university curricula. But for the university as a community of scholars and students, that is its central function and the key to its internal renewal. Universities are embedded in multiple institutional, economic, financial, political and research networks. All of these generate pressures and constraints as well as opportunities. The curriculum, however, is the core domain of the university itself.
Here we present a set of eleven overlapping principles designed to inform an international dialogue and to guide an experimental process of redesigning university undergraduate curricula worldwide. There can be no standard formula for implementation of these principles given the huge diversity of institutional structures and cultural differences amongst universities but these principles, we believe, provide the foundational concepts for what needs to be done.
- As a central guideline teach disciplines rigorously in introductory courses together with a set of parallel seminars devoted to complex real life problems that transcend disciplinary boundaries.
- Teach knowledge in its social, cultural and political contexts. Teach not just the factual subject matter, but highlight the challenges, open questions and uncertainties of each discipline.
- Create awareness of the great problems humanity is facing (hunger, poverty, public health, sustainability, climate change, water resources, security, etc.) and show that no single discipline can adequately address any of them.
- Use these challenges to demonstrate and rigorously practice interdisciplinarity, avoiding the dangers of interdisciplinary dilettantism.
- Treat knowledge historically and examine critically how it is generated, acquired, and used. Emphasize that different cultures have their own traditions and different ways of knowing. Do not treat knowledge as static and embedded in a fixed canon.
- Provide all students with a fundamental understanding of the basics of the natural and the social sciences, as well as the humanities. Emphasize and illustrate the connections between these traditions of knowledge.
- Engage with the world’s complexity and messiness. This applies to the sciences as much as to the social, political and cultural dimensions of the world. Such an engagement will contribute to the education of concerned citizens.
- Emphasize a broad and inclusive evolutionary mode of thinking in all areas of the curriculum.
- Familiarize students with non-linear phenomena in all areas of knowledge.
- Fuse theory and analytic rigor with practice and the application of knowledge to real-world problems.
- Rethink the implications of modern communication and information technologies for education and the architecture of the university.
Curricular changes of this magnitude and significance both require and produce changes in the structural arrangements and institutional profiles of universities. This is true for matters of governance, leadership, and finance as well as for systems of institutional rewards, assessment, and incentives; it is bound to have implications for the recruitment and evaluation of both professors and students as well as for the allocation of resources and the institutional practice of accountability. The experimental process of curriculum reform we hope to stimulate by offering these guiding principles will thus require the collaboration of scholars and educators willing to transform their scholarly and educational practices and of administrators willing to support experimentation and to provide the necessary structural conditions for it to succeed.
These principles are the conclusion of deliberations by a working group of scholars that met at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin during the academic year 2009/10. Some were fellows at the Kolleg, others joined the group because of their interest in these issues. The Wissenschaftskolleg supported the work of its fellows. The principles have already been adopted by a first group of institutions as a blueprint for local curriculum reform. The group involved in drafting these principles represented diverse disciplines (from the natural and social sciences to the humanities), geographical origins (Europe, North America, and India) as well as career stages (from former university presidents to students). They invite their colleagues around the world to join in this effort of re-thinking and re-shaping teaching and learning for the university of the future.
Hello Mr. Klöpper,
I would like to thank you and your fellows for taking this on. I am a non-traditional student (33 years old) who has not attended any type of school since the age of 9. Now in my third year of a mechanical engineering bachelors degree, I have a huge amount of respect for the professors I work for as research assistant. Through the experience of this research, and their perspective, I have been able to, at least somewhat, connect my education to a real life application. I see this as being absolutely essential to the learning process. To me, as someone who has spent many years in the ‘real world’ and has much experience with a few career paths, I have noticed a great rift between what is taught inside, and what takes place outside of, the classroom.
As a direct result of this, I set about starting a student club with the intention of bringing students from every department on campus together to accomplish something that everyone involved, as well as the community, would benefit from. It is somewhat of an ambitious project and I have been faced with administrative hurdles since day one. I have no intentions of letting up my efforts because I really do believe I am going to be able to set a much needed example for students to follow.
I am not sure if it is due to the free form education of my youth, but I am appalled by the state of my educational environment. Everything. From how it is taught, by whom, to what degree, with such pitiful expectations, and worst of all, with such carelessness to what is actually being learned.
It is at times like this I wish I had started my education earlier so I could be involved in such endeavors as yours.
Only innovative thought will bring an innovative reality.
Thank you for reading and best wishes,
Dave Schenker
President, Greenspeed
http://greenspeed.me
Bravo! I enjoyed reading your manifesto and I completely agree with your 11 principles.
But, to really “fix” the undergraduate’s education system, I believe that it is not only the curricula that we must change but more importantly the teaching techniques that are used to deliver this knowledge. Indeed, I find that the main problem with today’s education is the lack of regulation of the quality of teaching. What I mean by this is that the only real force that regulate the quality of the education is the curricula that teachers are supposed to follow. But, this force is not strong enough in itself to really regulate the main factor that decides if a course will be “good”(useful and remembered) or “bad” (useless and forgotten once the credits are obtained). This main factor is of course the quality of the teachers themselves. And so, even if you have a good curricula, if the teachers are fundamentally bad, the courses will still be bad.
With that said, I invite everyone to rethink the way that knowledge is delivered to students. Computer programs can deliver the information and can be regulated in ways that human teachers could never hope to do. Indeed, to regulate a computer program, all we need to do is consistently improve the codes of the program by receiving feedbacks from the students(something that could actually be done in real time!). The possibilities of improvement that would come by making the switch to a learning environment who primarily use computer programs are endless. For example, the softwares could be coded in ways that would recognize the learning category of the students that use it. Is the student more of a visual learner or an auditory learner? At what pace does the student learn? With this information in hand, the program could then adapt his learning methods to suit the individual needs of every single user. Far-fetched you say? This kinda of technology is already used in popular video games.
We have the technology and the resources to do it now, so exactly why aren’t we stepping forward?
Dear Mr. Field,
While our group and this website are primarily concerned with curriculum development, I do agree with you that (instructional) technology will have an important role to play in the restructuring of higher education. This is what we tried to stress with point 11 of the manifesto.
While I don’t agree that education should be fully automatised, I think the role of the teacher/professor has to shift even further than it did with the invention of the seminar from recitation machine to mentor and guide. There are lots of things that could be done to bring about that shift and some them are already being tried:
- Carnegie Mellon runs an interesting initiative that tries to make effective use of technology http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/
- During a consulting project for the New York City Department of Education that I was involved in we talked to a number of innovative principals that made clever use of technology to deliver student-centric instruction:
http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/EnterpriseOperations/DIIT/ModelTechSchools.htm
- That there is a general trend in towards bringing education “online” is amply documented. Just a month ago the Chronicle featured a long “field reports” on the subject:
http://chronicle.com/article/Tomorrows-College/125120/
If you know of any other initiatives or experiments in this field, please let us know by responding to this comment.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
Hannes
A propos the manifesto:
Is there not still a quandry? Men and women of science have always loved literature and the arts. How do we persuade men and women of the arts and literature that they should love science? It strikes me as clear that stuffing background into someone’s brain serves no purpose. Are we forced to have some people who study in one single field while others try to master many?
jak
Dear Jak,
This problem is certainly amongst those that this manifesto seeks to address. The idea is that students will learn about the importance of multiple perspectives by engaging with real-world problems, which typically cannot be solved in a satisfactory way without the insights generated by a number of different disciplines. By confronting students with the perspectives of other students with various disciplinary backgrounds, we would like to put them in situations where they will to test their own assumptions, learn about unfamiliar epistemologies and different sets of values. In other words, the idea is that humanities students would hopefully come to think better of the sciences once they have become acutely aware of their capacity to relieve human suffering and prevent the large scale loss of life. On the other hand science students may be humbled by the fact that their insights may cause huge and morally problematic repercussions, if they are employed without careful reflection and planning – something usually brought to the table by the humanities and the social sciences.
Hannes
One could have Nobelists, brilliant researchers, and the most outstanding teachers teaching first year undergraduates. But, simply as an example, let us think about their teaching emphases in an introductory biology context. What should the core science curriculum for the biology majors (two semesters), or non-majors (one-semester) be? This is to suggest that the CONTENT that the faculty members deliver must be the core for both groups.
Emphasis on one’s own area of research? NO. A whirlwind phylogenetic and or taxonomic survey of the Archaeans, Bacteria, Animalia, Fungi, and Plantae? NO. Cladistics? NO. (A few significant weeks and high-points survey of DNA, evolution, genetic, and biotechnology? YES, of course.)
What should NOT ever, ever, ever be there? NO coenocytic fungi, NO sclerenchyma cells, NO metanephridia of an earthworm, NO revolving nosepieces of a microscope, NO minutia, NO cladocerans, and NO Thalliopterus obscurus.
Having painted the above portrait, what CORE CONTENT / concepts, data sets, and understandings are extremely important today, but is too often hurried over or even largely or entirely missing in much of today’s Science 101? We suggest a prominent one-or-two week role for population, human population growth past, present, and alternative futures, demographics, planetary carrying capacity, limiting factors (and not just the usual “running out-of” suppositions), climb-and-collapse, thorough understandings of exponential and non-linear mathematics in population and biospheric systems, etc. Along with real-world examples of thresholds, tipping points, and unintended consequences. (Topics that might be addressed collectively as “Biospherics and Whole-systems ecology.”)
Sample presentations and pdfs along these line, most of which are freely-downloadable, are currently available here http://www.scribd.com/Rocky%20XVIII and here http://www.wiserearth.org/organization/view/cf70c799a2c2ef209698259a55d585d7 .
The organizing principle for the comments offered above begins with a simple question: What Should EACH and EVERY Citizen Know About Our Planet? And then a listing of 100 such items was developed. Notice that the question does not confine itself to biology majors or to first-year undergraduates, but to college students of ALL majors (journalism, economics, business, political science, education, sociology, history, statistics, art, psychology, and so forth). The question also considers the broader public at large, and all educators and students worldwide, including those in the poorest and least developed countries whose current access to edcuation requires virtual schools and/or distance-learning programs.
Lastly, if we confine this discussion to college curricula alone, we leave out populations who may fail to attend college at all in pursuit of elected policy-making employment, anchors and producers for major television outlets, or even an assortment of radio and television talk-show venues.
Your instincts are good. We live in a time of big challenges and small answers, and the work of rethinking old models properly begins in the undergraduate years. May I suggest a few concepts that will help you tighten your approach? (I amplify these points at http://www.integrityatscaleblog.com)
Scale. The essence of modern society is the capacity for mass replication. Templates can be replicated by the millions. When they serve a useful purpose, society benefits. But poorly chosen templates can also cause harm on a vast scale, and society can suffer. Scale is everywhere, and wherever we mishandle it, we generate failure.
Integrity at Scale. We learn individual integrity when we are young. “If your behaviors cause harmful consequences, accept moral responsibility. Change your behaviors.” So our parents tell us. As individuals, most of us live by those principles and community life works well. But do we take this rule to the large scale world of big institutions? Often we don’t. If integrity, at scale, isn’t part of the design standard, then scale can go astray and its damage can be magnified.
Society as a Matrix, as a mixture of Assets and Operating Sectors. Think of society’s assets – environmental capital, human and community capital, economic capital, civic capital. When those assets are in good shape, or improving, we can say society is moving toward the common good. When society’s core assets are being degraded, we can say society is moving away from the common good.
Now think of society’s operating sectors. The energy industry. The medical industry. The banking industry. Many others. If they are well-designed, their template replication behaviors at scale will improve the well-being of society’s core assets. If they are badly-designed, their behaviors at scale will degrade society’s core assets.
An interdisciplinary effort has to learn to ask distinct kinds of questions. One essential set of questions will address the well-being of society’s core assets. Is the atmosphere being degraded? Are urban neighborhoods steeped in inter-generational poverty? And so on. Another essential set of questions will look at society’s operating sectors and their ability/inability to practice integrity at scale. Do they have business models that protect the common good? Or business models that undermine the common good? Still another set of questions will ask if public policy is well designed. Still other questions will probe the real world linkages between business model design options, on the one hand, and the fate of society’s core assets, on the other. What is the logic chain that connects the choice of gasoline engines for cars with the Earth’s natural cooling system? Will too much gasoline consumption alter the behaviors of the Earth’s natural cooling system?
Think what happens to interdisciplinary analysis if these matters are NOT raised. Scale and the templates that make it possible. Integrity, and what it means for the largest industries and institutions. Society’s core assets – how do we know what they are, when their health is improving, when it’s deteriorating. Society’s operating sectors – do their business models benefit or harm the well-being of society’s core assets. Leave those questions out, and the interdisciplinary analysis will be considerably weaker. Add them and it will be stronger.
Best wishes in your work.
Steven Howard Johnson
I’ve just reblogged this manifesto on HASTAC (http://www.hastac.org/blogs/nancykimberly/rethinking-curricula-21st-century-1) and would love it if we could get some cross-talk going. There are a lot of HASTAC members who are very interested in this very topic!! Everyone and anyone should feel free to converse there as well as here! Thanks–
Nicely put. But I do not think you go far enough. I wrote my own manifesto about education reform covering all levels, not just tertiary, and I think there are some useful points in there regarding university education that has not been covered elsewhere http://www.a3rdway.com/2011/04/01/the-cosshall-manifesto-for-educational-reform-and-innovation/
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