During the 2007-2008 financial crisis, many experienced what literary academics call a “crisis of representation.”
Globally, more than US$15 trillion seemed to evaporate and people wondered: “Wait a second, what is money? How could all of this value just disappear? If this thing that represented that other thing can vanish, was there ever anything there in the first place?”
Those of us who teach at universities are going through something similar because of COVID-19. Losing most of the physical markers of academic life — no classrooms or offices, and students instead beamed into our homes via Zoom — has forced us to question what a university is and what higher education means.
This year, the answer is not obvious — and not only because the pandemic-induced economic crisis will probably cause a host of small colleges, especially in the US, to vanish like so much money. Virtual teaching, like online business, socializing or prayer, is nothing like the real thing. Subtract dorm life, parties, physical classrooms and office hours in actual offices from the higher-education experience, and what remains is quite sterile.
However, this pared-down environment might also be revealing something essential that had been hidden by all the climbing walls, cafeterias and culture wars — namely: the mechanism by which learning happens. What should students be able to do at the end of the course that they cannot do at the beginning? What happens when we ask that question?
By building their courses backward in this way, professors could then add the needed skills in stages.
This simple idea is not exactly new, but it is not at the center of current higher-education debates.
Partly because faculty have not organized themselves to answer the essential question of what and how universities teach, that task has fallen increasingly to administrators responsible for “assessment.”
A set of “measurable objectives” is set in various planning and accreditation documents, and “student outcomes” are standardized at the institutional level. Many professors fear that these administrative structures and strictures are gaining greater purchase during the pandemic. Online courses can be monitored and recorded, and might come to resemble algorithms rather than learning communities.
However, long before college presidents had MBAs and academic human resources managers had more job security than professors, US higher education had its own planning document: the humble course syllabus.
Many professors worry that the syllabus has itself fallen prey to too many bureaucratic requirements, including quasi-legal disclaimers about academic honesty, accommodations for special learning needs and grievance policies. Yet, at its heart, the syllabus is a piece of writing that a teacher crafts to imagine a classroom community into being.
That is not the traditional view, of course. Back in the mid-20th century, the syllabus was mostly a list of the knowledge a professor would deliver to students.
Today, the syllabus is an opportunity to plot a story in which the students — not teachers — are the protagonists. Devising one gives any teacher the chance to do what good writers do, and engage empathetically with others’ experiences. That way, teachers can create classes that take students through difficulty and change to somewhere new.
We are not advocating making every class somehow “vocational,” much less sentimentalizing the hard work of learning. Rather, teachers should plan their courses backward by developing assignments — readings, experiments, and projects — in a progression so that students learn how as much as what, week by week, even class by class.
Technology of all kinds can be critical, and especially now, when almost all of us are teaching on screen, but it is, and must be, a tool, not a proxy. No classroom teacher ever thought that the blackboard or chalk was doing the teaching, yet today we risk imagining that our sophisticated technology can make up for the lack of a robust, practical pedagogy. Professors who are asking how tech can improve their teaching are asking the wrong question.
Using the pandemic to reimagine the goals of teaching might be the unexpected upside of a miserable situation. Teachers can find within this crisis the opportunity to rethink the precious classroom dynamic. After all, teaching students how to learn, and to learn how to do things themselves beyond the classroom, is education’s necessary gift to society.
Giving that gift, and making sure it is received, will require a lot of good writing — not the bureaucratic or disposable kind, but something more imaginative. That might not sound like the syllabus you remember from your own university days, but it is what we need now.
As former British prime minister Winston Churchill famously said near the end of World War II: “Never let a good crisis to go to waste.”
The COVID-19 crisis is the most serious that US higher education has ever faced. The opportunity is ours to squander.
William Germano is a professor of English at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art’s Center for Writing. Kit Nicholls is director of the Center for Writing at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
US President Donald Trump has gotten off to a head-spinning start in his foreign policy. He has pressured Denmark to cede Greenland to the United States, threatened to take over the Panama Canal, urged Canada to become the 51st US state, unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America” and announced plans for the United States to annex and administer Gaza. He has imposed and then suspended 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico for their roles in the flow of fentanyl into the United States, while at the same time increasing tariffs on China by 10
With the manipulations of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), it is no surprise that this year’s budget plan would make government operations difficult. The KMT and the TPP passing malicious legislation in the past year has caused public ire to accumulate, with the pressure about to erupt like a volcano. Civic groups have successively backed recall petition drives and public consensus has reached a fever-pitch, with no let up during the long Lunar New Year holiday. The ire has even breached the mindsets of former staunch KMT and TPP supporters. Most Taiwanese have vowed to use
As an American living in Taiwan, I have to confess how impressed I have been over the years by the Chinese Communist Party’s wholehearted embrace of high-speed rail and electric vehicles, and this at a time when my own democratic country has chosen a leader openly committed to doing everything in his power to put obstacles in the way of sustainable energy across the board — and democracy to boot. It really does make me wonder: “Are those of us right who hold that democracy is the right way to go?” Has Taiwan made the wrong choice? Many in China obviously
About 6.1 million couples tied the knot last year, down from 7.28 million in 2023 — a drop of more than 20 percent, data from the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs showed. That is more serious than the precipitous drop of 12.2 percent in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the saying goes, a single leaf reveals an entire autumn. The decline in marriages reveals problems in China’s economic development, painting a dismal picture of the nation’s future. A giant question mark hangs over economic data that Beijing releases due to a lack of clarity, freedom of the press