More EDU-TALK

Colleagues, My Colleagues

More Edu-Talk
but never the less
provocative!

Emergency Phenomena & Values
 Creating Interdisciplinary
 Campus Cultures: A Model
 for Strength and Sustainability
                  By Julie Thompson Klein
 
Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures
gives administrators and faculty the tools
they need to craft persuasive arguments,
make informed decisions anchored in the
literature, and devise changes in policy
and procedures that will foster successful
and sustainable interdisciplinary research
 and education.
 
The book provides a systematic approach
to inter-disciplinarity on campus, grounded
in a conceptual framework, and also
presents a portfolio of pragmatic
strategies.
 
Presumptuously, I admit: I’ve been trying to create
a culture across  the curriculum if not inter-disciplinarity
maybe meta-disciplinarity-- beyond  disciplinarity:
in  disciplinarity but not
of disciplinarity,
know what  I mean?
Habituated to our disciplinary habitats, sure,  but not
addicted to them. .
 
I lack the craft of persuasive argument & know it's
not a unilateral deal. The harder I try, the less I
succeed.
 
Let’s say, a hypothetical:  President Pfeiffer and Dean
Garrett ordered us all copies of this book: assigned it—
the way we assign “this” and “that” in our courses, and
we all read it conscientiously—good students we
all are as our  doctororal degrees testify..   .
 
Do you guess that would set us up for building cooperation
and  collaborative genius across the curriculum & generate
a shared sense of  what we talk about when we talk about
General Education? ? 
 
“Read This!” they might decree (Sandy and Paula)
     “And then Talk Amongst Your Selves.”
 
That’s pretty much how my courses  work:
            You all read this, we’ll talk.
It  helps if I  quiz them to insure they’re
doing the reading  but I can get away with
it because I hold ex-officio authority and
wield a grade-gun and can make them write
papers, too— reflection  and  commentary.
 
[Writing is good for them: Putting their deas 
‘In Play” so to speak.  Maybe thesis-driven;
maybe merely exercises in emergent
phenomena (a-HA! they sometimes say:
I never knew I knew that! )
 
The more  writing  the better.  It’s always been
that way  in education.   Write yr Asses Off 
I implore them. How else get merrier if not
good? ]
 
And then: spectacular discussion, constellating
innovative ideas bouncing off each other and  walls.
Twists & turns & digressions, quibbling & questioning
everything: hidden assumptions, controlling meta-force,
emerging phenomena  and values  rising  like fog off
the frog pond.   Academics: got to love IT!.
 
Generating Inter or A- Disciplinarity Across the Curriculum
would be  just like what-we-do in the  classroom except
flipped up & over our heads and we’d be the ones acting
like a bunch of stunned rigor-devoted students, talking and
writing amongst ourselves  
 
If we forced ourselves to give ourselves efficient attention,
as we demand of our students, well-- Klein’s book claims
the tools to craft persuasive argument, make informed
decisions anchored in literature so as to devise changes in
policy &  procedures that will foster successful &  sustainable 
interdisciplinary research and education,  educing and indulging
the P in our Ph Degrees. .
 
I don't believe any of this, actually. IT's more complicated and
more intersting than all that:  how to create an  interdisciplinary
campus culture--modeling strength and sustainability.  Can't be
legislated by fiat,  task force & empowermental strateegery--tools
to craft persuasive argument, forcing the issue so to speak, but
we seem to  talk that way. As if it could be..

"Neither Logic nor Sermons Convince," says Whitman,
but we talk as if they do--one of our
Ways of Talking.

xxxooo, Sam