Some reflections on what I have learnt at PennState

The Schreyer Center for Teaching Excellence

Its been nearly a month now since I have come back from my three months stint at PennState, where I spent my Fulbright from February - May 2022.  It was such a treat to spend three months in a new environment, on my own. I will reflect in a different post on what I learnt for and about myself during this time, but here I would like to share some of the insights I gained by being embedded in a Centre for Learning and Teaching at a large state-funded College in the States.

I have been thinking about this for a while, people have asked me what my observations were, but it took me a while to settle into this process. This morning I woke up and somehow the list was here. So here it is, in no particular order: 

The Higher Education Landscape in the US is changing

I must admit before joining the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence at PennState I didn't know much about the US Higher Education system. What I have learnt, is that it is fascinatingly diverse but also changing. There are State Colleges and Private Institutions. There is a very clear hierarchy among institutions, being rated by their research outcome (R1-R3 I believe), there is the Ivy League and there is a large network of Community Colleges (becoming strong contenders for the more research-focused institutions because of fee structures, especially in the first two years of studying). Contrary to for example South Africa, enrolment numbers for Higher Education students are dropping and institutions are scrambling to reach their enrolment targets. This means fierce competition, between the different players in the Higher Education system.  PennState for example is a State College (one of the land-grant institutions, which were built on native American Land, another long discussion altogether!). It has a large main campus (University Park), considered a R1 institution, but many different Satellite campuses across Pennsylvania, which offer a selected range of undergraduate degrees, sometimes only the first two years, after which students transfer to University Park. Fees differ, but because of dropping enrolment rates, University Park needs to attract students from other Colleges, with possible closures looming. Universities in the US are dying, which I found fascinating. Especially smaller Liberal Arts Colleges are at high risk of closure.  This means for many the need to re-invent themselves. 

These are some of the 'alternative' models I have come across:

• The Community Oriented model: Berea operates a no-fee model,  but employs students in community service
• The Unbundled model: Western Governorns University offers adult education to very competitive pricing, fully unbundled and flexible
• The Elite model: Minerva offers a series of study abroad experiences, where students are gaining work experience while studying online
• The No-Mark model: St John's academic project is focused on small reading groups and works on a no-grade system
• The 'Dont Study at all Model': Peter Thiel fellowships encourage young people to start businesses rather than to study by offering venture capital

Institutional orientation has impact on the ability to innovate

The status, history and precarity of institutions then has a huge impact on how ready and able they are to innovate and who drives this innovation. In our interviews with learning designers for the research project on socially just learning design (which I am going to blog also separately about), we found the most innovative strategies to transform teaching and learning at either smaller private liberal Arts Colleges, or at more Community-oriented Colleges, where teaching carries more weight than research. For an institution such as PennState change is really difficult to implement, as it has invested too much in the status quo and has too much to lose to think about implementing large-scale innovation. This has a strong impact on Centres for Learning and Teaching (CTL). POD has recently developed guidelines to evaluate Centres for Learning and Teaching which have some really interesting ideas on how to classify CTL

• Hubs: We make connections between people who would not otherwise be connected. We have a view into the university that’s unique and can build on that to support initiatives and work towards cultural change.
• Incubators: Many of our faculty participants from intensive, year-long programs have taken important admin positions and can now influence their department or the whole university in the US and internationally
• Temple: We are a sanctuary on campus where people can come to talk about and think about teaching and learning
• Sieve: We “read the research and share the best.”

These orientations define how faculty developers are positioned, what their role is, their level of responsiveness, their engagement in scholarship, etc. At PennState I would say they are 'sieves'. Their main role is to respond to faculty's needs. Their level of responsiveness is high. If a School would come with say a problem around assessment or diversity, they would do research, develop a workshop based on this research and would go into the department to run these workshops. This means that it would be hard to establish long term relationships with Faculty, but also that the expertise is seen to reside within the Centre or at least outside the institution, with the faculty developers distributing information around pedagogical best practices. Other Centres are built much more on the understanding that the expertise around learning and teaching is shared among Faculty members, so the hub idea. People don't come to the Centres because they have problems, so there is not a remedial element to it, but because they want to share their expertise, their good practices, and want to engage with like-minded colleagues in conversations around learning and teaching. Examples are for example Robin deRosa's OpenCoLab at the University of Plymouth (a Community College), which champions openness and interdisciplinarity across the institution, or Mays Imad's Centre for Learning and Teaching at Pima College, which she intentionally set up as a collective, community driven, shared space. This also means that for example at PennState scholarship is not necessarily part of faculty developers' KPIs. They can egnage in scholarship, but in their own time. What they do is 'applied scholarship', ie using existing scholarship to support their faculty development programmes. What was interesting, is that when I visited Temple, a large public institution in Philadelphia, who I would say are also more sieve oriented, I saw them run their Centre in a very 'businesslike' way. They have beautiful facilities, and a very passionate team, but there is also strong sense of responding to problems they are confronted with, rather than proactively working towards changing an institution. 

Faculty development initiatives

The orientation of a Centre also has impact on the kind of faculty development programmes they are offering. There is a lot of talk about how the 'workshop is dead'. For many of these Centres workshops were their signature pedagogy, especially in Centres that were orientated as 'sieves'. On the contrary, apparently CTL such as the Center for Teaching at Vanderbuilt, which is positioned as one of the most innovative CLT in the US, and I guess would be considered Temple or Hub,  have moved away from once off workshops and focus on institutional strategies to improve teaching and learning. The range of programmes inclused teaching grants, course design institutes, fellowship programmes and faculty learning communities.  All of these foster relationships, working with faculty over time, establishing connection and transfering innovation to the departments through these strategic partners. They sometimes combine these learning communities with SOTL work, to foster a culture of reflection on learning and teaching and promote the idea of faculty development and teaching and learning as a field worth of studying. Another new term I have encountered is institutes and academies, which are longer-term faculty development programmes, the difference being that latter accepts everyone, while there is a selection process for the former. Typical institutes are for example Course (Re-)Design institutes, an academy I have encountered focused on Anti-Racist pedagogies. SOTL learning communities at PennState explore for example the concept of Ungrading and Student as Partners initiatives. These SOTL learning communities bring together faculty from different disciplines to explore one pedagogical intervention and collaboratively engage in research, supported by a faculty developer.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a big topic in the US and for CLT. They often have a DEI director / coordinator, who runs DEI workshops / initiatives. That was really interesting to me, to see how DEI is seen as a separate element in faculty development, rather than a guiding principle for all faculty development, as I would say, it is for many faculty development centres in South Africa. Faculty Development in the US is still predominantly white and one of the conversations that are only starting now, is the question about transformation of these Centres themselves. Jamiella Brooks, the Director for DEI at the CLT at UPenn, an Ivy League College in Philadelphia, and two colleagues, recently wrote a piece about decolonising education development and called for a critical reflection on how CLT reinforce racism and colonisation. I was surprised how little positionality was openly discussed at the center I was based in, how there was no challenge about for example white colleagues running workshops on decolonisation or anti-racist pedagogies, something that would definitely have been openly challenged at a South African institution. Also what was striking was, how terminology matters. Our working title for the book I was working on during my stay at PennState was 'Socially Just Learning Design'. Social Justice made people very uncomfortable. They prefer terms such as DEI, as social justice seems to have more transformative / protest connotations. I found it fascinating how there is a sense that CLT can be 'neutral', can stay out of politics, have to actually be neutral and translate a larger strategy decided upon by Executive Institutional Management to Schools and Departments. But I guess that again depends on the orientation of the Center.

The bane of evidence-based staff development

Jamiella and her colleagues also challenge the need for evidence-based faculty development in their article. They use active learning, which is one of those high-impact interventions with tons and tons of evidence backing it up, as an example of the shortcomings of evidence based practices. The US loves evidence, large-scale quantitative study that show that certain initiatives are more effective than others to support student learning and student success, which is often equated to throughput and which at the end helps the university's ROI. They call these High Impact Practices or HIPs or engaged practices, and these consist of currently 11 practices: First-Year Experiences, Common Intellectual Experiences, Learning Communities, Writing-Intensive Courses, Collaborative Assignments and Projects, Undergraduate Research, Diversity/Global Learning, Service Learning, Community-Based Learning, Internships, Capstone Courses and Projects and ePortfolios. All of these reflect Kuhn's eight characteristics of student engagement and help students engage in "deep approaches" to learning which are important because "students who use these approaches tend to earn higher grades and retain, integrate, and transfer information at higher rates” (Kuh, 2008).  The problem with these practices are based on Western Values and Beliefs, rely on large-scale quantitative studies to prove their effectiveness and do promote a 'one size fits all' approach. Jamiella and her colleagues warn, that these practices might miss important cultural nuances: 

"... active learning’s effectiveness depends on its execution, and students who are unfamiliar with Western approaches to active learning experience discomfort and dissonance (Hallinger & Lu, 2012; Li & Jia, 2006). Is it possible to address or expand the Western values embedded in active learning to encompass other culturally informed ways of learning; is active learning always better; should we, as educational developers, even strive to “discover” a universal teaching strategy? " 

As somebody whose research is deeply qualitative, and relies on narratives to make sense of our and our students' world, these kinds of universal brushstrokes make me very uncomfortable as well.

What about learning design?

What I also realised, is that learning design had no space in the CLT I was based. Traditionally there is a strong division between CLT, who focus on mostly in-class teaching and cover a broad range of topics, such as assessment, student feedback, large class teaching, DEI, etc...and what at PennState is called 'Teaching with Technology' (TWT). This is where the instructional designers are based, who focus on supporting staff with the use of the LMS and other technologies. Then there is the Global Campus, which develops online courses for Schools and Departments. It is important to say that PennState decided to promote all their courses as 'OneCampus', so their residential courses and their online courses are all offered under the PennState brand. There is a clear sense however of the hierarchy between these Centres. Faculty development sits on top, with most academic positions (albeit not tenured, which makes a huge difference as they are seen as quasi-academics, para academics, 'not real' academics). Instructional designers are support staff, who might have Masters and PHDs, but are not taken 'seriously' - even their PHDs in say Instructional Technology are not necessarily seen are 'real' PHDs. Staff are seen as focusing on technology, following checklists, not thinking deeply enough about learning and teaching. Their importance has grown tremendously during the pandemic, and funding towards online learning is increasing, which also questions the role of traditional CLT or urges them to think about how they can remain relevant. The pandemic did bring faculty development and instructional designers closer together, but it's not necessarily a strong and sustainable relationship. There are integrated centres, where these roles are situated much closer together, but they are the exception and not the rule. These power dynamics and differences in status coupled with an often inhuman workload during and beyond COVID, and with many opportunities opening up in industry for learning designers at the moment, has led to a major exodus and high turnover among instructional designers and learning technologies.

The neoliberal academic and academic freedom

Finally, it was fascinating to see the workings of a neoliberal academy close up. While we do complain about neoliberalism creeping in in South African higher education systems, in the US it is in your face. The precarity of adjunct professors, job offers with no salaries attached , and the ability to terminate non-tenured contracts at any time, has huge impact on academic freedom and what faculty developers can say, teach and write about. I realised that we could be way more critical in our own scholarship, more free in what we do research in and what we say in our research.