June 3, 2009
Alumni College & Reunions, Reed College
I am pleased to talk with you about social responsibility and the humanities and to make the case for incorporating social responsibility into the humanities. Since much of the discussion at Alumni College is about the importance of the humanities to a liberal arts education, I'm going to assume that importance, and leave behind the question of why humanities? for the moment.
Instead, I want to push the conversation forward to the question which really intrigues me. Namely, how are the humanities being taught? In particular, in what ways can the humanities be used to educate—and train—today's undergraduates for lives of social responsibility and active, empowered citizenship?
Higher education may be about many things—dedicating oneself to the life of the mind, discovering the intrinsic value of intellectual pursuits—but civic training? Isn't it enough to simply learn for learning sake? Why muck up the purity of the academic experience with talk about "social responsibility" and "civic engagement training"?
It is certainly legitimate to ask whether humanities courses should be taught for their own sake—to develop general knowledge, rational thought, and intellectual capabilities and not for any practical purpose. There are real concerns about how the topic of civic engagement can be integrated into humanities courses in a way that honors the discipline and does not dilute the intellectual rigor of the classroom but rather adds to it.
Is this approach feasible in only the more obvious disciplines —political science, sociology, and psychology? What about philosophy, art history, and literature? The issue at hand for skeptics is not simply if the humanities are capable of being a vehicle for educating students for a life of civic engagement, but should they be?
I'll tell you at the outset that I consider the humanities are a perfect vehicle for helping students to become not only engaged citizens but also superior students and that I intend to make that case today. Of course, in an effort at full disclosure, this statement is grounded in my belief that an essential role of higher education is the explicit preparation of students, both professionally and personally, for membership in society, and that therefore concepts of civic engagement should be introduced not only in humanities, but throughout the academic curricula.
Social responsibility is an issue that has been important to me as long as I can remember. Since I graduated from Reed I've held a number of positions relating to education—in think tanks (Aspen and Brookings), at the New York Public Library and at Consumer Reports magazine., and now as Executive Director of Project Pericles,
Project Pericles is a national consortium of 22 colleges and universities selected because of what they are doing to prepare students to become civically engaged and socially responsible citizens. We began eight years ago when Eugene Lang, the educational philanthropist, conceived of this organization to counter growing political cynicism and civic disengagement of young Americans. Our mission is to transform higher education so that students are educated for a life of civic engagement.
I joined Project Pericles in part because of my experience at Reed. To me, a liberal arts education is about gaining a whole new way of thinking and encountering the world. Reed was not just about intellectual exploration, but about asking what kind of person I wanted to become.
We come to college to make our life more significant. This transformation happens the first time you experience a shift in the way you think about an issue, and gain the capacity to unravel problems from multiple perspectives. I would argue that civic engagement incorporated in the curriculum of the humanities is a key way to develop that capacity for intellectual nuance and personal tolerance.
Recently I had a conversation with Brian Rosenberg, the President of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota who is the Chair of the Presidents' Council at Project Pericles. He said to me, "Educating people to be responsible citizens in a democratic society is the responsibility of a liberal arts college. In the end, you want [your graduates to be] smart, informed people who are concerned not with make a living, but rather making a life."
What do I mean by "civically engaged" and "socially responsible" citizens? What are the characteristics Project Pericles hopes that graduates of member institutions will have?
The description that most closely reflects our philosophy comes from our advisory board member Thomas Ehrlich in his book Higher Education and Civic Responsibility.
"…a morally and civically responsible individual recognizes himself or herself as a member of a larger social fabric, and therefore considers social problems to be at least partly his or her own; such an individual is willing to see the moral and civic dimensions of issues, to make and justify informed moral and civic judgments, and to take action when appropriate."
We at Project Pericles believe that educating students for this role must be a systemic feature of the college experience, not as so often happens on campuses through opportunities to participate in random off-campus extra curricular ventures.
When Mr. Lang, our founder and Board Chair says: "Our goal is to transform higher education," He understands that to effect meaningful change there must be commitment from the top down, the bottom up, and yes--- even sideways. Each Periclean college and university seeks to involve its entire institution in cultivating the students' social awareness. Thus educating students for a life of civic engagement involves an institution's academics, its campus activities, and its relationships with the local, national, and global community.
This transformation encompasses:
the classroom,
the campus, and
the community.
This systemic approach involves the participation of all who comprise the institution—the board of trustees, the president, the faculty, the staff, the students, and the alumni—as well as those in the community.
Upon joining Project Pericles each member institution of Project Pericles makes three commitments:
First, each institution's Board of Trustees passes a resolution to work with all constituencies (students, faculty, staff, alumni, trustees, and members of the community) to make the preparation of students for socially responsible and participatory citizenship an essential part of the institution's agenda. Each institution also establishes an ongoing Board subcommittee to oversee the implementation of this commitment.
Second, each institution's President becomes a member of Project Pericles' President's Council, which meets annually to assess institution and group progress toward achieving Project Pericles' goals and to share projects, ideas, and concerns for moving forward.
Third, each Periclean member institution develops a program that involves the curricular and co-curricular activities that contribute to the institution's commitment to educating students for a life of civic engagement. Each program is centrally administered by a Program Director who is responsible for its success.
Beyond undertaking the three commitments outlined, each of the 22 Periclean members carries out its own civic engagement program in a way that is unique to its institutional mission and character. Our institutions include both colleges and universities. Located throughout the country, from Maine to California, they are rural and urban, large and small. Two are all women's institutions. Three are HBCUs-historically black colleges. This diversity makes us an unusual and powerful group as we work together to create and strengthen programs that prepare students for a life of civic engagement.
When I say that my goal as the executive director is to strengthen civic engagement on our campuses I mean far more than creating attractive opportunities for students to volunteer in soup kitchens and halfway houses. I mean educating students about the conditions that make such institutions necessary and providing students with the intellectual tools they need to combat the underlying social problems. At Project Pericles we believe that education must show students how to connect the substance of academic courses with their relevance to society.
To this end, one of Project Pericles' biggest undertakings has been to fund the development and teaching of civic engagement courses—that is, academic courses that have a civic engagement focus or component.
But what do we mean by that?
Can we call courses that cover the Boston Tea Party or introduce such historical figures as Susan B. Anthony and Frederic Douglas civic engagement courses merely because they teach about people who tried to combat social injustice?
Drawing on the words of Tom Ehrlich, Project Pericles considers a civic engagement course to be one that helps students develop the knowledge, skills, values, and motivation necessary for working to make a difference in the quality of life in a community or larger social fabric.
We give Periclean institutions broad latitude in their creation of courses.
We have funded over 100 civic engagement courses. In 2007, with funding from the Teagle Foundation and the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, we launched our second round of civic engagement courses. This study was designed, in part, to look at how civic engagement can be added to a variety of academic disciplines, including the humanities. How introducing civic engagement can add value to courses, advance student learning, and improve academic performance, and what best practices can be recommended as a result of the courses we funded.
Our selection criteria included academic rigor, connection to civic responsibility, creativity, plans for evaluation, applicability to future years and other campuses. The courses we selected covered a wide variety of disciplines including political science, art, history, psychology, sociology, communication, geography, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, Asian Studies, ecology, philosophy, urban studies, literature, economics, criminal justice, social work, and environmental science.
The courses that we funded were exciting. There were seminars, lectures, introductory classes and capstone projects.
There was a physics course taught at Occidental College in California that introduced students to the principles of energy conversion and their application to global energy resources. That course included field trips to energy-generating facilities. The students learned to assess the energy needs, costs, and policies of community partners and recommended reductions in the partners' energy costs.
We funded a political science course developed and taught at New England College in New Hampshire. That course included traditional coursework that was focused on candidates, the media, campaign finance, party politics, the Internet, and voter turnout. In order to develop the students' civic engagement, the course included role-playing, a mock election, a mock debate, and hands-on work on a presidential campaign.
Because this Alumni College is focusing on the humanities, I want to concentrate on the humanities courses we funded.
How does teaching civic engagement in humanities courses happen?
It is my position that concepts of civic engagement can and should be introduced throughout higher education curricula, including the humanities. And it can be done without losing academic rigor. In fact it can gain meaning and enhance the learning. I strongly support designing humanities courses so that they have a civic engagement perspective.
The proposals we received demonstrated that our Periclean campuses agree that humanities courses can incorporate civic engagement. These proposals generated excitement on their campuses. For example, the Program Director for Project Pericles at Ursinus College wrote about a proposal from a faculty member, "This course is exciting to Ursinus, since it would involve the Art Department for the first time in the offerings available to our students through the Project Pericles CEC Initiative."
In fact, about half the courses we funded in our 2007-2009 program were either humanities courses, from departments such as literature, history, philosophy, and art, or interdisciplinary courses with some humanities content—courses such as Questioning Authority at Berea College; Civic Engagement, Ethics, and Community at Macalester College; The Art of the Essay: Making the Personal Public at New England College; Native American Art History at Pitzer College; English Writing and Composition at Bethune-Cookman University, and Museums and their Communities at Ursinus College.
Most of the civic engagement courses we funded were exciting both for the students who took them and also for the faculty who taught them. The humanities courses were no exception. I'll tell you about two, an English literature course about folk tales and a history course about the French Revolution. I'll discuss how they were created, what they involved, and the effects they had. By hearing these examples you'll begin to have your own creative ideas about how civic engagement can be introduced into many kinds of humanities courses.
English Professor Patricia Hamill, at Pace University in New York had long been concerned that civic engagement was overlooked in the humanities. I picked her course to discuss because of her interest in showing how an English literature course could have relevance to civic engagement. She wrote:
The Humanities have been overlooked in general regarding academic service learning. The obvious majors and areas of study such as political science, social work, [and] psychology…very often incorporate this into the curriculum. It is the intangible or immeasurable results that reading literature, discussing philosophy and ethics, addressing cultural developments…affords those "served" that are also of value.
Professor Hamill is an expert on folklore and fairy tales and how they have been adapted and developed in relation to cultural, religious, political, historical, and economic changes in various societies. She decided to focus on recurring moral dilemmas in folk tales to highlight their relevance to present day issues and to help her students think about ethical behavior in today's diverse and multifaceted world. She also wanted her students to understand how these tales fit into the larger world of literary development, emotional and intellectual education, and the development of critical reading skills.
A course that stimulates students' thinking about ethical behavior and responsibility would have been a good candidate for a Project Pericles grant. A course that furthers students' ability to think about ethical behavior in the specific context of today's world is one that—in accordance with our definition of a civic engagement course—helps students develop the knowledge, skills, values, and motivation necessary for working to make a difference in the quality of life in a community or larger social fabric.
Professor Hamill went one step further. She was committed to showing that the humanities courses are an appropriate venue for incorporating civic engagement so she did something even more unusual for a humanities course: She added a service component—that is, the opportunity for her students to provide hands-on service to their community.
It was a simple idea, really, and one that would increase exponentially what her students learned from the course: she identified during- and after-school programs for elementary and high school students—programs that needed college student volunteers. She had her Pace students interview at schools and then, were placed as volunteers to read to the youngsters.
It was more than just reading stories—Professor Hamill asked the Pace students to discuss the stories with the children, to approach the tales critically rather than passively. Thus her students had the opportunity to use what they'd learned not only about the stories, but also about discussing them. Hamill gave her college students the opportunity to transform into action the insights they had gained in her course.
One of the tales the Pace students worked with is the classic "Little Red Riding Hood." The college students in the class analyzed and discussed the development of the tale over time and across cultures. When the Pace students met with the children in the course of their community service, the Pace students focused the children's attention on the plot and the characters.
What was quite interesting was that the children were less concerned about the violence and death in the story than they were about responsibility—whose responsibility was it to take action and save Red Riding Hood? Was it her job to prevent the crime and right the wrong? Should Grandma, the responsible adult, have been more vigilant? Where was the father in all of this? Why is it that the woodsman had to come along to save two women?
There were mixed responses within the group discussion but overall, the children seemed to believe that Red Riding Hood and her Grandma should have taken a more active role and not relied on others to help them.
Pace student Shannon Bunch, chose to work with the program Only Make Believe, whose theater troop performs modernized versions of fairy tales for learning disabled students.
They performed a version of the Emperor's New Clothes, with rappers and other modern personalities. The plot essentially remained the same: A vain and foolish individual is convinced by smooth and deceptive speech, that his nakedness is really covered with the most fabulous clothing possible.
The children were made aware of the greater point to this story beyond entertainment. They understood that trickery and revenge are not the sole options for righting perceived or actual wrongs.
The children who were read to had both positive and negative reactions to the stories they heard. But their responses were just a start, and that's where the excitement of this course multiplied.
Some of the most important results from this course were the one-on-one connections that were established. In one instance a student worked with troubled teens. These teens were able to use the events in the tales as metaphor for their own dilemmas, to open up to the Pace student about their troubles, and to talk with the Pace student about ways to handle their problems.
Student Shannon Bunch described the results of this course in a presentation at Pace. Her presentation really encompasses the idea behind community engagement involving literature and the humanities. She wrote:
These tales are some of the first a child learns. As one grows, the lessons gleaned from these tales can and often do become more complex. These tales are, for many children, woven throughout their literary journeys and are a part of the most basic block of their cultural literacy. . . . The repetition of these tales throughout a child's education with gradual expansion on the context of the tales could be beneficial. As these children armed with an increased awareness of the cultural and historical context of fairy tales grow into adults they could posses a moderately higher understanding of the world at large.
This is an undergraduate, speaking to fellow Pace students about her insights on expanding cultural literacy, insights that are applicable to her community and to countless others, as well.
This leads me to my Reed thesis, which was titled "If the Wind Doesn't Blow -- Row: An Experimental Modification of Children's Internal-External Locus of Control. The thought, at the time –1973-- was the locus of control, much like IQ, was something you were born with. Your beliefs about whether your success and failure depended on external forces -- fate, luck, chance or other people (external control) or on your own actions (internal) were predetermined.
I worked with children, at a The Seth Lewelling School in Milwaukie, and was able to let students who were more externally controlled listen to how students who were more internally controlled answered questions. The plan was to expose externally controlled students to the idea that some people understand that their success or failure depends on their own actions. Locus of control was significantly modified by means of modeling and reinforcement procedures. I proved that educating children about personal responsibility through behavior modification and giving them the opportunity to observe others increased their ability to take responsibility for their own actions and had long-term positive effects.
Little did I realize that 35 years later I would be seeing new connections to my work.
Certainly at the time I knew that I wanted to work on a thesis that was a combination of library research of the literature and some sort of hands-on experience.
When I learned about Hamill's course and the way that it made students aware of personal responsibility, I realized what an important contribution her students made by talking with children about the implications of the stories they read.
This folklore course was very rewarding to Hamill, who was thrilled that the reactions of the individuals in the during- and after-school program were "wonderful." She received such an enthusiastic response from her own students, both to the academic content of the course and to their service work, which intensified their learning from the course, that she has made plans to teach the course again.
One measure of the success of our civic engagement course program is the fact that many of the professors have decided to teach these courses again.
Another course is Allegheny College Professor Barry Shapiro's "Citizenship, Democracy, and the French Revolution." The idea for this course began when Professor Shapiro attended a "Reacting to the Past" conference at Michigan State University where the benefits of role-playing were demonstrated as an effective means for learning history. He was especially impressed with a course on the French Revolution designed by professors Mark Carnes at Barnard and Gary Kates at Pomona.
Professor Shapiro realized that the French Revolution, with its many examples civic engagement and political activism, was ideal for developing students' appreciation of civic engagement and made his own adaptations of the prototype for that purpose.
He increased the roles for ordinary citizens in order to emphasize how civically engaged individuals, even unremarkable ones, can make a difference in their society.
For example:
You are Maximilien Robespierre, the most radical advocate of a democratic agenda in the National Assembly. A lawyer from the provinces who had been specializing in cases of injustices against the underprivileged, you have made a name for yourself by consistently speaking out in favor of the demands of the popular movement….you are, moreover, one of the few deputies ready to clearly and unequivocally proclaim that Louis XVI himself is an enemy of the revolution….[but] you have had little influence upon your colleagues in the Assembly….will that be changed by the attempted escape and arrest of the king and his family? Will the new political conditions enable you to persuade your colleagues to embrace a more democratic vision of the Revolution?…Are you prepared to support revolutionary militants who are beginning to talk about the need for a new revolution?
Here's another role:
You are a seamstress who works 12-hour shifts in a small dressmaking workshop in Paris. You are also responsible for taking care of your four small children and keeping house for your husband, who is a journeyman carpenter. Though you are often exhausted, you have somehow found the time and energy for revolutionary activity….You were at the Bastille in July 1789 and in the front ranks of the women who marched to Versailles in October 1789. You were hardly surprised by the news that the royal family had attempted to escape from Paris and you see the crisis triggered by this attempt as an opportunity for the popular movement to finally achieve its objectives. Perhaps now the Assembly will listen to the demands of the People rather than try to reach some kind of accommodation and reconciliation with these royal traitors whose hatred of the Revolution has now been exposed for all to see. But what if the Assembly does not listen? You and your friends have become more and more adept at organizing and mobilizing political protest. Will you be prepared to take on the Assembly itself?
There were other roles. For example, there was a merchant who believes the revolution has gone far enough. A lawyer who supported the revolution but does not want to put power in the hands of the masses. Lafayette who was responsible for maintaining order in Paris.
There were enough characters for all the students to play vastly different roles in the first and second halves of the semester. Professor Shapiro assigned individualized readings to help each student understand the roles he or she was assigned as well as general readings on the Revolution.
Students were instructed that they didn't necessarily have to act or vote in exactly the same way that the people they were portraying did, but that they would have to justify their decisions with credible and persuasive arguments that might have been made by the people whose shoes they were filling in the role-playing exercises, which involved elections, parliamentary maneuvering, lobbying, street demonstrations, and protests.
These exercises, which were in addition to (and not in lieu of) the more traditional papers and exams, gave Professor Shapiro's students a unique opportunity to understand and reflect on what it means to be a responsible citizen.
Academically, Professor Shapiro's class was successful. Eleven of the thirteen students who took the course rated their learning as high or very high, which is significantly above both the Allegheny average and significantly above the average for Professor Shapiro's other recent courses.
The course energized the students. They reported, for example, that role-playing gave them an incentive to learn and taught them more than they could learn from books and lectures.
Debriefing revealed that the students felt exhilaration when they prevailed on a particular issue and that they most liked the roles in which they had the best opportunity to prevail.
Shapiro also reported that the students experienced frustration when they felt that their voices weren't heard—a situation, unfortunately, many in this country can still identify with. Although the students didn't like feeling frustrated, their experience directly led them to grasp real-world difficulties in reaching political consensus and to understand the relationship between frustration and violence.
Perhaps the best testimony as to the success of this class comes from the words of Professor Shapiro in his own evaluation of the class.
He wrote: "…as a 63 year-old history professor whose sense of 'connectedness' to students has seemed to waver at times in recent years, I can state, without any hesitation, that this was the most successful course I have taught in a number of years and one of the most successful that I have ever taught."
He plans to teach this course annually.
In both these courses and in many other successful courses that we funded, we found that the academic gains were high, often higher than they would have been in a course without a civic engagement component.
A Berea College professor wrote about the civic engagement course he developed called Questioning Authority, "The apparent positive effect on student performance in other academic and co-curricular areas was…a noteworthy accomplishment."
A Macalester College professor wrote about his geography course, "The external accountability component of the public scholarship project inspired students to aim very high and do excellent scholarship…the course provided a rigorous learning experience that exceeded Macalester's standards for a capstone experience."
A Widener University professor who taught a course on Business Law and Environmental Action wrote: "[Service learning] gave me the opportunity to interact with some of the less vocal students in the class who were not always the students to respond to questions in a traditional classroom setting….Service Learning proved to be a way to harness and showcase student skills that are not always apparent in the classroom."
You may have noticed that, in contrast to Professor Hamill's folklore course, Professor Shapiro's course on the French Revolution did not have a service component. From the courses that we funded, it is clear that some humanities courses do not easily lend themselves to service, but that should not be a hindrance to expanding them to include civic engagement.
To emphasize this point, I wanted to share with you the comments from two professors whose humanities courses we funded.
Berea College history professor Rebecca Bates wrote about her seminar in modern European history, "Social Responses to Poverty,""This course did not have a service learning component and I would not add [one]. One of my intentions was to aid students in understanding that thinking, reflecting, and sharing information with the public about social change is a noteworthy accomplishment in itself."
Similarly Pitzer College Professor Bill Anthes, who taught a course entitled, "Topics in Native American Art History" wrote in his evaluation:
…"I remain committed to the idea that civic engagement need not be synonymous with service learning. While my colleagues in the social sciences have a methodology that lends itself to community-based learning, my goal was for a class that was content-rich, and in every way a serious art history seminar, in which students learned about the ethical and practical issues of researching Native American materials. I would want to encourage other instructors in the humanities to consider civic engagement as a goal, even if the methods of service learning do not seem to apply to our disciplines. I would caution, however, that students might not expect that the idea of civic engagement is relevant. Additional time and effort needs to be committed to readings and classroom discussions that incorporate the issue of civic engagement and the ethical implications of disciplinary research. Additionally, students will need to see this modeled, through collaborations and partnerships with local communities and organizations, which should be seen as stakeholders in the knowledge that is produced."
Project Pericles' definition of a civic engagement course is broad. A civic engagement course is one that helps students develop the knowledge, skills, values, and motivation necessary for working to make a difference in the quality of life in a community or larger social fabric through political and nonpolitical processes.
We intentionally left decisions entirely to the discretion of the professors and their institutions as to whether a course should be classroom-only or should include community service.
More important than deciding whether a course will be classroom-only is including opportunities for reflection in the course. These opportunities can be provided in connection with essays, research papers, classroom discussions, journals, blogs, or Facebook chats, for example. Opportunities for reflection are an important ingredient for ensuring that the students gain an understanding of the importance of civic engagement and their ability to effect improvement in their local, regional, or global communities.
I also want to propose another idea—that educating students for a life of civic engagement has unique importance in this current climate of economic stress.
Learning to read critically, to think, to form opinions of our own, to express ourselves clearly both orally and in writing in a variety of disciplines—those are some of our accomplishments as liberal arts students at Reed. It is likely, too, that most of us value those skills over the volumes and volumes of facts to which we were exposed as students. Probably few of us can recite many of those facts or even remember using any of those facts in our careers.
It is the development of intellectual skills, properly focused on community and global issues, that are essential if students are to be educated for a life of civic engagement, a life in which they can make a difference in their communities and the larger world. In the current climate of education-as-training for careers, it is the cultivation of these whole-person skills that are most threatened.
In the article from Daedalus that you were given in connection with this Alumni College, Eugene Lang, our Project Pericles founder, offers liberal arts college some advice that seems even more pertinent now that it was ten years ago when he wrote it. He says:
"Like most systems that relate to intellectual or spiritual life, liberal arts education must periodically refresh the substance of its mission—most immediately by adapting its content and structure to address the needs and objectives of a democratic society that has undergone and continues to undergo major transformation. There is nothing new about this. Pressures for change have been a historic constant in the lives of liberal arts colleges […] Taking their problematic future into account, liberal arts colleges may well regard the challenge of enriching American education as a special opportunity to reconstitute the viability of their historic role in higher education and their distinction in the marketplace. Instead of seeking survival by compromising their mission and adapting their character to more merchantable denominators, liberal arts colleges can find new vitality and appeal by adding responsible citizenship as a discrete undergraduate dimension."
Project Pericles believes in the power of young people to make a difference and that colleges and universities have an obligation to educate them to exercise that power effectively throughout their lives. Our most recent civic engagement course program demonstrated that. Faculty and administrators were enthusiastic about civic engagement courses. Civic engagement concepts can be incorporated into a wide variety of courses, including humanities courses.
Civic engagement courses can be academically rigorous and very often inspire students to perform at a high level. The benefits of civic engagement courses don't stop when the courses are over. Funding a few civic engagement courses encouraged the development and teaching of many additional ones on Periclean campuses and beyond.
Perhaps you can understand why Project Pericles is more than ever committed to introducing concepts of civic engagement throughout the curriculum, including humanities courses.
As Henry David Thoreau said, "The fate of the country does not depend on what kind of a paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning."
At Project Pericles we believe that incorporating civic engagement very broadly into academic curricula is the way to educate students to meet the burden, obligation, responsibility, and privilege of serving society.
