Mistaken Goal: Where Higher Education & Technology Meet

Update: I received a response from someone associated with the group that sent this message. Apparently NASPA allowed them to send this message to all NASPA members “to assure that those opposed to the proposed merger had an equal chance to communicate with NASPA members.”

I received this e-mail today:

Now the choice is yours.
Together We Can Preserve NASPA and Make it Better

It is now time for us to stand up for NASPA to prevent it from being dissolved.

Since we established the NASPA Yes! Consolidation No Committee several months ago, scores of members contacted us to thank us for taking a stand to continue our association. They affirmed our belief that the proposed new association is not in the best interests of our members or advancement of our profession. It is too cumbersome, disenfranchises important constituencies and would require years of effort and additional financial resources that may or may not create the kind of effective, top-echelon association that we already have in NASPA.

In that spirit, we organized a campaign to preserve NASPA so it can continue to provide valued and valuable services to its membership, and can continue to evolve and improve based on input from you as a member, followed up with thoughtful planning and execution as we work together to deepen our expertise as professionals and increase our influence in shaping the future of the institutions we each serve.

We want the organization to be inclusive—there for all people at all levels of our profession, and through all stages of their Student Affairs careers from graduate students and new professionals to mid-level professionals and SSAO’s—drawing members from institutions of all sizes, and in all regions. NASPA has proven itself, and has played these roles effectively for many years. We don’t believe that any objective case has been made that a new organization is needed.

We developed a website to reach out to you as a peer to provide information to those who want to understand why so many of their friends and fellow-NASPA members fervently oppose consolidation with ACPA. We invite you to join us in this effort.

To learn more about the NASPA Yes! Consolidation No effort and save NASPA, please visit our website at www.supportnaspa.com and provide us with your comments and suggestions.

NASPA, Yes! Consolidation, No! Committee

I resent being sent this message. It’s inappropriate for a group of senior student affairs administrators to use their power to attempt to sway others, especially much younger members, to their side. It’s very poor form to further inflame what is already a passionate debate. And it’s particularly galling to be sent this message telling me how to vote in an election in which I AM DENIED THE RIGHT TO VOTE because I had the audacity to go back to school full-time for my doctorate, especially when it’s the older and more senior members of NASPA that have repeatedly denied student members voting privileges!

I get enough junk e-mail; please don’t send me more.

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This semester, I am co-teaching a graduate class focused on college learning and teaching. Each week, our students will have to write a reflection based on a prompt we provide them. Partially to “pre-test” each prompt but mostly because I believe in reflection and purposeful metacognition, I’ll write my own replies to the prompts in my blog.

This week’s prompts are both intended to get students to consider how they organize information and how that differs from how their students organize information. It follows the second chapter in the book we’re using as our text and it should also link well with the work we’re doing in class right now, particularly the focus on learning bottlenecks (which are often caused by the differences between how teachers – experts – and students – novices – organize and connect their knowledge).

This week’s prompts:

First: As a graduate student, you have become (or are quickly becoming) an expert in your field. And as described in this chapter, you have almost certainly learned to organize your knowledge differently than you did as an undergraduate. How did you did you organize your knowledge as an undergraduate and how does that differ from how you do so now? How did you learn to organize your knowledge in those ways? And how can you best help your students organize their knowledge like you – an expert – do?

Second: Identify a specific moment in your course in which your students face a learning bottleneck, something that is essential for their success but which semester after semester large numbers of students fail to grasp. Describe as precisely as you can what they are getting wrong (i.e. what is the nature of the bottleneck?).

(I don’t feel like this first answer is sufficient. I still have a lot of thinking to do about my own thinking and how I organize knowledge and I fear that my answer is incomplete because my own self-knowledge is incomplete.)

First, I am an interdisciplinary scholar so the inherent challenge I face is connecting seemingly-disparate bodies of knowledge. As an undergraduate, I usually partitioned my classes, keeping their content separate in my mind just as my class schedule ensured that my courses didn’t overlap. Why shouldn’t I have done this? It seems to have been what was expected by my faculty and making connections between disciplines was rarely if ever rewarded outside of a handful of exceptional classes. Now that I’m a graduate student, I find that interdisciplinary work is indeed valued by many faculty members but it’s rarely taught or practiced so the path is still a solitary one with few guideposts.

It seems that the best thing I could do for my students to help them make explicit connections between disciplines and courses is to publicly practice making those connections myself. In that way I can demonstrate how it can be done as I work to discover broader principles and methods to make this practice easier and more approachable. Moreover, students should be encouraged to draw upon all of their knowledge and experience in their learning and rewarded whenever they make strong connections between disparate bodies of knowledge.

Second, in a course I previously taught undergraduates about identity in the digital age students seem to get tripped up in the readings, especially but not exclusively the more academic ones. Specifically, they didn’t seem to understand the importance of critically reading and evaluating the arguments made in the readings and the evidence presented in support of those arguments. Most students seemed to accept the assertions made by each author as if it were The Truth, even if This Truth contradicted That Truth We Read Last Week. I expect some of this is related strongly to the level of intellectual and ethical development of many younger students who still expect to receive the truth about the world from the anointed experts. But I imagine that much of this is related to inexperience in making such judgments, both because they lack a sufficient knowledge base to challenge factual and methodological inaccuracies and because they lack experience and practice in making these judgments.

(An aside: I wonder if some kinds of bottlenecks are only experienced by experts and easily avoided by novices. It seems that experience places blinders on us and invites trepidation when we approach forbidden areas of philosophy or methodological approach.)

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I have updated the Student Affairs Conference and Events Calendar. I added webinars this time but I did not include state-level events.

This has all of the national, regional, and webinar events currently listed on the websites of the following organizations:

• ACPA
• ACUHO-I
• ACUI
• NACA
• NACADA
• NASPA
• NIRSA

As I said when I first created this calendar: I don’t want to maintain this calendar. I don’t think it should be one person’s job. If I could immediately and automatically give everyone the ability to edit this calendar, I would do so. But I can only give specific people permission to edit. So if you are interested in helping to maintain this calendar, please contact me. NACA is maintaining their events and Jeannette Passmore has added several events so please join them!

I also renew my earlier plea for our organizations to please adopt more open, accessible calendars. They don’t have to be Google calendars but something easy to view and to which we can subscribe would be wonderful. Pretty please?

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As noted in a previous post, I’m co-teaching a class this semester. Specifically, I’m co-teaching EDUC-C 750 (Section 15753): Learning and Teaching on the College Campus with Dr. Joan Middendorf. I took the course two years ago and I’ve been working with Joan and her colleagues in our Campus Instructional Consulting shop for about 9 months so this is a good fit for me and a great opportunity.

Teaching a class about how to teach class is daunting. It feels like there is no room for error in a class like this because if we make blatant mistakes then it undermines our credibility in the very topic we’re teaching. I’m not sure if that’s something the students will immediately pick up on explicitly but I feel very strongly that it’s inevitable so Joan and I are going to address this on the first day of class. Not only will it address a real issue for our class but it will be good to model the kind of honesty and trust that is necessary for good teaching. Striking that balance – teaching the class while providing as good a model as possible of good teaching – will be stressful and demanding. But it will be a good challenge to face because it ensures that we will be very intentional and thoughtful teachers.

Teaching this class is also a wonderful opportunity for me and I am very thankful for it. Joan is a wonderful mentor who has been very open to my ideas and even criticism as we’ve planned the course. Despite the fact that her experience far outstrips mine, she has treated me as a respected colleague. Although I often defer to her judgment and experience, she welcomes my input even when I push back (hard) and not only explains her rationale (which is often why I’m pushing back – so I can learn from her!) but she often changes her approach based on my feedback and questions. I’m very fortunate to be able to teach a class with Joan, particularly one directly related to her experience and research!

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This semester, I am co-teaching a graduate class focused on college learning and teaching. Each week, our students will have to write a reflection based on a prompt we provide them. Partially to “pre-test” each prompt but mostly because I believe in reflection and purposeful metacognition, I’ll write my own replies to the prompts in my blog.

Aside from a minor concern about accountability (Did they read the assigned reading? Are we appropriately incorporating it?), the prompt for the first week of class is intended to do two things. First, it will start students thinking about one of the major topics of the course, bottlenecks in learning. This topic is being incorporated in this class by way of research conducted here at Indiana University (e.g. the History Learning Project) where faculty have identified ideas or concepts that are both essential and particularly problematic for students. Second, it will help ground our discussions of learning theory in students’ own experiences, both helping them understand the theories better and reminding them that these theories are not applied to just some students (an “other”) but to everyone, including themselves.

This week’s prompt:

This week’s reading focuses on the experiences and knowledge students bring to class and how that affects their learning. You, too, have experiences and knowledge you bring to this class that have shaped your beliefs about effective college learning and teaching. We will have to work to discover and incorporate those experiences, knowledge, and beliefs and that work begins with this reflection.

Reflecting on your undergraduate experience, which problem was more prominent in your major classes: Inaccurate prior knowledge, accurate but insufficient prior knowledge, or inappropriate prior knowledge? Why was it the biggest problem? Of the possible approaches described in the text, which could have been most effective in addressing the problem? Finally, do undergraduates in your discipline still have the same obstacles and would the same approach(es) work for them? Why or why not?

(I fear that my response may lack depth; my undergraduate degree is in mathematics and although I conduct quantitative research I have strayed very far from my undergraduate discipline and have become almost entirely a consumer of mathematical knowledge. But here goes…)

In my opinion, the biggest problem facing undergraduates in nearly any math class is that their prior exposure to math has given them a completely false image of math. For nearly everyone, mathematics is a large set of disconnected rigid rules and procedures that make little sense and are retained purely through repeated practice and memorization. In fact, the heart of math is creativity and connection. Math is the language of the universe but we never learn to read or speak it; instead, we focus on following often-meaningless rules and memorizing procedures without any context or explanation. Without understanding the role of creativity in mathematics and its inherent interconnectedness, no one can truly understand math and apply it well.

Of the methods presented in the text to help students “correct inaccurate knowledge,” the most applicable seems to be “ask[ing] students to justify their reasoning.” I believe that most students would not be able to justify their mathematical reasoning beyond “that’s just the way it is” which is not a very good reason. So the challenge – and it’s a big one! – would be to help students understand not merely what to do but more importantly why to do it. And that would include explaining that some mathematical conventions are just that – conventions that ensure consistency and help everything else make sense.

Finally, it seems obvious that this problem is not unique to me or my classmates but is a problem that has lasted for generations. Not only is it an inherently difficult and challenging problem but its history has given it momentum that is difficult to alter: Students who were never exposed to the inherent beauty of mathematics and creativity of mathematicians become teachers who never expose their students to those critical elements. And the challenge is passed on to the next generation.

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The editors of Oracle: The Research Journal of the Association of Fraternity and Sorority Advisors are putting together an issue dedicated to “empirical research on technology.” Examples of such research may include:

• Technology’s effect on fraternity/sorority recruitment
• Studies regarding the ways alumni(ae) connect online
• Relationship of technology use and fraternity/sorority involvement
• Impact of email/twitter/facebook and other social networks for Greek organizations

Kim Nehls, Executive Director of ASHE and Visiting Assistant Professor at UNLV, is the guest editor of this issue. Please contact her at kim.nehls@unlv.edu if you’d like to contribute to this issue or have questions.

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