Curriculum as Academic Practice

At my institution, we are currently having a curricular debate regarding the notion of life calling. Helping students discern their life calling is a noble initiative, and it fits nicely with the institution’s Christian identity as well as its focus on “Accent on the Individual.” The College of Business and Economics has offered coursework that supports notions of life calling and career discernment. In one of these classes, students complete the Gallup Strengthsfinder and explore how their strengths could impact the career paths they are considering. The courses provide important support to students. In many instances, freshman who change their majors and drop classes turn to this class as a way to maintain full-time status while rethinking their futures.

As wonderful as the experience is for students, there is great debate regarding the degree to which these courses are academic enough to constitute course credit. For more than a year, the faculty senate curriculum committee has struggled with this issue. Over the course of the hours of debate, the committee reduced the original proposals for three three-hour courses to one three-hour course and two one-hour courses. Nevertheless, the committee is reluctant to approve them beyond a trial basis. Meanwhile, the need for the courses (and others like them) grows. The university offers College Credit Plus credit to high school students and has a special partnership working with immigrant students in Columbus. These and similar courses would be helpful for these students. The university also works with prisons and provides college coursework to inmates. Again, these and similar courses would be helpful in these instances.

To provide depth to the context in which this debate is unfolding, it is important to note that both the College Credit Plus initiative and the Corrections programming are driven by administration without a great deal of engagement among the faculty. There was little to no buy-in about the programs nor was there conversation about the nature of the programs and how they may impact the work most faculty do – traditional undergraduate and graduate teaching. The three initiatives – traditional programming, College Credit Plus programming, and corrections programming - have maintained parallel existences. The courses offered were courses that were part of approved programs and other than periodic struggles to find qualified adjuncts, the work has progressed with little incident. However, this changes with the introduction of courses like “life calling” or “study skills.” Now faculty have to discern the degree to which new images of programming (and thus curriculum) fit with the historical images of who AU is and what AU does. How do faculty reconcile what they perceive as coursework with less academic rigor with programming that meets other needs and overall seems to support elements of the mission of the institution? To make matters worse, when faculty ask questions or struggle with the issue, some administrators misinterpret their questions or concerns as obstructionist behavior. Without some sort of intervention, the impasse between faculty and administration seems long and inevitable.

Yet, does it have to be? Within our College, I am arguing for an alternative. We are working on a life calling seminar that will help educators discern their future. We hope to begin offering this seminar this spring as a free event in both Columbus and in Cleveland. This would shift the life calling experience from a credit-bearing course to an “academic practice.” I draw from Alastair MacIntyre’s (1984) work, After Virtue to characterize such a practice:

. . . any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (p. 187)

Kreber (2015) uses this definition from MacIntyre to judge whether scholarship for teaching and learning could be considered a MacIntyrean practice, and I believe the criteria she identifies in her research apply here. In order for life calling to be considered an academic practice (in a MacIntyrean sense), it would need to meet the following four conditions:

Is it practiced within a community?

To make life calling an academic practice, we must ensure that it is practiced within our community. Rather than making life calling a course within our College open only to admitted students, we are going to make it an open (and free) seminar open to anyone who is struggling with burn-out, professional identity confusion, or a sense of professional unsettledness. In Ohio, educators learned that they must work five more years before qualifying for retirement (the State changed the full-benefits requirement to thirty years instead of twenty-five). I hear many teachers and administrators lament, “I cannot do what I’m doing for five more years.” Our life calling seminar will help them explore other options while staying in the teacher retirement system.

Will it help us realize the internal goods gained from the activity?

We certainly hope that the process of discernment leads some individuals back into graduate programs, and we hope that they choose our graduate programs as a result, but this is not a requirement of the seminars. We are not designing the seminars as a recruiting event. We are designing them as ways to connect with teachers and administrators and to serve a vital part of the mission and vision of our institution: providing a transformative learning experience and helping students discern their life calling.

Will the life calling initiative be realized through virtues that help us achieve standards of excellence?

The life calling seminars will be facilitated by faculty and staff in the College of Education. As such, they not only provide a transformational experience for the registered participants, they will also provide transformative experiences for our faculty and staff. It draws our community together and helps us focus on what really matters: our service to educators. This is not some transaction where the faculty and staff of the College of Education provide a service for which they are compensated. This is an authentic call for our community to be in relationship with others in the field, and it challenges us to be as open to transformation as those whom we are serving.

Will the life calling initiative involve a transformative process leading us to reconceptualize and eventually achieve internal goods?

Anyone who works in graduate education has moments in which he or she experiences glimpses of transformation when working with students. I believe this is particularly true when working with doctoral students (or at least it was true in my own and close colleagues’ experiences). You cannot really work to transform the lives of others if you are not willing to likewise experience transformation. Anything less is hypocritical or (worse) Machiavellian. We are making a leap of faith to come together and make this commitment to provide this level of experience for individuals who are not our students. It’s a commitment of resources to truly live out the mission of the institution. Do we hope that it will lead some to come and complete programs with us? Yes. Do we hope it helps distinguish us from other competitors? Yes. Will it, in all likelihood, make our faculty stronger teachers? Yes. But these extrinsic values do not drive this initiative. The call to serve and fulfill the mission of our institution drives our work.

The Bottom Line

We recognize that this proposal does not guarantee positive financial results. In universities, we spend much of our time and resources in ways that do not directly impact revenue: connecting with alumni, serving in the community, and feeding the bureaucratic machine itself. This is a deliberate attempt to engage in an intrinsically motivated and virtuous initiative because it is good and right to do. As such, our life calling seminars should “. . . sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good” (p. 219).