Attending classes during the first and second week of the spring quarter I focused on the aspect of collaborative learning, which as I came to underderstand does not necessarily include collaborative planning.
Sitting in at the very beginning of a coordinated study program called Contemporary America created a vivid impression as an experienced "old team" Dave Hitchens and Jerry Lassen introduced the TESC idea of seminaring to a group of 48 freshman students. The program is taught in a mixture of lectures, film viewings and seminars with group work and presentations aiming at a final symposium week at the end of the spring quarter; altogether not very different from a good interdisciplinary course taught at our school, but fairly untypical for a normal German University course.
The perspectives from history, economy and the media served as a nice refresher course for me concerning the latest materials. The students articulated a need for more and connected information on the US-history of the past 50 years and reflected on differing perspectives between their own and their parents’ generations.
I was impressed by a highly supportive atmosphere in the seminars, the openness of all participants in critical discussions and the personal involvement of students in their written assignments. I looked at it as a good example of an Evergreen seminar establishing a learning environment that encourages students to fair, critical discussions, but with not as much interference by the faculty as in Germany.
The second seminar I got a short impression of was taught by the young new team Juliane Unsel, a feminist historian, and Mario Caro, an art historian. It is called Difference and Desire: Sex and Race in Society, Medicine and Film. I would have liked to spend more time with this all-level group that had initiated the seminar with a group contract. They had such an interesting syllabus of books, films, webzine seminars and workshops with provoking positions and they challenged me to formulate my ideas during the discussions. I really liked their political and feminist point of view and their excitement in theory building. What a heterogeneity of student abilities and interests! Amazing!
The third seminar experience showed the possibility of a truly interdisciplinary approach, when four faculty members of the course Health and Human Services confronted the large group of nearly 90 advanced level students with different perspectives on the required reading for the day about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on humans described in Bad Blood by James H. Jones. The decision to begin the session with a faculty discussion was the result of a faculty seminar the day before and was quite a lively presentation of the team members and their backgrounds for me, surely not only for me.
In the spring quarter the students are out in the community doing their internships and meet on the campus only for one day a week. I could feel clearly that they have been working together for some time and faced the issues as a learning community that was in touch with current social problems. The guest speaker of the day, a health expert of an organisation in Oregon initiated a simulation in a workshop of rationing health care, a practice for real life applied politics.
In the one of the four seminar groups which I attended following the communal session, the students played an active role structuring the discussion of the assigned book linking it with considerations of responsible approaches to own health issues and important research questions. The Evergreen form of seminaring did not only involve asking for help with the individual research papers or sharing problems with the internship, but also organising potluck dinners or support groups for a sexual awareness week.
Overall during this seminar many aspects of scientific inquiry were discussed on general terms and with respect to very concrete examples from the students’ experiences during their first week of internships. I envied these students the amount of academic counselling they could get and admired the faculty for their dedication to teaching. I see this advanced program as a good example of the application of most of the Evergreen principles: multidisciplinary collaborative and active learning geared to serve the multiple intelligence, student-centered in its enormous methodological variety and bridging theory and practice with internship and community-expert approach.
One of the most impressive learning experiences I had at the TESC was a student-organised conference on ecological activism in the CASCADIA mountains. Appealing to all senses with music, food, theories,( e.g. on neo-colonialism, deep-ecology workshops), stove-building, mushroom-walks and videos, the conference was an active communal learning weekend that embodied all the Evergreen principles at their best.
In several interviews about the specific design of learning at TESC I collected information on the Evergreen approach to education and on the faculty efforts to improve the efficacy of members’ teaching. I met with the Dean of Undergraduate Studies Lee Lyttle and with a team of academic advisors to discuss the transition from traditional school learning to this rather difficult form of learning at Evergreen. For most freshmen it works best only when they take part in a core program, especially planned to help them become good college students.
One structural set-up of counselling I found very impressive was the core connector program for faculty as well as students. The academic advisers assist each study program team so that the students develop active learning habits and pursue their specific academic goals. They organise various workshops, e.g. for time management or writing self-evaluations or advise the needy students to connect with students services, like the Learning Resource Center for math and writing.
In their teaching of core programs each faculty team integrates into the coordinated study program the training of special study skills, e.g. for successful field trips or for thorough text analysis. I was fascinated by the multifaceted collection of techniques and reports of past experiences that are shared among the teams. Not only are the new students introduced to learning as a group process, but also each new faculty team is seen as a learning community that is trained in summer institutes and workshops for Evergreen’s collaborative interdisciplinary teaching. Many of the methods and materials they shared with me can be put to good use in our teachers’ training programs.
For example looking at my German experience of team work and group dynamics, I think that the mutual signing of a program covenant is an important tool to straighten out responsibilities and address each participants’ own ideas about emotional and personal involvement. Every member knows what to expect and what she or he will need to invest. It sets formal goals for the learning process in a program and can be used a basis for reciprocal constructive evaluation.
Some teams even formulate a student-faculty covenant, discuss it at the beginning of a program and have the students sign it. The students are exposed to a different role of authority and guidance than before. I did not, however, find out how much Evergreen students influence the programs suggested or how much they can negotiate the expectations put on them concerning e.g. self-determination and responsibility.
Above all I could see the impact of narrative evaluation on the educational process in Evergreen. There is such a difference if you do not have a normative arbitrary standard to aim at, but rather support individual growth and have high expectations regarding the outcome. I noticed incredible faculty commitment and admired how they try to evaluate the students against themselves. In order to be able to do this successfully you must have a clear understanding of your pedagogical goals beyond the academic disciplinary concerns. I feel there is a high degree of agreement on educational goals among the faculty, sometimes called the mission of TESC, but I encountered many individual way of trying to reach these goals, e.g. how much time the faculty invest in feedback or students‘ contact during the process and how seriously they take the portfolio as a form to reflect and document personal and academic growth.
In recent years the faculty at Evergreen has done research on how to help students remain in college after the first year and furthermore how to react to a changing student body that is getting younger, more individualized and in general more critical towards learning. The modern student mentality often sees education as a commodity, wants to consume it as a service without too much effort. I have noticed these general tendencies to be especially harmful for educational processes that demand an active interest and self-directed approach to learning.
Two of Evergreen’s measures are an outreach program with mandatory advising and options for shorter study programs. The experienced coordinated study teams say that it takes at least 6 months for a group to become a real learning community, whereas from the more independent students, even on the freshmen level, I heard they appreciate the development in curriculum, not only a year - long involvement with one theme and one group. I also see the emphasis that is put on developing learning communities as a good way to react to the changing student body’s needs for integrated learning.
At the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education I found a large collection of helpful articles and testimonies of past experiences that will become even more valuable to the staff, as TESC faces a higher rate of staff turnover due to enrollment growth and the retirement of colleagues. It will be a vital issue to see how the college can sustain such passionate commitment by its staff and aim at a less time consuming approach for the sake of preserving commitment and attracting new faculty. Especially at this time, it is important for TESC to have such a Center integrated with the college and working in close cooperation on applied research.
With the help of the staff of the Washington Center I have increased significantly my understanding of the way that collaborative interdisciplinary education can be planned more formally and classroom assessment be done more democratically and constructively. I would like to use my experience of teaching in an experimental school design together with the innovative ideas and positive energy I got from TESC to knock at the bureaucratic barriers within the German educational system.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century we need to re-evaluate some basic assumptions about teaching and rethink our resources, both material and immaterial. I believe all participants in this process here, students as well as teachers, need to move towards more active and co-operative forms of learning. Education will make so much more sense if it is integrated and puts serious expectations on the outcome for real life.
For teachers and students I would like to introduce and practise mutual forms of qualitative evaluation rather than the authority-centered ones which make comparisons to abstract standards. It will take time to establish the rituals and constructive tone that are needed for growing. The hierarchical and quantitative forms of evaluation that are being introduced in our schools at the moment again do not seem to further progress.
In my teaching I will encourage students to work on their portfolios and I plan to continue more actively to give constructive feedback.
My internship at Evergreen has turned out more generally to broaden my perspectives in possible forms of higher learning rather than to focus on a specific research question. In my own work I want to make many adaptations and ‘translations’ to our educational and cultural needs that are appropriate for the new century.
I want to acquire more skills so as to implement to the multiple intelligence approach addressing all senses in teaching. I am sure I will also profit personally from a more integrated approach that focuses seriously on collaborative forms and on building bridges between theory and practice, between school and real life.
Due to the highly advanced environmental thinking and teaching in the Cascadia region, one of the most promising areas in social and urban developments in the world, I got a closer look at sustainable development in economic and environmental matters. After several intensive discussions and readings I feel that the efforts of the Evergreen State College to change learning and teaching could be described with a similar term: sustainable education. The educational principles of TESC can be regarded as important steps towards a form of sustainable development that will promote schools and colleges to face the challenges of the future. It meant a lot to me to share some of their experiences and take valuable inspirations back to Germany.
Copyright 2001, Elisabeth Esslinger