TALK ABOUT TEACHING
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Teaching Outside the Box: A Residential Frontier for Pedagogy
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by Christopher Dennis
Universities are odd places. We confidently (and correctly) assert
that the curriculum is at the center of undergraduate education. Every
few years, involved faculty in their departments struggle with
structuring just the right combination of requirements to offer shape
and coherence to students' departmental majors. Only slightly less
often, the same kind of reform takes place on the school level.
Curricular redesign is a crucial feature of the educational enterprise
and is a vital occasion for faculty to shape student inquiry and to
think through changing points of emphasis in the various fields of
knowledge.
Yet students spend only about 15 or so hours per week in class,
pursuing this painstakingly thought out curriculum. That leaves 85 to
100 hours a week when students are awake and on the campus of a world-
class teaching and research university-but not in class. How should we
analyze the logic of such a ratio? Is it pedagogically appropriate? Is
such a ratio tenable in the harsher economic climate we face-where the
costs and benefits of the educational experience are being more
intensely scrutinized than ever before? One hears the sense of current
constraints and the pressure to create more time to teach undergraduates
in the campus discussion generated about the effort to add a few
teaching days to the Fall term.
We assume that the three hours of class per week will launch
students into out-of-class encounters with substantial issues in the
reading, written exercises and other problem-solving assignments between
classes. But what do we know about the accuracy of this assumption? How
does this happen? What out-of-class circumstances enhance and enrich
these encounters? In truth, we lavish time on the 15 curricular hours
but think far less intensively-if at all-about the 85. As a faculty, we
need to apply much more of the same pedagogical energy and creativity
that we use in fashioning and re-fashioning school and departmentally
based curricula in shaping the out-of-class experience. I would argue
that the University's residences offer important opportunities for
realizing this goal.
The modes of learning are changing rapidly. New ways of retrieving
and organizing knowledge mean that we should be making sure students can
skillfully retrieve data, texts, visual and audio materials from the
myriad of electronic and other possibilities. We should probably be
adding information management skills to reading, writing and mathematics
as a foundational goal. How and when will this be done? One solution is
to expand our sense of the curriculum and the classroom. Much has been
written on the possibilities of how this could happen (and is happening)
electronically, and all of that is to be encouraged. But we might also
think in less virtual ways.
Since most students spend most of their out-of-class time in their
residences, we might think about that space as a promising new
pedagogical frontier. We might choose to regard the residences as more
than "dormitories," places where people merely sleep, and as more than
sites only for the Colonial focus on moral education, or for the
enactment of institutional obligations in loco parentis. Such a re-
vision of the residences might come in the form of comprehensive
residential colleges, which could be institutional structures providing
convenient contexts for out-of-class interaction between and among
faculty and students.
Suppose as an institution, we energetically designed a co-
curriculum of (say) 15 hours outside of the classroom, offered up with
as much intellectual attention as is currently invested in our
traditional curriculum, and we looked at the residences primarily as
sites for learning, to be developed as educational resources for the
university's students and faculty. If we supposed that each student
encountered-in fifteen hours outside of class-an extended curriculum or
co-curricular series of offerings complementing in intellectually vital
ways the credit-bearing work of the classroom and classroom assignments,
we could find new opportunities for intellectual development and
exchange. In this new frontier, there might be ample time and space for
all sorts of intellectually relevant experiences, for trying out
practical applications of theoretically based knowledge, for labs,
research opportunities, service learning, collaborative learning and for
developing new skills in the new technologies of learning that might be
used and built upon during a lifetime. There might also be the leisure
for meaningful exchange and discussion, which would bring us nearer to
creating a true community of scholars.
To be sure, many faculty spend a great deal of time carefully
designing out-of-class assignments (and students work hard to complete
them). But many others may be constrained by logistical or technical
difficulties. Suppose in an emerging residential program, each house or
residential college had staff (graduate or undergraduate students) who
helped faculty members with these arrangements. They would be-in effect-
pedagogical support staff handling many of the details of co-curricular
arrangements.
The residential programs currently in place offer some
prototypical examples of possibilities. Twenty-five faculty and their
families live in our current house system. In the College Houses, 50
graduate and professional students are slightly older intellectual role
models for our undergraduates, and students and faculty come together to
define a program of social, cultural and intellectual events that works
for the house. Last year, some 1700 programs took place in the Houses.
Particularly for first- and second-year undergraduates, some formal, co-
curricular elements are in place now, elements such as Math Centers,
supporting the Maple calculus initiative, residentially based Writing
Across the University (WATU) sites, and residential computer labs (with
access to PennNet, the library and the Internet, and up-to-date
software), ResNet and visiting scholars programs.
Much work has been done by energetic residential faculty and
students, but the way to this particular pedagogical frontier has merely
been cleared. If as an institution, Penn created an opportunity for
faculty to shape an additional 420 (or so) hours per semester of "co-
curricular time," what new elements might Penn's faculty design? Could
we redefine teaching and undergraduate education? The impressive
possibilities allow us the time and the space to reimagine enriched
educational experiences extending from an increasingly metaphorical
classroom.
(Pictute caption; picture credit: Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
Penn's Colonial Home
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The first site of what is now the University of Pennsylvania was at
Fourth and Arch Streets-a rectangular brick classroom building (topped
by a steeple holding the school bell) that had been built for the
Charity School and adapted for use by the Academy and College of
Philadelphia. The dormitory at right was added in 1762-63. Both were
demolished in 1844 and 1845, and Penn was at Ninth Street until
the "new campus" opened with College Hall in 1872.
Watercolor by nineteenth century artist William L. Breton after an ink
drawing (c. 1780) by Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere.
This article, fourth in a series developed by the Lindback Society and
the College of Arts and Sciences, is by the director of Academic
Programs in Residence (and of Penn's College House program). Dr. Dennis
is also adjunct assistant professor of English.
Almanac
Volume 41, Number 17
January 17, 1995
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