NAFSA 2011: A Parallel Universe by Sharon Joy Bell

(With nearly 10,000 members, NAFSA is the world's largest nonprofit professional association dedicated to international education.)

Many academic colleagues may be unaware but Vancouver, Canada, has just played host (May 29-June 3) to the largest gathering of higher education practitioners in the world, with 8,700 delegates converging on a stunningly beautiful city – a city at this time of year willing summer to take hold. The huge NAFSA delegate presence in downtown Vancouver was only briefly overshadowed by the thousands of fans who converged mid-week for the Vancouver Canucks/Boston Bruins ice hockey match – the first of seven which will determine who wins the coveted Stanley Cup. Fortunately our host city team won the first match with a single goal in the last seconds of the game, so spirits remained high.

With nearly 10,000 members, NAFSA is the world's largest not-for-profit professional association dedicated to international education. NAFSA’s members share high ideals: ‘that international education advances learning and scholarship, builds understanding and respect among different peoples, and enhances constructive leadership in the global community…that international education by its nature is fundamental to fostering peace, security, and well-being’. www.nafsa.org/about.sec/organization_leadership/

The NAFSA annual conference is a place to strengthen global institutional ties. The majority of NAFSA conference delegates are administrative and professional staff with responsibility for international students – from admissions, to study abroad, to internships and migration. These are part of Whitchurch’s (2006) growing ‘third stream’ of professional staff with strategically important roles in our sector. Some delegates are the sales representatives of the service industries that support student mobility, such as insurance companies. Some are government agency officials, such as Austrade representatives. There is a minority of academics.

At times during the week I felt I was travelling over time and space in Dr Who’s Tardis, never knowing where I would next land nor what surprising past-encounters and unlikely academic relationships would be revealed. But when my head stopped spinning from daily back-to-back meetings and a string of wine drenched evening receptions with colleagues from Florida to Stockholm I realised that the highlights of my week sat outside the formal Expo agenda. Foremost, the post-conference visit to the downtown (Woodward) campus of Simon Fraser University, where the courtyard entrance is dominated by a huge, multi-screen, illuminated Stan Douglas image of a violent clash between protesters and police in the 1970s. The image is a centrepiece of the campus and extraordinarily evocative of the 70s student experience in the West – a global phenomenon played out locally over a range of issues from local urban development to the Vietnam War. Douglas’s image entitled Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, is a representation of a little known but crucial moment in Vancouver's history. On that date, Vancouver police violently broke up a Smoke-In, a peaceful marijuana protest. This event was apparently ‘the climax to heightened tensions between local government, hippies squatting in empty industrial buildings and the predominately blue-collar families that had populated the neighbourhood for over a century’. The striking image has all the qualities of documentary veracity but in fact was created through an elaborate dramatic re-enactment of the scene, echoing Vancouver’s current status as a city of image-makers. http://thetyee.ca/ArtsAndCulture/2010/02/17/GastownRiot/

Yet the image is even more astonishing in terms of its place within this contemporary university setting – the downtown campus often reserved for our most conservative of activities – the interface with the business and corporate worlds, but in this rather funky city that prides itself on its creativity, also the site of the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts. I sat for some time in the SFU courtyard contemplating which Australian Vice Chancellor would take such a bold step to pose, in a very public and radical way, the enduring questions ‘What is the purpose of the university? How does it engage with its community? How do we reflect our place and history?’

At the beginning of the week I had discovered that the well-endowed University of British Columbia does it differently through a lush, open to the public golf course and an extra-ordinary Museum of Anthropology. The museum is an Arthur Erickson architectural and design triumph which offers a beautiful and respectful setting for the display of Indigenous material culture, the most astonishing of which are the monumental totems traditionally associated with Northwest Indian potlatch ceremonies – ceremonies that involved feasting, dancing and giving gifts to all in attendance, until such ceremonies were banned in 1885 by colonial powers.

The museum’s annotation of the potlatch again evoked my own student past – of Franz Boas and an American pre-occupation with material culture.  The ‘potlatch’ was firmly planted as an iconic ceremony in my anthropological discipline base, even though the retained detail was sketchy: recollection of conspicuous consumption, display, status and prestige, and, most important of all, the redistribution of wealth. Without intending disrespect for Indigenous colleagues or in any way underestimating the layers of symbolic and religious significance the ‘potlatch’ has amongst its cultural custodians, by NAFSA’s week end ‘the potlatch’ surfaced as the most obvious analogy for what must be the most extra-ordinary annual higher education event in the calendar.

I was a NAFSA conference ‘first-timer’, although through a fortuitous bureaucratic oversight my nametag was missing the purple satin, gold-embossed ribbon (akin to those one sees at rural shows for winning entries) that should have announced the same.  I did not know quite what to expect as, despite the multitude of emails that swamped me pre-conference, the program seemed to be rather content free unless you were a newbie seeking to build your international education operational skills and leadership base with a clear north-American focus.  I did not anticipate the scale, or the staggering market orientation of the event. If you ever wonder whether higher education has become a global commodity, land your Tardis in the NAFSA Conference Expo Hall – a hanger of a convention space with hundreds of booths in the style of a furniture fair or perhaps most accurately a travel fair. This is education as a commodity par excellence but, with the notable exception of the service industries and the ‘for-profits’ represented, the products for sale are not material goods, or even, as at other educational fairs, academic programs and student places.

At this commodity fair what is being sold is first and foremost the educational destination and student experience. Country exhibits dominate, populated by those who make up their sector – the Canadians showing an atypical degree of sectoral collaboration (or more likely funding) by showcasing their provinces. Most others, including the Study in Australia stand, showcase individual institutions. At the institutional level it is status and reputation that is being sold, and location of course helps.  At the individual level what is being reinforced and interrogated is the robustness of relationships and exchanges.  Students are the currency and they, as ‘incomings’ and ‘outgoings’, are counted, their quality of experience measured, and counted again. Balanced reciprocity is the aim – a particular challenge for those institutions whose student populations are mature age, part-time, and/or low SES.

Between individuals from far-flung institutions there is often a high degree of affection through experience that spans many years underpinned by an evangelical zeal for global student mobility. I do not know if NAFSA has the data but ‘the chat’ tells me that many who work in this field were exchange students themselves and many found their overseas experience life changing.  They are now close witnesses to their students’ life changing experiences: the development of fluency in a new language; the opportunity to study and work in parts of the globe less travelled; and inevitably, the cross-country marriages. What individual exchange students have gone on to achieve is a large part of ‘the chat.’

So, like the ‘potlatch’, this annual ritual revolves around conspicuous consumption (the investment in travel alone for 8,700 delegates is mind-numbing), sometimes quite elaborate display of relationship, status and prestige, and to a degree the redistribution of wealth, if we equate educational experience with wealth.  Also like the potlatch NAFSA is not strictly aligned with the sector’s economic imperatives. Exchange relationships do not necessarily translate into student load, although many hope it will, and research collaboration is more likely to be a precursor to student exchange than an outcome of student mobility.  It should also be noted that NAFSA is, by and large, a ritual of the West – the Americas (including South America) courting Europe and vice versa. Australia is apparently a perennial favourite with north-American students. There is limited engagement by the Middle East and Asia, although this may be changing.

On a ‘green’ planet do the costs (and carbon footprint) justify the benefits? It is hard to say.  It is certainly interesting to see how much colleagues value face-to-face contact and how apparent it is that there are conversations we simply not want to have using technology. Relationships do matter. Does NAFSA change the way we conduct our business in the international sphere? We undoubtedly pick-up examples of best practice but in student recruitment more broadly our ‘value proposition’, which drives the most successful of our exchange partnerships, is yet to dominate the equation. Was NAFSA a learning experience?  Most certainly, but through observation and lots of listening, not through the formal conference program. Is NAFSA 2012 Houston, Texas in my diary? Probably not but I would encourage every Vice Chancellor who has never attended to do so to gain a sense of the ritual hybrid to which our sector has given birth, and to gain a fascinating window into the context in which our international offices work.

The potlatch was banned in the 19^th century partly because the scale of the events being staged grew exponentially and questions were asked by colonial powers about the economic impact – the elaborate preparation necessary, the time expended attending the rituals, and the concomitant spread of contagious disease. This year part of ‘the chat’ was around whether NAFSA become too big and outgrown its purpose? We should at least be asking the question, even if the only disease symptoms being spread seemed to be those associated with jet lag and the occasional case of the common cold.

Sharon Joy Bell is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research and International at Charles Darwin University in Australia

A Utilitarian World (2)

Imagine a world in which the daily experience of attending school does not exist. Take that a bit further and imagine learning as an experience that is both lifelong and not constrained by institutions, not necessarily located within institutions, but fundamental to everyday life.

In a utilitarian world, learning is sequestered to one place or one time.

Learning, in my opinion is by definition never finished. Of course there is a narrative to the learning experience — a beginning and an end, but the entire process of learning is always temporary and crucially, contingent.

In a utilitarian world, learning is first of all ‘located’ to some place and then given a particular time, fit into a schedule.

Even online education which should be open and less linear has in many instances been structured into a sequential process. If the digital age has so far taught us anything, it is that sequence should be based on multiple pathways and diverse strategies to learning. Learners want to map their direction based on a vast number of factors from state of mind, to the demands of everyday life.

This need to take control — manifested most fully in the rise of social media — has its own problems. For example, given the wealth of information that now suffuses everything that we do, how can we distinguish between good and bad information? This is a major issue for parents whose children are exposed to any number of questionable web sites and problematic claims from many different sources. But, the need to take control is also essential to the learning experience. After all, learning if it is to be valuable must also be seen to have value. Value is gained when learners feel some degree of empowerment from the process.

In this context, teachers have become curators as well as mentors and guardians of history. The word curator is derived from the Latin, “curator” which means overseer, manager and of importance to this discussion, guardian. Curator also comes from the word, to cure. The challenge is that curators have to be able to teach critical thinking.

In a utilitarian space, there is less and less time for historical and critical engagement with ideas. The rush is on to achieve a great deal as quickly as possible and the notion that for example, it might be important to spend some time on areas of study that seem peripheral to a set of pragmatic goals becomes less and less attractive.

In my next post in this series, I will explore contemplation which marks out a territory that is far more speculative than an overly utilitarian approach could ever permit.

Part 1 can be found here.

A Utilitarian World (1)

The Dilemmas of Learning              

Over the years (17 to be exact), this web site has turned into a vast enterprise. There are now no less than 1200 pages of material on the site and most of the articles and essays are original. I often comment on learning and research in education and industry. Today, I am beginning an occasional series that is part of my new book. So, I would appreciate any feedback and advice on this entry and others as they appear. I would like the book I am writing to reflect and incorporate the concerns and views of the large community of readers who visit Critical Approaches on a regular basis.

The work of research and learning, particularly in applied areas like design can be as pragmatic as required depending on the project or the demands of clients or the general challenge taken to various problems and issues. However, any learning process and research that is entirely governed and judged by pragmatic standards is rarely that useful. In saying this, I am trying to soften current trends and discussions among educational policymakers and the community that suggest that learning without a pragmatic outcome is not valuable and in the end will not add value to society or to the individual learner. The emphasis on outcomes in education has become so dominant that it seems almost heretical to raise some questions about it.

For example, a course in philosophy or ethnography may seem irrelevant to designers or engineers or medical practitioners. In fact, if you take a close look at the professional schools, there is a nod to the humanities in some of them, but for the most part, the curricula have narrowed to reflect the immediate challenges of the professions. Engineering schools often have courses in Technology and Society and do permit their students to take electives. But, the core training focuses on the perceived needs of specialized individuals to the exclusion of what are seen to be courses that are less important to the future employment of professionals. Martha Nussbaum has commented on this situation in her new book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010 Princeton University Press).

Part of the challenge here is that learning should not be narrow but also learning is by definition a process that is always unfinished. The idea that students can earn their qualifications in a linear and direct way actually contributes to failure unless the disciplines are very simple and the skills needed never evolve or change.

Three concepts to keep in mind here:

1. Learning is non-linear, therefore broad based skills provide students with multiple pathways to achieve the goals they set for themselves;
2. Pragmatism is not in and of itself a negative, but pragmatism in the service of limited outcomes decreases flexibility and inhibits creativity;
3. Professional disciplines need to integrate and not just pay lip service to other disciplines. 

Part Two will appear soon…… 

TED Day One

University Rankings

Malcolm Gladwell has a terrific article in the most recent New Yorker on college ratings in the United States. Gladwell shows quite conclusively that the ratings are largely determined by the individuals and companies that produce them. The categories used turn out to be far more subjective and therefore subject to the whims and prejudices of the rankers than previously thought. Ratings in general have been a destructive means of differentiation between different universities and colleges in Canada. The Maclean’s (one of Canada’s few national magazines) survey which is roughly equivalent to the US News and World Report survey uses categories from the experiences of campus life to quality of teaching that cannot and should not be summarized in a simple question and answer format. Even though both magazines claim that they do a great deal of research, have you ever seen questions and categories that relate more directly to curricula within the humanities? How about a question about whether students have the chance to spend some time being creative outside of the context of demands largely defined by the credit system? The various categories used for the surveys could be described as ‘soft.’ How much money comes in for research? (This will inevitably favor the large universities and always does.) Here is a quote that describes one of the categories:

STUDENTS & CLASSES (20 per cent of final score) Maclean’s collects data on the success of the student body at winning national academic awards (weighted 10 per cent) over the previous five years. The list covers 40 fellowship and prize programs, encompassing more than 18,000 individual awards from 2005 through 2009. The count includes such prestigious awards as the Rhodes scholarships and the Fulbright awards, as well as scholarships from professional associations and the three federal granting agencies. Each university’s total of student awards is divided by its number of full-time students, yielding a count of awards relative to each institution’s size.

When you go through the award winners the large universities always garner the most not only because of their student numbers, but also because they have an infrastructure to support and seek out awards. This would not necessarily be a bad thing were it not for the fact that the “student” category is so important to the overall placing of the school. Or take another category entitled, faculty. Awards and research monies are tallied and even though these are adjusted to FTE (full time students) size, inevitably large universities gather in the most money. The problem as Gladwell so carefully explains, is that comparisons between large and small schools are fraught with problems not the least of which is that it is difficult to measure the impact of an institution on its faculty, students and community without in-depth research in each community. “The first difficulty with rankings is that it can be surprisingly hard to measure the variable you want to rank— even in cases where that variable seems perfectly objective.” (New Yorker of Feb 14 and 21, 2011 p. 70) Without going into too much more detail, weighting of different categories is ultimately a subjective choice.

Ironically, the large institutions all follow and devote themselves to rankings which have become the holy grail upon which an institution’s status stands or falls. This has also led governments and policymakers into centralizing the majority of their funding with institutions that are “the best.” I will let Gladwell have the last word:

There is no right answer to how much weight a ranking system should give to these two competing values (efficacy and selectivity). “It’s a matter of which educational model you value more.” (p. 74)

Learning in the 21st Century (Part Three)

I recently had the privilege of talking to a group of parents about the culture of schools and the education that their children were receiving during what is clearly a transitional phase in the history of education.

Many of the parents were very worried about their children and with some justification. This was a boy’s high school and the parents were concerned that their sons were spending an inordinate amount of time on computers as well as playing video games. I put up a slide with the words moral panic written in bold and this seemed to describe their feelings — a combination of hostility, fear and acceptance.

However, my intention in putting up the slide was not to reinforce the moral panic that they were feeling, but rather to explore the implications of the shifting cultural space now occupied by a generation that lives within the “net.”

Distinctions between online and offline life are no longer relevant nor are they germane to the way people learn. The continuum of relationships set up through mediated environments will only become more complex as societies explore the many layers of information and knowledge that now define not only relations among people but also among societies.

We are living within a period of history that is not dissimilar to the massive changes experienced during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. These changes were as much a product of scientific invention as they were of fundamental social change. In fact, a key feature of that period was the advent of real scientific solutions to previously difficult challenges. At the same time, many old ways of thinking had to change as science gave empirical explanations for what had hitherto been thinking based on religion or superstition. 

Social and cultural changes ‘dislocate’ societies in various and often-unpredictable ways. For example, the Internet makes schools not so much centres of learning, as social spaces for the exploration of relationships, which may include immersion in particular disciplines but not in the manner to which we have become accustomed over the last fifty years. The issue is not only the availability of numerous venues for learning, but also comes down to the choices students make and the emphasis they place on learning experiences in different places.  

As John Falk and Lynn Dierking emphasize in a recent and brilliant article in American Scientist, (Nov-Dec 2010 issue) students spend only five percent of their lives in the classroom and learn most of what they know about the sciences outside the classroom. “We contend that a major educational advantage enjoyed by the U.S. relative to the rest of the world is its vibrant free-choice science learning landscape—a landscape filled with a vast array of digital resources, educational television and radio, science, museums, zoos, aquariums, national parks, community activities such as 4-H and scouting and many other scientifically enriching enterprises.” (p. 486)

Since Falk and Dierking are talking about K-12 as well as post-secondary, it would not be too hard to extrapolate an even lower percentage of university students for whom the classroom is the main venue for learning. This raises interesting issues for policymakers who have focused all their efforts on grading and testing while not recognizing that informal modes of learning are the dominant mode of learning.

I believe that parents are worried because mediated environments can lessen social interaction and can decrease if not eliminate the qualities of everyday conversation so essential to our well being. They are also worried because the information on digital culture is itself so contradictory. Statistics appear everyday from varying sources that suggest a whole variety of impacts caused by the swift appropriation of the Internet for nearly everything we do on an everyday basis. This is so to speak more of a source for the ‘panic’ than the actual engagement of children and adults with digital experiences.

In part four, I will look into the issues of moral panic and digital culture in greater detail with an emphasis on the importance of this discussion for learning and education.  

Learning in the 21st Century (Part Two)

One of the recurring themes in discussions about learning and education is that our post-secondary institutions are always to varying degrees on the verge of decline or even death. “The American Liberal Arts College died today after a prolonged illness. It was 226 years old.” (Washington, D.C., 2 July 1862) Quoted in the Winter 1971 edition of the History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4 p. 339.

In 1862, colleges in the US shifted from a skills orientation to broader curricula more concerned with social, economic, artistic and cultural issues than traditional approaches to job-ready training. It is important to remember that in the 19^th century it was not necessary to go (as Richard Hofstadter has put it) “…to college to become a doctor, lawyer, or even a teacher, much less a successful politician or businessman….Higher education was far more a luxury, much less a utility, than it is today.” (History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4 p. 340)

The key word in what Hofstadter says is “utility.” Today, in our rush to promote the utility of education, we have reduced learning to a series of “courses” defined in larger measure by a structure that privileges speed over gradualism. Intuitively, learners know that new knowledge cannot be ‘acquired’ through the simple consumption of information. Intuitively, teachers know that tending to the emotional intelligence and needs of their students is perhaps more important than promoting rote learning. Nevertheless, schools try to squeeze learning into narrow disciplinary boundaries. So much of the structure of schools works against change including the fact that hiring of new teachers is still defined by discipline.   

When economies go into crisis, policymakers look to schools to solve the immediate challenges of unemployment and thereby raise expectations that schools will simply ‘produce’ the workers needed to solve the economic challenges. This is also why the for-profit sector in education has become so large because they play into the fears learners have that they will not be employed unless they have specific skills needed for specific jobs. Policymakers amplify this even further by linking funding for public institutions to labour market data that is often years behind the economy itself.

In a globalized environment, it is increasingly difficult to predict economic direction and to manage complexity. Schools should be the places where we encourage complex thinking and doing, creating and collaborating. Instead, we rush to both prove the value of education and its outcomes. In the process, we have created straightjackets that limit invention, innovation and crucially the human imagination from flourishing and thereby actually decrease the opportunities for change and impact.

Our educational institutions are not dying, although some will disappear. The rhetoric around their value has become embedded in the fabric of Western democracies. The challenge precisely is to understand how that value can be transformed to reflect and enhance the ability of learners to generate, shape and contribute to knowledge-based societies.

Part Three will examine some of the central characteristics of the knowledge society and whether schools are in fact the pivot for the new digital era.

Learning in the 21st Century (First of a series)

These days there are many documents and reports circulating about 21^st Century learning and outcomes. For example, here is a classic programmatic statement: “Within the context of core knowledge instruction, students must also learn the essential skills for success in today’s world, such as critical thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration.” 

BUT, and it is a big but, this has always been the ambition of most schools, most teachers and most governments. Who doesn’t want their students to be good communicators? Would any school suggest that problem solving is unimportant? Collaboration has always been celebrated as essential to learning.

So, is this just rhetoric? Are these just convenient descriptors without any real content or are they essential and new aspects of the learning process?

Context is crucial here. Can schools built on a mid-twentieth century industrial model of education promote critical thinking in the 21^st century?

Can twenty to forty students sitting in a classroom develop the insights needed to meet and challenge not only their own points of view, but also those of others?

In 1828, the Yale Report (a foundational document in the history of American education) appeared and here is a brief quote from page six: “From different quarters, we have heard the suggestion that our colleges must be new-modeled; that they are not adapted to the spirit and wants of the age; that they will soon be deserted unless they are better accommodated to the business character of the nation.”

Sound familiar? Have our schools ever been able to meet the needs of the age? I doubt it. More often than not education and learning are sources of dispute, mediators in the culture wars or progenitors of conflict. These are not bad characteristics, it is just that learning, for better or worse is not about information, schools or responding to what teachers suggest or talk about. The social space of schools is much like social media, places of conversation where the unintended outcome is often far more important than any of the artifice used to frame conversations in a specific way.

The hubris of educational institutions is that they believe they are central to the lives of their students and are the hubs around which learning takes place. For the most part, learning is neither clear (as to intent — you may want to learn, but everything from the emotional state that you are in to the classmates and teachers you have muddy the waters) nor is it linear. The lack of linearity drives policymakers crazy. They have forgotten of course that play is central to learning and deficiencies in the understanding of information and knowledge cannot so easily be cajoled into positive outcomes. In fact, the drive to constrain the inherently chaotic nature of learning leads to examinations and modes of evaluation that measure not what has been learned, but how effectively students can play the outcomes games required of them.

Part Two will examine the specifics of outcomes and the expectations of policymakers.