This spring, students will be able to explore the intersection of the humanities, technology, and design in two new humanities studio courses intended to combine traditional seminar teaching methods with hands-on studio work.
The two courses—Humanities Studio 1: "Cold Storage—An Interactive Documentary Project" and Humanities Studio 2: "Homeless Paintings of the Italian Renaissance: A Hands On Curatorial Experiment"—are among a series of new courses launched this spring that are not affiliated with a single department.
“We are part of this broad movement in the humanities, the digital humanities, in which researchers are applying new emerging kinds of research methods,” Matthew Battles, associate director of the the Harvard metaLAB, said. The metaLAB is a humanities research laboratory that includes faculty who are working with students in the studio courses.
Students in "Cold Storage" will focus on documenting and analyzing the Harvard Depository through video production and website design, while students in "Homeless Paintings of the Italian Renaissance" will develop an animated archive of lost Renaissance paintings.
According to Jeffrey T. Schnapp, the professor of both new courses as well as faculty director for the metaLAB, the studio classes will be open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, professor of romance languages and literatures, speaks about a collective learning experience in visual art during his new course Humanities Studio 2: "Homeless Paintings of the Italian Renaissance" in Boylston Hall on Jan. 29.
“They aren’t courses that presuppose a set of skills or involve prerequisites,” Schnapps said. “I like to describe them as translational courses where you acquire a set of skills, you acquire knowledge, but right from the beginning you have to translate that knowledge into hands-on forms.”
Schnapp said 11 students shopped "Cold Storage" on its first day, Tuesday. Both courses will be capped at 18 students.
“It’s an experiment stage, to test the waters, see what works at the end of the experiment,” Schnapp said.
Battles said the courses will be graded on a letter scale and students will be evaluated primarily on class participation and projects.
“The grading will be based not on any particular fluency in Photoshop or Javascript, but rather with the ability to come to grips with new materials, to identify problems, analyze those problems,” Battles said.
Both studio courses have been approved and financed under the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, an initiative to promote innovative teaching methods.
According to Battles, the studio courses will provide fluid interdisciplinary curriculum that meets the aims of HILT and will accommodate changing teaching methods.
“We’re in the midst of rapid change, changes in educational experience and participation, changes in institutional forms, and changes in technology,” Battles said, noting that the structure of the new courses is yet another progression in teaching methods.
—Staff writer Meg P. Bernhard can be reached at mbernhard@college.harvard.edu.
The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Pleaseimprove this article and discuss the issue on the talk page.(October 2009)
For-profit education (also known as the education services industry or proprietary education) refers to educational institutions operated by private,profit-seeking businesses.
There are three types of for-profit schools. One type is known as an educational management organization (EMO), and these are primary and secondary educational institutions. EMOs work with school districts or charter schools, using public funds to finance operations. The majority of for-profit schools in the K–12 sector in America function as EMOs, and have grown in number in the mid-2000s. The other major category of for-profit schools are post-secondaryinstitutions which operate as businesses, receiving fees from each student they enroll. A third type of for-profit schools, which is less prevalent in the United States, are K–12 schools which operate as businesses.
EMOs function differently from charter schools created in order to carry out a particular teaching pedagogy; most charter schools are mission-oriented, while EMOs and other for-profit institutions are market-oriented. While supporters argue that the profit motive encourages efficiency, this arrangement has also drawn controversy and criticism.[1] Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program of the New American Foundation said in a 2010 column inThe Chronicle of Higher Education that "For-profits exist in large part to fix educational market failures left by traditional institutions, and they profit by serving students that public and private nonprofit institutions too often ignore." He also noted that "There's no doubt that the worst for-profits are ruthlessly exploiting the commodified college degree. But they didn't commodify it in the first place."[2]
longnt80/flickrEarlier
this month, more than 700,000 students submitted the Common Application
for college admissions. They sent along academic transcripts and SAT
scores, along with attestations of athletic or artistic success
and—largely uniform—bodies of evidence speaking to more
nebulously-defined characteristics: qualities like—to quote
the Harvard admissions website—“maturity, character, leadership,
self-confidence, warmth of personality, sense of humor, energy, concern
for others and grace under pressure.”
Why are American colleges so interested in leadership? On the Harvard
admissions website quoted above, leadership is listed third: just after
two more self-evident qualities. So too the Yale website, which quotes
former Yale president Kingman Brewer's assessment that “We have to make
the hunchy judgment as to whether or not with Yale’s help the candidate
is likely to be a leader in whatever he [or she] ends up doing.” Our
goals remain the same today” before going on to stress that “We are
looking for students we can help to become the leaders of their
generation in whatever they wish to pursue.”
The language of Princeton dean Janet Lavin Rapeleye in The New York Times is strikingly similar:
“We look for qualities that will help [students] become leaders in
their fields and in their communities.” (So too Princeton's admissions
website, which lists leadership prominently in its section on
extracurriculars: “We look for students who make a difference in their
schools and communities, so tell us about your leadership activities,
interests, special skills and other extracurricular involvements.”) In
his study The Gatekeepers, Jacques Steinberg describes how the
admissions officers at Wesleyan scored the “personal” section of an
applicant's portfolio: “A 9 [out of 9] at Wesleyan...someone 'sure to
“have significant impact on campus in leadership roles”; a 7 or 6 would
be assigned to someone who was “likely to be a leader in some areas,
contributor to many.”
Leadership alone rarely makes or breaks an application, says
Emmi Harward, director of college counseling at The Bishop's School in
La Jolla, California and the Executive Director of the Association
College Counselors in Independent Schools. But, she says, “Not only does
leadership distinguish a student in a competitive applicant pool from
other students ([compare] a student body president to someone who has
spent four years just going home and doing their homework) but also
serves to foreshadow the impact the student could make on the
college/university campus, and the potential impact they could make once
they graduate.”
It's possible, of course, to understand “leadership,” as conceived in
the college admissions process, as a broad church of qualities:
encompassing a whole host of attributes desirable in bright, motivated
teenagers. But its rhetorical prevalence bears investigating. The tacit
assumption is that leadership, like “maturity” or “concern for others,”
needs no qualification or explanation; it is not only de facto desirable,
but indeed essential. To be a “contributor,” to use Wesleyan's
parlance, to a chess club is to be merely average; to be president of
that chess club, by contrast, is to display some intangible merit.
But such an assumption is hardly universal. To be a natural leader,
after all, (or even, to use Harvard's list of desirable qualities, a
“self-confident leader”), is to eschew other potential roles: that of a
“natural follower,” a “natural team player,” a “natural lone wolf.” And
each of these, in other cultural contexts, might be seen as equally, if
not more desirable. As Lan Liu, author of Beyond the American Model, puts it in a piece for the Harvard Business Review,
“Leadership is culture-specific. Unfortunately, this theme has been
unduly overshadowed by the bias, which is often an American one, toward
the pursuit of a universal model of leadership.”
Rather, there is something quintessentially American about the system
advocated by former Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University
Robert J. Sternberg in his book College Admissions for the 21st Century: a system in which“students
should be admitted to college on the basis of their potential for
future leadership and active citizenship, at whatever level of society.”
While Sternberg makes sure to tell us that he defines leadership “not
in the sense of achieving a level of authority, but rather as making a
positive, meaningful, and hopefully enduring difference to the world at
some level,” his assumption is that those worthy of admission at elite
colleges are not simply good scholars, or even good workers, but rather
those who will take initiative, those who will be pioneers in their
fields, those who will—implicitly—manage those others who are not.
It is no surprise that Sternberg's book often runs into the language
of business: he writes of how “talking to a high-level executive at a
major investment bank, I mentioned our desire to enhance admissions at
Tufts University. His response....was that tests like the SAT and the
ACT, as well as college grades, predicted quite well who would be good
analysts...What they did not predict as well was who would be able to
take the next step—who would have the capacity to envision where various
markets are going.” Sternberg then goes on to discuss his fund-raising
efforts, which involved meeting “some of the most successful alumni of
Tufts, as measured not only by their financial resources (and, hence,
giving capacity) but also by the contributions they have made to
society.” While Sternberg's caveats are doubtless made in good faith,
the parameters he sets up implicitly reward “leadership” as conceived,
quite straightforwardly, as managerial: artists and doctoral students in
the humanities, no matter how “successful” in their fields, do not tend
to congregate at fund-raising appeals.
William Deresiewicz, in The American Scholar, may be too cynical when he writes,
“That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about
training leaders. Educating people who make a big name for themselves in
the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can
brag about. People who make it to the top. People who can climb the
greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.”
But it's certainly true that the kind of qualities we think about when
we think about “leadership” do lend themselves naturally to hierarchical
ascent.
By contrast, at my English alma mater, Oxford, the ideal student is
not a leader but a lone wolf, something reinforced at every point in the
undergraduate process. Tuition takes the form of one-on-one “tutorials”
with professors. The admissions process consists of interview by
mock-tutorial with one's prospective future tutors, who also make
admissions decisions. Once on the course itself, students are assessed
entirely on their capacity for independent research. There are no
classroom grades but merely marks on end-of-course examinations,
anonymously graded. “Leadership”, and the qualities it is meant to
entail, hardly enters into the equation. What is valued is not the
contribution I make “to the world” at large, nor even the contribution I
make to the life of the campus or to my fellow students. Rather, it’s
the quality of the work I do on the course (which is to say, the level
of my marks) and, as I make my way towards a doctorate, the contribution
I make to my tiny, somewhat esoteric field.
Yet such insularity seems at odds with the rhetoric of the American
educational institution. To be a “lone wolf,” to simply “go home and do
their homework,” is to neglect, in some sense, a vital component of the
educational experience. Harward and Sternberg alike stress the
importance of “impact.” A desirable student is expected to do more than
merely learn effectively, to further the transmission of knowledge from
professor to student. They're expected to go further: to take an active
role in the classroom, as Harward notes, “contributing ideas that
sparked discussion or encouraging a quieter member of the class to offer
up their thoughts.”
It would be a stretch to accuse several of America's best educational
institutions of anti-intellectualism. But the implicit message behind
the rhetoric of leadership in the American college admissions is that
intellectualism alone is not enough, even for an academic institution.
Simply learning for learning's sake is not enough. In this paradigm,
there is something suspect—even selfish—about a “lone wolf” prospective
student that stores up knowledge, like a dragon hoarding treasure. For
all that is made of the American tradition of “rugged individualism,”
American culture is less welcoming to those who neither lead nor follow
but simply opt out altogether.
There is much to be said for the benefits of valuing this
kind of leadership among students. A case can be made that the
pure-academics approach of many continental and European universities,
which encourages and rewards independence, also fosters a degree of
isolation. Students are not encouraged, at any institutional level to
collaborate, to gain managerial skills, to learn to follow or lead. And
the valuation and fostering of leadership can be especially vital for
groups of people who have not historically had the opportunity so to do –
many women's colleges, for example, highlight the value of seeing women
in leadership positions on campus.
But it's worth investigating the assumption that to be a “good
leader” and to be a “desirable student” are the same thing. In
valorizing “leadership” as a quality, we risk overlooking other—less
obvious—qualities, something Harward concedes could use more discussion.
“We do need good followers, and I think that aspect of leadership is
something that we should talk about more,” she says. “What good is any
leader if they alienate those around them or don't empower them to lead
themselves? And does the focus on leadership imply that a student who
embraces the life of the mind and a specific intellectual interest to
the fullest isn't leading in some equally compelling way?” Certainly,
it's worth asking if assumptions about “leadership,” culturally-specific
and quintessentially American as they are, penalize candidates from
different cultural backgrounds, where leadership—particularly among
adolescents—might take different forms, or be discouraged altogether.
College admissions has come a long way in recognizing how candidates
from different backgrounds and different levels of opportunity might
present themselves differently. At its best, the holistic admissions
process allows admissions officers to assess test scores and grades in
context. But so too it’s worth looking at the context of the personal
qualities admissions officers value. Do we need a graduating class full
of leaders? Or should schools actively seek out diversity in
interpersonal approaches—as they do in everything else?
參加臺大85週年校慶後，當晚就與校內主管同事一行九人，前往芝加哥參加由當地 Chicago Council及當地三所大學，西北大學(Northwestern University)芝加哥大學(The University of Chicago)及伊利諾大學(University of Illinois)共同舉辦的大學校長共同論壇。
這次主辦單 位芝加哥全球事務理事會(Chicago Council on Global Affairs)是一個已成立91年的公共事務組織，透過舉辦活動和會議的對話互動模式，邀請國際級領袖與學者將國際觀點帶入芝加哥，同時也藉由雙方對 談，將對國際議題的意見從芝加哥輸出至全球。其中最重要的就是芝加哥論壇系列，每年舉辦超過150個公開議程，供廣大民眾了解當今國際發展和議題。本次會 議應屬於論壇系列之一，與芝加哥三所主要大學一起主辦，承襲芝加哥論壇的傳統，以國際重要議題為主題，並邀請該議題相關之世界級領導組織專家參與。
本 次會議主題為“Global Urban Challenge”主要係以聯合國西元2011年研究報告所述，預估西元2050年左右，全球將有三分之二以上的人口會居住於大都市(Urban)。然 而檢視目前全球各大都會，無論在實體建設或社群服務機制皆欠缺足夠的準備以應付未來可能出現的新需求，在未來絕對會是人類社會的大挑戰。而大會主題的副標 題“Global Urban Challenge：the Role of ResearchUniversity”清楚標舉研究型大學理當設法解決人類未來問題，因此在「研究型大學如何扮演好推動的角色」此項重要國際議題由芝加 哥三所公立大學—西北大學、芝加哥大學、伊利諾大學三位校長點名邀請大學聯盟校長們參加會議。本次總計邀請全球28所著名大學與會，臺大是第一次受邀，某 種程度也代表對臺大研究實力的肯定，所以臺大國際處特別重視這次機會。適逢校慶，當日即由本人率團與會，成員還包括財務副校長湯明哲、國際長張淑英、電資 學院院長郭斯彥、公衛學院副院長詹長權、生農學院教授張俊彥、城鄉所所長黃麗玲、國際處林淑靜、張華玲，另外本校工學院前副院長，現借調華府科技組組長周 家蓓亦專程前來參與論壇。
在三天活動中，第二天開幕特別開放給媒體及Council Member、贊助團體等參加，三位校長皆親自參與論壇，並分別就研究型大學(Role of Research University)對未來的挑戰發表看法，他們不約而同的強調大學的存在是希望對未來世界有impact，強調如何帶動、影響學生“Think”以及 “Social Impact”，這真是國內邁向頂尖大學的師生應該思考的議題。他們認為辦學理念就是要“Connect education with future life”投資在高等教育就是“Funding Future”！
會中，芝加哥市長 ─Rahm Emanuel發表開幕演說，強調教育理念為：“Every child sees the energy of the city and be part of the future.”充分展現芝加哥論壇的風格，並可透過此一平臺將芝加哥市的理念和理想向外界傳播。
LIKE all first-year Stanford students, Peter Kurzner is obliged
to study the arts. He has settled on a curriculum that includes courses
in political science and "theatre in the marketplace", as well as voice
lessons. “I considered going to Yale, which has traditionally been much
better at performing arts," he says. "But Stanford is really making a
push to raise its level."
It is indeed. California’s famous
innovation factory, which counts Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google,
Reed Hastings of Netflix, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger of Instagram,
and Peter Thiel of PayPal among its alumni, has discovered that arts are
the future.
“Stanford is aware that it’s educating leaders,” explains
Stephen Hinton, a professor of music and the director of the Stanford
Arts Initiative. “And leadership isn’t just about having technical
skills and economic savvy, but about having a broad range of skills.”
In
other words, Stanford wants its future Brins and Pages to know not just
how to code but also how to decode Mozart symphonies. From last
September, all undergraduates have had to take a compulsory class in
"Creative Expression". Among the 161 courses they can choose from are
Laptop Orchestra and Shakespeare in Performance.
The Palo
Alto-based university is trying to help answer one of the questions that
haunts our "knowledge society": where will new ideas come from? Many
successful start-ups are the result of their founders spotting gaps in
their own lives. But what if their thinking stretched far beyond their
daily horizon? “The labour market is a rat race, so you’re in a
permanent state of distraction,” notes Wiley Hausam, the executive
director of Stanford’s new Bing Concert Hall (pictured). “Art stops all
of that and allows creative ideas to emerge almost on their own.”
So,
in much the same manner that Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century
philosopher, developed ideas on his daily walks through Königsberg in
Prussia, Stanford students’ outings into the world of arts will—so the
university’s leadership hope—help them become more creative citizens. Of
course, not all undergraduates will jump at the opportunity to learn
more about Giacomo Puccini or Jackson Pollock. But, argues Professor
Hinton, in today’s society delving into unfamiliar areas is necessary:
“The pace of technology is such that the field you go into may become
obsolete, so it’s good to get used to stepping outside your comfort
zone.”
Indeed, according to Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, a senior
analyst at the OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation,
“other universities are also realising that vocational training isn't
enough”. According to an article by Vincent-Lancrin, Francesco Avvisati and Gwenaël Jacotin in the Tuning Journal for Higher Education, arts graduates are more likely than others to be involved in product innovation. Aalto University was launched in Finland in 2010 with the goal of creating a new science-and-arts community.
Stanford’s push also raises a question about the role of the arts in northern California as a whole. According to the Bay Area Economic Research Council,
the 7.15m-resident San Francisco Bay area, with its GDP of $535 billion
(£328 billion), is the world’s 19th-largest economy. Yet even though
San Francisco has a respected opera house and world-class symphony
orchestra, northern California’s arts scene is small compared with that
of, say, London or New York. That’s something Mr Hausam wants to change.
"Stanford has been the catalyst of the Silicon Valley revolution, and
we want to have the same effect on the arts," he says. "The Bay Area has
the human and material resources needed to become the Florence of the
21st century."
The first step, Mr Hausam says, is to turn Palo
Alto into a city where artists live permanently. “In the next
three-to-five years you’ll see the effect,” he promises. “Arts will
fundamentally change our students, and it will change students who come
to Stanford. In five years I hope we’ll have a student body that
embraces the arts and artistic living.”
Stanford creating a new
Florence? Students and professors at Yale, which boasts highly respected
drama and music schools, might scoff at the thought. But the university
behind Google and Netflix has the muscle to make an impact in arts,
too. Imagine the potential if future Brins and Pages were encouraged to
nurture artistic interests. We’ll check back in five years.
