higher education

In Echoes of Insight: Past Perspectives and the Future of Christian Higher Education, co-authors Patrick Allen and Kenneth Badley mine voices from the past for fresh wisdom to assist Christian universities in their efforts to balance programming (glitz), the pursuit of truth (glue), and the goal of being transforming institutions “for the sake of the Kingdom (300)” (hope). 

The text is a response of hope, intended to refocus the mission, identity, and curriculum of Christian universities on its well-being and its ultimate purpose, which is "to provide a clear and rigorous program of instruction, spiritual formation, and vocational preparation (255).” The text, therefore, proposes a distinct move away from the sometimes exclusive, albeit important, conversations around money, branding, and jobs for graduates. To do this work, the authors examine eleven influential thinkers of education. Using a format that very closely resembles the multiple editions of Daniel L. Pals’s Theories of Religion, each chapter in Echoes of Insight offers a brief biography, a synopsis of classic and relevant works, a discussion of applicable ideas, and questions for reflection.

Part One: “The Classroom and the Student Instruction, Formation, and Vocation,” introduces five thinkers and attempts to connect their ideas with the perceived “challenges faced by Christian higher education in the twenty-first century (18).”  Part One begins with Alfred North Whitehead, but the works of Dorothy Sayers, Hannah Arendt, Flannery O’Connor, and Maria Montessori, via their respective chapters, come alongside to help to facilitate a larger discussion on the human experience and the current challenges faced by Christian universities. Cooperatively, these works support Whitehead’s claim that “all parts of a student’s education should fit together epistemologically and should connect to the student’s day-to-day life (29).” In other words, how faculty members treat students, how colleagues convey mutual respect, or where the roots of authority lie all contribute to the students’ learning experience.

Part Two: “The Faculty and the Administration: Mission, Vision, and Values,” examines the work of John Henry Newman, Abraham Flexner, Thorstein Veblen, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Karl Jaspers. Unlike Part One, the thinkers included in Part Two are those who had a vested interest in higher education and maintained distinct ideas about the university and the pursuit of truth. Allen and Badley found that all agreed that a common mission, a strong academic program, an emphasis on learning, and the freedom to pursue truth were essential. 

Overall, the text is an enjoyable read. In fact, although it is written for a scholarly audience, the authors’ often tongue-in-cheek humor makes the manuscript a rather accessible and entertaining page-turner. More importantly, the authors’ passion and genuine interest in the success of Christian higher education makes Echoes of Insight both engaging and insightful.

Echoes of Insight is an important work and a valuable addition to this area of scholarship. Thankfully, the authors are already planning a more inclusive and diverse second edition, because the current text falls short in these areas. Indeed, the glaring absence of writers, theologians, or philosophers of color is problematic. Such an omission not only silences and makes invisible select people groups, but it also disregards the distinct experiences of minority students on predominantly white Christian campuses. Consequently, this text, whose argument is predicated on integration, connection, and the unhindered pursuit of truth, failed to take seriously just how much race and racism in American education and American Christianity unjustly impacts people of color and negatively informs their day-to-day life and learnings experiences. Thereby rendering many of them grossly untouched by Allen and Badley’s vision of a transformational institution.

Given the philosophical and theoretical emphases of Echoes of Insight, graduate students and specialists (namely faculty and administrators) with scholarly interests in this subject matter would benefit most from reading this text.

 

Funded by the Ford Foundation, neighboring universities joined in a two-year partnership hoping to make the “learning climate” on each campus “more inclusive of minority voices and ways of knowing” and safer “for the free exchange of ideas” (ii). This spiral-bound handbook documents the plans and experiences of the faculty, administrators, and staff at Alaska Pacific University and the University of Alaska Anchorage who sought to deepen “civil discourse” on each campus. The project primarily focused on faculty development for “difficult dialogues” within classrooms, but also addressed broader campus atmosphere and structures of support. The volume is meant to be a “conversation-starter and field manual for [those] who want to strengthen their teaching and engage students more effectively.”

The first four chapters (Ground Rules, Rhetoric/Debate, Race/Class/Culture, Science/Religion) are framed by the training faculty received as part of four day-long faculty intensives. Rather than a straight narrative, each chapter reads as both a how-to manual and an assessment of implementation – summaries of proposed pedagogical techniques are followed by faculty essays that document what happened when they applied those approaches in the classroom. A fifth topical chapter (Business/Politics) documents an additional set of teaching techniques and case studies. Brookfield and Preskill’s Discussion as a Way of Teaching served as a guiding text for the group’s work, but they also drew from the wisdom of fellow faculty. The book’s essays, by thirty-five faculty and staff involved in the initiative, make clear they found the project’s prompt to reflect and adapt teaching approaches to be helpful.

The final chapters (Outcomes, Keep Talking) offer an assessment of the two-year project (successful in its deepening of the sense of each institution as a place of “profound learning, of courageous inquiry, [and] deep transformation” for “students, faculty, staff, administrators, and community partners” [247]) and brief suggestions for maintaining the project’s benefits. Every chapter includes color-coded lists, summaries, and tips, which prove useful when skimming the text for material relevant to a variety of topics and contexts. The volume closes with a list of references and readings on topics discussed in the chapters, including: academic freedom, safety, contrapower harassment, rhetoric, argument, debate, identity, privilege, culturally responsible teaching, politics, and social justice.

Start Talking includes a deep storehouse of pedagogical and practical wisdom. In many ways the volume reads more like a grant proposal and summary of results than a cohesive narrative. As a result, rather than reading the text straight through, faculty members or departments facing specific issues might search the volume for targeted resources to navigate difficult conversations. Similarly, institutions hoping to shift campus climates in contentious times might identify approaches to pilot with small teams over the course of an academic year. Finally, and particularly because most of the volume’s content addresses difficult conversations around issues other than religion (such as race, class, culture, politics, and science), the book’s resources provide a useful, lower-stakes entry point for faculties at religiously-based institutions to think about how to navigate contentious theological discussions.

Studies in higher education seem to have given limited attention to the emotional aspect of the teaching-learning experience. Emotion has, nearly for the greatest part, been isolated from cognition. Underlining this distrust of emotion in academia, How Higher Education Feels, explores the less charted trails of emotional dimensions of teaching and learning. Holding to the hypothesis that emotions cannot be separated from rational engagements, the book attempts to demonstrate how emotion is deeply intertwined with thinking and reasoning in higher education. This book is thus about journeying with, and reflecting upon, the emotional landscapes of courses we teach and students we impact.

The first two chapters set the stage and agenda of the book by outlining the need for study of emotions in higher learning, the methodology with which to explore emotional experiences, the significance of poetry in relation to emotions, and the conceptual tools used to examine the role of emotions. A teacher’s regulation of his or her own emotions in the context of student-centered teaching is a key element in the discussion.

The next nine chapters each include ten to fifteen poems that address specific themes of experience in university education. Some of the key themes include: transition to higher education, taking care of students and ourselves (teachers), love of people and culture, love of arts and or science, success and failure, and introspection and retrospection. The poems were compiled to serve as case studies expressing and illustrating various feelings in relation to significant aspects of learning, teaching, and development. They are rich in content and language, duly accompanied by brief commentaries as well as a well-researched expert commentary that places the poems in their specific contexts. They are simple and complex, metered and irregular compositions just like the life and moods of many academics. Poems are personal and touching, deep and sensitive, and quite successfully serve the purpose of the book.

While the poetry is meant to serve as case studies in emotion and feelings, the book seems to become a compilation of poems rather than a pedagogical discourse. Thankfully the commentaries, especially the expert commentaries, rescue the reader from being lost in the anthology of poems. The theoretical framework is also well conceptualized and the final chapter recaptures the mission of the monograph. It successfully shows the importance of emotion in experiences of higher learning from enrollment to graduation and beyond. It further shows the centrality of emotion and feelings of a student in relationship with subject, with teachers, with peers, and with self – all summed up, in this study, in poetic expressions.

As the compiler of this groundbreaking work, Kathleen Quinlan of Oxford Learning Institute, deserves appreciation for pointing attention to an important direction in higher education – the centrality of emotion and its powerful expression in poetry. She has liberated emotion in education from being the sole property of psychology and opened it up, with the help of poetry, for reflection on its socio-cultural contexts. How higher education feels? It feels terrifically poetic!

Editors Khine and Areepattamannil contribute to the series Contemporary Approaches to Research in Learning Innovations with volume nine, Non-cognitive Skills and Factors in Educational Attainment. The premise for the volume is that non-cognitive skills are equally important, or are even more important, than cognitive skills for effective educative processes and student success (3). Examples of non-cognitive skills include resilience (grit or toughness), well-being, social awareness, curiosity, creativity, work ethic, self-evaluation, collaboration, self-regulation, self-confidence, and motivation (16). The book is organized in three parts: I – Introduction, II – Conceptual and Theoretical Underpinnings (on non-cognitive factors), and III – Evidence from Empirical Research Studies. In Part II, six chapters are devoted to the relationship between non-cognitive success in learning and the educational process. A key question is: “Why are non-cognitive constructs important?” (17). Research shows that the cognitive development of persons should be accompanied by intentional non-cognitive development for positive democratic citizenship and personal and social well-being. Authors call for teachers and policy-makers to be aware of the research that clearly shows the significance of non-cognitive learning, thereby challenging current curricula, teaching methods, disciplinary policies, student evaluations, activities, and utilization of assessments (chapter 3). Subsequent chapters in Part II focus on understanding roles of self-efficacy and emotional intelligence, a repertoire for educators based on their attention to non-cognitive factors, attitudinal changes regarding assessment and correlating interventions, and non-cognitive learning tied to academic performance. Part III provides evidence from empirical research studies that support non-cognitive factors being highly significant for student success both in school and after graduation. For example, self-confidence is a greater predictor of achievement than measures of socio-economic status (166). Passion, perseverance, and self-control contribute significantly to success as well (chapter 9). Chapter 13 provides recommendations for greater student success: provide self-regulation knowledge support for students to improve their preparedness; provide information about available supportive environments; evaluate creativity and practical skill sets equally to cognitive ability; and redesign education from a “fixed intelligence” foundation to a dynamic intelligence focus (311). Chapters 14 and 15 initiate a tested “mental toughness” curriculum for students, and analyze attributes required for such toughness. In contrast, the next chapter recommends socialization through school in early childhood that educates children in social norms and mores through the lens of justice, beneficence, faith, hope, and love rather than with fear, negativity, and external control (370). Issues of future wellness, performance in mathematics, and the impact of culture on non-cognitive skill sets follow in the final chapters. This volume provides exhaustive evidence for its premise. Yet, these studies challenge educators to think pedagogically about what we expect in the classroom and how we intend to educate the whole person in a dynamic learning conversation rather than in a “fixed” curriculum. This book is worthy of attention, and is likely best suited for faculty exploration in broad strokes rather than an essential read for all teachers.