GroshLink

Both faculty and InterVarsity staff desire to shape lives, but many times we find our efforts falling flat. Here’s an article of interest from the Chronicle which argues students have become adults, with their identities in a lockbox before their first year and are not to be enlightened: The Myth of First-Year Enlightenment. I recently had a conversation with a faculty and undergrad campus staff worker at a small liberal arts college which waded through similar material as we discussed the potential for campus outreach which would truly engage students, faculty, and the campus as a whole. Here’s a quote from the article:

“Most of the mainstream American teens I spoke with neither liberated themselves intellectually nor broadened themselves socially during their first year out,” he [Tim Clydesdale, an associate professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey, and author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School (University of Chicago Press, 2007)] writes. “What teens actually focus on during the first year out is this: daily life management.” . . .

“Only a handful of students on each campus find a liberal-arts education to be deeply meaningful and important,” he writes, “and most of those end up becoming college professors themselves. . . . And so the liberal-arts paradigm perpetuates itself, while remaining out of sync with the vast majority of college students.” . . .

I asked him what practical effects his study had had on his own classroom, and he outlined several, two of which struck me as especially interesting.

First, he has shifted his learning objectives away from content retention and toward skill development. “Little of the content of liberal-arts courses will be used in the careers of our graduates,” he said, “but the thinking, writing, speaking, and analytical skills these courses hone have enormous utility for the careers and the lives in general of our students.”

That’s why he has virtually eliminated lecturing in his classroom, since its primary purpose is to convey content that students tend to quickly forget anyway. Instead, he spends classroom time “discussing issues, contrasting perspectives and interpretations, and working on semester-long projects that require on-going development and revision.”

Second, he no longer claims (among the learning objectives listed on his syllabi) that his courses will broaden a student’s worldview. His research has convinced him that such objectives simply don’t translate into any meaningful learning for freshmen.

Those changes make sense to me and fall in line with what most teaching experts in higher education would recommend: Minimize lecturing in order to emphasize active learning strategies, and don’t promise students something you can’t realistically deliver.

That might be the reality of teaching freshmen, but just because it’s true doesn’t make it any less depressing. I doubt I’ll delete the world-broadening objectives from my first-year syllabi. For me, as I would guess is true for many of you, those deeper and less tangible objectives helped inspire me into the profession.

But Clydesdale’s book has convinced me that such big-picture objectives have to take a back seat to the development of practical skills in reading, writing, and communicating. And he has also convinced me that freshmen certainly deserve no blame for their general unwillingness to open themselves up to what higher education might offer them.

Few and far between, writes Clydesdale, are freshmen “whose lives are shaped by purpose, who demonstrate direction, who recognize their interdependence with communities small and large, or who think about what it means to live in the biggest house in the global village.”

But it’s equally true, as he points out, that “few and far between are American adults” who could be described in those same lofty terms.

In other words, the practical-minded teenagers we find in our classrooms—cognitively sharp but intellectually immune, to borrow a trenchant phrase from the book—are nothing more than quintessential Americans.”

As to the transformative nature of InterVarsity's work with students, faculty, the larger campus, higher education, the graduates which flow forth, and the world . . . God alone brings renewal of the heart, soul, mind, and strength. I rejoice in a first year enlightenment provided by the call of God upon my life, one both from above and below as both faculty and students were used by God.

No campus, not even Grove City College, serves as the new heavens and the new earth.  None-the-less, let's set our eyes on the kingdom to come and be brave not only in articulating the Big Picture, but also setting our feet out upon the long road of obedience.  Praying for his grace this new week of ministry.

Updated:  3:01pm, 2/4/08