Varieties of Capstone Experience

Yesterday’s post consisted of musings on what a capstone course for a liberal arts major at a two-year college might look like, followed by a call for suggestions from readers.

I have the best readers ever.

The responses, mostly by email, were generous and thoughtful. When I had the chance to read them, after a particularly frustrating day, they did my heart good. Some patterns:

Several responses came from readers at four-year colleges. I liked a lot of what they did, but much of it relied on having students for four consecutive years. That’s not going to happen here. Even two consecutive years isn’t always how it works; one of the better-kept secrets of the community college sector is how many transfer credits come in. When people think of community colleges and transfer, they usually think about transfer out, for obvious reasons. But we take students with batches of transfer credits from many other places, including four-year colleges. That makes relatively specific capstones or pathways difficult; we can’t assume that everyone had the same background readings before arriving at the capstone.

One reader from an in-state four-year school expressed skepticism about transferability. It called to mind a piece I wrote in 2005, even before Inside Higher Ed started running the blog, on “Freshman Seminars and the Tyranny of Transfer.” It holds up pretty well, almost 16 years later (!). The short version is that courses that don’t fit into predefined checkboxes are often either denied at the point of transfer application or relegated to “free elective” status, which, as I noted even then, is where credits go to die. I’m a bit more optimistic about transfer now than I was back then, probably as a perverse side effect of the increased economic pressure on colleges. As tuition has become ever more crucial, four-year schools that once turned up noses at community college credits have become more accepting. “Merit” is funny like that.

A few readers from several different community colleges wrote to brag on their capstones. Unlike my theoretical capstone, their courses mostly didn’t have preset themes. Instead, they were project-based, with students building portfolios from their various liberal arts classes and/or doing extended research on a given artifact (its history, importance, etc.). One of them even worked a sort of career prep into the first half of the course, setting students up for a second half in which they reflect (in a structured way) on their educational journey. In that sense, the student became both the subject and the object of the class.

A close variant on that was one that requires students to use the “inquiry method.” Students are trained in asking a series of questions around a given historical artifact or phenomenon, going through the cycle over and over again until they get to one they have to do themselves. The idea is to help students internalize the method, so they can use it when they get to upper-level courses.

One well-known reader mentioned that he and a colleague are almost ready to publish a study they’ve done on general education programs at 30 colleges across the country. General education and the liberal arts aren’t quite the same thing, but the project sounds promising.

A-B Tech has to get a special mention for the multiple readers from there who wrote to discuss their HUM 220, Human Values and Meaning course. According to the course description,

This course presents some major dimensions of human experience as reflected in art, music, literature, philosophy, and history. Topics include the search for identity, the quest for knowledge, the need for love, the individual and society, and the meaning of life. Upon completion, students should be able to recognize interdisciplinary connections and distinguish between open and closed questions and between narrative and scientific models of understanding.

It’s certainly ambitious!

Another suggested an “integrative seminar” at the outset, rather than a capstone. The idea would be to stitch together multiple courses in the first semester around a common theme. (In another context, I’ve seen those called freshman interest groups, or FIGs.) It struck me as the sort of idea that could work brilliantly at a residential college with traditional students who didn’t transfer in credit, but would be much more challenging at a community college. Even two-course learning communities often fall prey to the demons of logistics; stitching together four courses with the same students would require manual intervention at a level hard to sustain. Anecdotally, too, when it was done, I heard about complaints from students that being with the same 20 people in every class felt too much like high school. Still, there’s something here, if the pragmatic concerns can be addressed.

Several readers mentioned that it would be helpful if we moved away from the courses model altogether, and instead went with skills. I actually agree with that, in a theoretical sense, but that’s where the transferability issue would get really ugly. I could imagine a college being built from the ground up that way, but an existing college switching to that requires a suspension of disbelief. When someone thinks their course is in danger of losing its protected status, the discourse shifts abruptly from high-minded academic concerns to interest-group politics.

Finally, I couldn’t help but notice the strong humanities bent of most of the capstones. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but the liberal arts encompass more than the humanities. They also include the social sciences, math and science. To my mind, that provides much more possible fodder for classes, and more ways to engage students. Pragmatically, it could also enlarge the number of faculty on a given campus eligible to teach the class.

Taken together, the discussion gives me hope. Yes, the ever-present pragmatic issues of transfer, ERP systems and internal politics need to be addressed. But people are finding ways to do it, and the sheer range of ideas suggests possibilities yet untapped. Thank you, my wise and worldly readers, for restoring my faith at a time when I needed it. There’s plenty of good work yet to do.