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When people talk about traveling to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small, but barely anyone in the present really thinks that they can radically change the future by doing something small.
— Shower Thoughts (@TheWeirdWorld), April 2, 2018
It’s common these days to hear about the myriad ways in which “transfer is broken” in U.S. higher education. Less common, and arguably more accurate, are assertions that transfer is working as it was designed, because our two-year and four-year systems were not built to provide seamless pathways for students across institutions and sectors. Common refrains in both versions of the transfer conversation often include divergent caricatures of faculty as either selfless, stalwart defenders of student access and success or as an entrenched, elitist professional class committed to pursuing its own interests at the expense of students.
But reality, as it so often does, belies the caricatures and shows how they obscure more than they illuminate. A helpful alternative to the decidedly unhelpful caricatures might be found in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each of us sees only part of the overall picture, and what we see depends on our positions. Creating the opportunities for faculty to see the fuller picture, and to see the roles they play in that bigger picture, is important work that requires both moving past thin narratives and honestly acknowledging the ways positionality shapes perspectives.
“Beyond Transfer” was created to help elevate the perspectives that can help us forge new common ground for student-focused reform of policy, practice and mind-set; to do that, we need to lift our eyes, engage in some collective visioning and work to build shared purpose across positions and perspectives within systems and institutions.
Futurecasting workshops are increasingly common in higher education, and when done well they can be of practical and immediate value. The most promising approaches to visioning and futurecasting take a proactive approach, centering the truth that seemingly small changes in our daily actions and decisions can be the path to creating a more ideal future. We wonder if such an approach might help faculty, staff and administrators to move past stale narratives and toward a greater, shared understanding of the imperative of equity-minded reform of higher education. If we can agree—even in broad strokes—about what an ideal future looks like for students, we can, individually and collectively, work to bring that future into reality. While the experience of structured futurecasting can offer a therapeutic break from the stresses of everyday work life, it is only useful insofar as it is grounded in an understanding of the current reality. Just as equity-minded reform efforts require a clear-eyed understanding of the origins and ongoing manifestations of inequities, effective futurecasting requires a shared understanding of how things came to be the way they are in order to help us imagine—and create—a better future.
Faculty within programs have been taught that working to integrate ideas and learning across courses is a best practice, recognizing that skill building requires iteration and scaffolded reinforcement. Many programs have taken that charge to heart, creating course maps and plans for their students that layer sequentially more challenging applications of skills across and through many courses—with the goal of creating truly integrated curricula. Many faculty are involved in creating detailed maps documenting where key learning outcomes and concepts are introduced, reinforced and assessed for competence and growth over the course of terms and years. Intentional layering and scaffolding are good pedagogy, offering students time to absorb and apply what they are learning, as well as opportunities to stumble or fail in safer environments (e.g., the classroom instead of the workplace).
As it’s currently employed, however, this “gold standard” approach to pedagogy assumes that students complete their entire, multiyear program of study through continuous enrollment at the same institution, bringing it into direct conflict with the imperative to level the playing field for today’s students by building transfer-affirming and transfer-receptive cultures. The traditional approach to curriculum development, while surely grounded in an ostensible commitment to rigor within a discipline, is also grounded in a system designed to reinforce—not challenge—stratification of society through education. The traditional approach was not designed to meet the needs of the ever-increasing population of students who attend multiple institutions on their way to a credential, or who seek to make college affordable by attending both two-year and four-year institutions on their way to and beyond a baccalaureate. Transfer students enter at multiple points in a program’s curriculum, and most programs have not been designed for this reality. Requiring students to navigate systems that weren’t designed for their success is a recipe for the low and inequitable attainment rates we continue to see despite decades of work on transfer—and it is also a recipe for the endless proliferation of prerequisites that pile excess credits on students and articulation agreements that fall short of their aims.
Faculty at both sending and receiving colleges and universities are doing what they feel is best to meet the needs of students and their programs, but too many are working with inaccurate assumptions about the congruence between their students’ needs and the interests of their programs. Despite being closest to students, many—particularly at four-year institutions—are operating with outdated assumptions about who their students are. As a result, most efforts remain misaligned, and the goal of achieving truly transfer-affirming and transfer-receptive cultures remains out of reach. It’s been noted before in this blog that it’s simply not possible for most postsecondary students to dedicate several years of their lives to being a student as their primary activity. Futurecasting affords an opportunity to imagine a better future for today’s students by understanding at a deeper level how some of our supposedly “gold standard” practices have reinforced stratification of opportunity.
The fact is that students are increasingly looking for educational opportunities in smaller, just-in-time offerings—offerings that most colleges and universities aren’t currently set up to provide. Rather than starting from that reality, however, conversations about student success tend too often to become mired in ideological disagreements about the fundamental purpose of higher education that hinge on an enduring and false dualism. On one side of the false dualism are those who espouse the broader goals of education and the ideals of an educated citizenry, and on the other are those who argue that providing real upward mobility to more through education requires an exclusive focus on skill acquisition for career advancement. More than 100 years ago, in his seminal Democracy & Education (1916), John Dewey cautioned against pitting “education for life” against “education for work,” claiming instead that true education of a democratic citizenry requires the systematic dismantling of this dualism in service of a richer notions of both vocation and citizenry.
Today, employers continue to echo Dewey’s insight in calling for employees with 21st-century skills, and the conversation about credentials—and the different ways they may be acquired across a lifetime of work—is changing rapidly. While the concept of scaffolding earning and learning over a lifetime has gotten clear traction with students and employers, traditional higher ed is struggling to catch up. Ossified notions of hermetically sealed two-year and four-year degrees and outdated models of learning before earning continue to dominate explicitly and implicitly in traditional higher education institutions. The norms of many disciplines, particularly in what community colleges refer to as transfer programs, are not aligned with the expectations of today’s students, the needs of today’s world of work or the demands of global citizenship. We need a better conversation about this reality—faculty need it, and students deserve it. But what would that look like?
In keeping with the tenets of futurecasting, is it possible for us to imagine a future that works for today’s students and for the faculty who make or break their experience? And could that future embed both expectations for and recognition of content introduction, reinforcement and assessment for all students, no matter whether it happened at a college or a university—or even in a workplace, community organization or faith-based volunteer setting? And could that conversation begin from a more honest shared recognition of what isn’t working for today’s students and how it came to be this way? As a society, we increasingly espouse the value of education embedded over the course of a lifetime, but our current practices and assumptions sequester it to early adulthood. Every day, through our actions and interactions, we either reinforce or we challenge this status quo. The fact is, too many of us are working tirelessly in and for systems that weren’t designed to work for today’s students. Perhaps futurecasting can be one of the tools that helps us finally dispense with the false dualisms and thin caricatures and allows us instead to take a hard look at the roles our traditions play in perpetuating an inequitable status quo—and what we can do together today to move toward a better, fairer future.
