Learning is chaotic, and that’s just fine
These days there are many documents and reports circulating about 21st century learning and outcomes. They talk about the need for students to have critical-thinking and analytical skills, problem-solving abilities, and strengths in communication and teamwork. 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.
But 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 21st century? Can 20 to 40 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 raised the alarm about the ability (or inability) of universities to meet changing needs: “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 that learning, for better or worse, is not just 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 resolutely 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.
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) Today, there is much discussion about the decline of the humanities in the US and Canada. At the same time, culturally digital economies actually need what students in the humanities produce. These tensions have been around for a very long time.
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; 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 fearlessly encourage complex thinking and doing, creating and collaborating.
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.
1 Comment What can you “get” from a degree in the humanities, arts and social sciences?
It’s a question our community faces regularly from parents, students, donors, and even some colleagues in other disciplines. As a dean of graduate studies and president of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, I hear it a lot.
In many ways, the question is tied to a larger discussion about the role and purpose of universities in society. Canadian institutions’ relationships to their communities, regions and the country are continuously evolving. And, they face undeniable pressures from governments, employers and students to align the benefits of a university education with changing marketplace realities, and to ensure that university research and teaching contribute tangibly to bettering all aspects of society.
In the current political and economic context there is a justifiable preoccupation with jobs, returns on investment and struggling global financial systems. Canadian universities increasingly face competition from international institutions where investments in education, particularly in sci-tech fields, are churning out highly trained graduates in astonishing numbers.
So how will the education that Canadian humanities, arts and social sciences students receive equip them to contribute effectively to changing workforce and societal needs? It’s partly a matter of disciplinary training. Be it early childhood education, public policy, translation studies, or comparative religion, disciplines impart knowledge, instill theory and develop methodologies and research expertise in a particular field.
And yet, as is the case with well-trained scientists, physicians or engineers, study and training in the humanities, arts and social sciences involves a broader type of intellectual formation that privileges how one interprets information, rather than simply what one knows. Whether students are immersed in the study of medieval courts or fascinated by the impact of urban renewal on homelessness, fostering their ability to think critically, broadly and flexibly is integral to preparing them to meet workforce and societal needs.
In a rapidly changing world, perhaps the most important knowledge students can acquire is that no discipline has a monopoly on understanding. Graduates in the humanities, arts and social sciences are fortunate that the scope of their education offers a wonderful point of departure and a reliable (re)positioning system as they navigate the 21st century’s complicated pathways.
Recent news from Google illustrates the point. According to one of the company’s Vice-Presidents, the high tech powerhouse expects to hire 6000 people in the coming year. But the kicker is that 4000 – 5000 of those new hires will likely have degrees in the humanities and liberal arts. None of the digital media industries would exist without technology, science and engineering—nor would they succeed without literature, language, creative writing, sociology and communications grads who generate narrative content and can situate new technologies in wider cultural contexts.
Nor is it just the high tech world that is thirsting for what researchers and graduates in our disciplines have to offer. In the History department at Concordia University in Montreal, where I work, the public’s desire to know is visible in the astonishing success of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. The Centre has become a magnet for students and researchers working together across disciplines, and for multiple community partners who use advanced digital technology to capture the lived experiences of individuals and groups from a wide spectrum of society. These partnerships are expanding as Canada leads in the development of the digital humanities. The Global Campus Network at Toronto’s Ryerson University illustrates how something first created as a teaching tool for radio and television arts can lead to extraordinary world-wide institutional partnerships, research collaborations and creative interactivity between students. The initiative has not only helped academics re-imagine the culture of the ‘classroom’, but the networking capability has also grabbed the attention of the broadcast industry.
While these projects are sophisticated and impressive, it is important to remember that not all knowledge is digital. It would be a mistake to underestimate the sense of excitement and capacity to transform that more traditional forms of humanities, arts and social sciences evoke. The quest to understand the human condition and to acquire knowledge for its own sake, can inspire productive new modes of thinking about the world in which we live, including about the structural, cultural (and disciplinary) determinism of thought itself.
Across the spectrum of society and the economy, in both the private and public realms, there are exciting, imaginative and practical roles for graduates of the humanities, arts and social sciences. Ironically, what many graduates ‘get’ from a degree in these disciplines are the knowledge, skills, inspiration and creativity to go in directions their professors and mentors, let alone their parents, never anticipated.
Valuing the ends and the means of a university education
Education is both using and improving knowledge. Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must be experienced.
–William Glasser
What I remember most about my first two years as an undergraduate student in the eighties at a large Canadian university is being #146509. Twenty-five years later, I can’t recall much about what I learned there except my student identification number and making nylon and aspirin in an organic chemistry lab. It seemed at the time, and still does today, that I was simply a number and a source of tuition dollars. Used to having been nurtured in small public schools, I was lost in a sea of 35,000 students and no one, nor the institution, looked out for my learning or me as an individual.
Fortunately for my future, I took the large risk to leave home and migrate south to a small liberal arts college in the United States. The move likely saved my undergraduate education. There, I was no longer just a number. Instead, I was welcomed into a community of self-directed learners who signed contracts with our professors on how we would both learn the course material and be evaluated on having learned it. There, I could take a mix of seemingly disparate courses and integrate them into an interdisciplinary undergraduate education which rekindled the flame of my academic and intellectual ability that had been nearly snubbed out as #146509. There, in partnership with my peers and instructors, I learned to think, analyze, critique, create, write, paddle, and climb mountains (both inner and outer).
We were allowed to graduate only when we could prove we were competent in our major area of study along with two breadth areas. Graduating from this unique college, I knew I wanted to teach in such an inspired learning environment and pursued graduate education to do so. I know for certain, had I not changed universities (and therefore my undergraduate experience), that I would have become a statistic of a different sort by adding to already formidable attrition rates and I would not be a 3M Teaching Fellow.
When I think about the future of university education in Canada, I have a view that I “climb” towards in my classroom everyday. Much like scaling a high altitude mountain, I alternate between having this view and taking the necessary footsteps (i.e. actions) toward it. I engage students by creating an active, experiential, and supportive learning community that sees them as a collection of individual learners, each with different goals, backgrounds, and motivations. I overcome their hesitancy and ambivalence using unbridled passion for the subjects I teach. I want every student I teach to have the enlightened undergraduate experience that I had at Prescott College.
As we look forward, we must value both the ends and the means of university education in Canada. We must break our huge (and dehumanizing) institutions into smaller communities in which students can develop their “learning base camp” and in which their professors’ teaching and scholarly contributions are evaluated beyond, and more deeply, than the numbers on their CV. Universities need to advance the current and next generations of philosophers, educators, and scientists using innovative, creative, and experientially driven teaching. University leaders must drop the fault-filled dichotomy of scholarship and teaching by assigning value and resources to both equally and by building more, rather than breaking down, bridges between them. These changes in organizational attitude will propel students to the forefront of university purpose and help mitigate the risk that a student will be only #146509.
The journey towards sustainability
In our goal-oriented world, it might seem strange to say that sustainability is a journey, not a destination. After all, as the old saying goes, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” (attributed variously to either Yogi Berra or Lewis Carroll). So why can’t we say, “Check off x, y and z on the list, and then we’ll be a sustainable university”?
The answer has to do with the nature of sustainability. Becoming more sustainable involves continually redesigning the way we live and work to leave the planet in better shape – environmentally, socially, financially – for future generations. Absolutely, there need to be goals along the way. But as the way we live and work changes with new technologies and demographic shifts and a thousand other things, so must our concept of sustainability evolve.
“Being” sustainable, then is about putting in place the conditions that allow an institution to grow and adapt. It involves building a university-wide culture of sustainability. That sounds daunting, but it all depends on how you approach it.
I tell my kids, “every little bit helps.” Usually, I’m trying to get them to clean their rooms, but my philosophy about sustainability follows a similar logic. At McGill, we’re focusing on ways to find and nurture ideas, big or small, to transform our culture. We have our big-picture projects – an energy management plan; new university-wide printing/copying devices that replace countless desktop devices with shared units, reduce waste and automatically double-side paper; greener construction and renovation standards and many more. But we’ve also found a very effective way to support smaller projects.
McGill’s Sustainable Projects Fund (SPF), allows any member of the McGill community – student, faculty or administrative and support staff – to bring forward a proposal and receive funding for their ideas. Since its inception in 2010, the SPF has funded more than 40 projects. The SPF was the brainchild of an accomplished McGill undergraduate, whose fellow students contribute $400,000 annually, matched by another $400,000 from the administration.
Like the veggies in our on-campus gardens, new sustainability ideas now sprout up organically everywhere at McGill. The SPF doesn’t just provide the financial means, but helps ideas flourish by linking people and even projects together. For example, a number of small ventures over time joined up to form the award-winning Food Systems project, which is improving our campus food operations throughout the entire food cycle: food production, sourcing, preparation, and disposal (composting).
In the Food Systems project, a handful of grassroots projects, started largely by students, ended up changing the way we do business. And that change happened because students and staff were willing to work together in a true collaborative partnership, disposing of hierarchies along the way (they recycled them).
It’s easy to see that becoming more sustainable can’t just happen from the top down. But I’ve learned it also can’t just happen from the bottom up. It needs leadership across the board. Sure, everyone has an area of expertise, but we can’t allow our titles – student, professor, chef, scientist – to limit what we allow ourselves, or others, to contribute, if we hope to effect the culture change needed to become a more sustainable institution.
Canada’s universities: The new Pier 21
As Canadian Universities seek to re-vitalize themselves for the next 100 years, we must re-focus on the centrality and importance of the undergraduate experience.
AUCC held its March workshop on the undergraduate experience at Pier 21 in Halifax, which offered a great framing metaphor. Roberta Jamieson, CEO of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, characterized this venue as the personification of the Canadian promise. Universities have been – and should continue to be – Pier 21s for Canadians.
The Grote Bier docked at Pier 21 in 1953 after a journey from Rotterdam. A Dutch family entered Canada with armfuls of blonde children. Neither parent had a university education. Nonetheless all seven of their children went to university. I was fortunate to marry one of them, who did a doctorate, wrote ten books, won a teaching award and a Governor General’s Prize, and entered the Royal Society. For the Verduyns, Pier 21 and Canadian universities provided a gateway to opportunity.
Like Pier 21, Canadian universities personify promise. Their graduates make enormous social contributions while generating few burdens. They add more to society than they take out of it, while strengthening Canada and its communities.
Canadian universities are connected to Canadian communities in aspirational, experiential, and consequential ways. This relationship rests on the quality of the undergraduate student experience.
Why does this need stating? The recent experiences of many university presidents have been fraught with frustration. Here is the context: massive enrolment pressures; cyclical waxing and waning of government support; revenues that have not kept pace with costs; deferred maintenance; and so on. As an administrator, I have mainly managed crises, juggled loaves and fishes, raised funds, and learned alchemy.
To be honest, I have assisted universities’ re-engineering to contain unit costs and to expand the research and graduate agendas. Governments’ PSE expectations focus on productivity, innovation, commercialization – offering financial incentives for universities to embrace this agenda. Universities, in turn, have adopted a narrow focus on policy and financial issues to maximize revenues from research and related areas. This ‘cherry picked’ the university promise and experience at the output end of the university funnel – at grad studies, R&D, big science – to the neglect of the upstream entrance of the funnel that feeds the high-end outputs.
In doing so, we lost sight of the broader promise of our universities – particularly the undergraduate experience. We also lost connection with our broader communities.
The irony is that the quality of staff, infrastructure, and programming has improved. But the character of the undergraduate experience has deteriorated. This experience can and should be better. The overall size of many universities has become problematic, as has class size. There is increasing use of contract teaching and less personal interaction. There is too much emphasis on testing and not enough on writing and talking.
This reflects both financial necessities and internal institutional choices, where the resources assigned to undergraduate education became the dependent budget variable. The ‘high-end’ envelopes are often cross-subsidized by the undergraduate envelope. Addressing the problem is complicated by the fact that many in our community may not actually see a problem.
We have to find a way to get equilibrium amongst a number of agendas to improve the undergraduate experience. We must also get parents and families on our side – their tolerance of the situation is surprising.
At the mouth of the funnel, we should emphasize access by re-connecting to our communities. We should increase accessibility for new Canadians, rural and small town areas, aboriginals, boys, and first-generation attendees – working with high schools to ensure skills/aspirational connectedness.
Within the funnel, we should maintain a quality experience by ensuring the core ingredients of quality, and fire-walling it through a financial sustainability model. We should not be afraid to differentiate ourselves.
At the funnel’s output, we should demonstrate community and social results, providing students with stepping stones for next steps, whether grad or professional schools, community engagement, employability, or research/knowledge – tracking, measuring, evaluating, and communicating this to our publics.
This is our story: we recruit, teach, and train young talent; we produce knowledge; we create opportunities and benefit the community; we are the site for major public discussions. This all starts with quality undergraduate education. We need to commit to this, do it, and tell it.
The Humanist alternative to the knowledge economy
Canadian universities are very sensitive to the knowledge economy creed. Advocating this model, the OECD upholds that a knowledge-based economy relies on the production and use of knowledge to ensure economic growth. Knowledge enhances a country’s ability to compete economically; its acquisition is necessary to ensure a competitive edge. Within such a context, universities are invited to privatize and commercially develop the knowledge they generate, through patents and other forms of intellectual property, and to train qualified personnel capable of meeting challenges inherent to the new economic reality characterised by globalisation. Canada’s governments base themselves on this model, both in their policies and programs, when they wish to augment universities’ resources.
That said, in Canadian universities, dogmatic adherence to the knowledge economy model engenders its own set of problems despite short-term gain: the exacerbation of private interests in an area where the common good should prevail, the privatization of knowledge dedicated to the principle of exclusion, and research whose profitability is measured mainly in economic terms and with the expectation of quick results. It is also paradoxical that, despite this model’s predilection for innovation (newness, originality), the standardisation of practices is nonetheless very popular in the race for structural adjustment of university practices.
Indeed, universities have always maintained a tight relationship with the State. While responding to external demands, they have carried out their mandates through the reinvention of compromise, owing to a certain period. This is not meant to deny the university’s contributions to the improvement of the economic well-being of individuals and societies. It’s more a question of promoting a humanist alternative to the knowledge economy model, which is often presented as the only possible option. The alternative is that of knowledge societies.
While the prevailing model proposes the existence of a knowledge economy, an alternative model points to the development of knowledge societies, pluralistic societies, committed to acknowledging cultural diversity. UNESCO supports this model. At the heart of these societies rests the capacity to produce and apply knowledge towards human development. Freedom of expression and cooperation among and within communities supply the foundation upon which knowledge societies are built. Universal access to knowledge is a prerequisite, implying strategies to combat poverty. The digital gap must come to a close: the use of free software is proposed. A cognitive gap separates the North and the South. Knowledge tends to favour an exclusionary principle, bestowing power upon those who already have it. The commercialisation of research results limits access to knowledge; also, a mediator must be established, reconciling the right to knowledge with intellectual property rights.
Governments and Canadian universities must sensitize themselves to this humanist alternative of the knowledge economy. This applies to their politics, programs, and practices alike. The university’s mandate is at stake, as is our collective future in this endangered world.
Vocationalism and Higher Education
We are currently witnessing a wholesale transformation of our universities, one in which institutions of higher learning are rapidly becoming professional and technical schools. “Higher education” is increasingly understood as an enterprise which seeks to provide students with those instrumental and technical skills directly tied to jobs. We are everywhere obsessed with credentials, certificates and qualifications at the expense of education.
At the heart of the dilemma lies a straightforward conflict between a view of the university as an institution designed for the preservation and dissemination of scholarship and education, with that of a training school, which focuses on providing students with skills relevant to employment and the economy. Simply put, is the university an educational institution or a vocational one?
The sad truth is that we are rapidly losing sight of the very idea of education as something distinct from preparing students for the workforce. “Education” is now used – even by people who know better – more or less synonymously with job or career preparation. This conflation of terms is further exacerbated by the fact that discussions of higher education are now dominated by words, concepts and categories borrowed from the business and corporate world; and this vocabulary seduces us into thinking and acting in such terms. For example, senior administration now routinely employ such strategies as “Total Quality Management” (or TQM) or “Responsibility Centered Management” (or RCM). Similarly, The Globe and Mail in its “Report on Universities”, argues that universities need to understand the student as a “consumer”. In the opinion of the Globe’s editorial writer, this verbal innovation is long overdue.
The result of all this is that the university now comports itself like any other rationally-ordered business in the marketplace. This means keeping current “clients” (what many of us still stubbornly refer to as “students”) satisfied, while finding ways to capture a bigger market share, that is, more so-called clients. The obvious means of achieving both goals is by giving customers what they want. And what the customer wants – or so the marketers say – are vocational and professional credentials which translate into jobs. In brief, we’ve allowed our proud Canadian tradition of education to be reduced to what a former age would more honestly and more accurately call “job-training.”
No institution can be all things to all people. Universities need to focus on doing what they do best – cultivating in students that quest for knowledge and understanding that Aristotle spoke of as the defining characteristic of the human condition. An ancient and invaluable educational ideal is under siege. This is the notion which was first articulated by the Greeks, and which maintains that our human potential can only be realized through the development of the mind and the inculcation of a critical intelligence. We are the sort of beings who require intellectual stimulation. We need to have our imaginative horizons engaged and extended. We aspire to become more fully aware of our own existence. We struggle to achieve our highest potential, and fully realize our human self.
These are the aims of liberal learning, ones which until very recently guided the university’s central mission, which is the education of undergraduates. They have been overthrown by naive appeals to a crude sort of economic utility.
The challenge in front of us is to restore to its rightful place an understanding of education which transcends the market. We need to recover the time-honoured educational ideal which posits that our students are more than mere consumers, and that education – as distinct from schooling – is fundamentally about the uniquely human mind and uniquely human achievements, rather than those pragmatic and utilitarian considerations needed to fuel the needs of the corporate state.
Patrick Keeney is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Education at SFU. He is currently teaching in the School of Education at Thompson Rivers University. He is the co- editor of Prospero: A journal for new thinking in philosophy for education.
Investing in Canada’s Universities Will Reward Us in the Global Economy
As President of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, I regularly meet with businesses of all sizes and from all parts of Canada. Having the right people is critical to their competitiveness and to their very survival. They all struggle to find the right workforce with the knowledge and skills to help them grow and compete successfully in today’s economy. They tell me that Canada has a skills shortage problem well on its way to becoming a crisis.
With the emergence of the knowledge-based economy, the proportion of the workforce requiring education or training following high school will increase dramatically. By the year 2031, an estimated 77 per cent of Canadian jobs will require a post-secondary credential like an apprenticeship or a university or college degree. This figure is significantly higher than where we currently stand at approximately 60 per cent.
For a long time we’ve known that capital is portable – money moves around the world seeking the best opportunities. But, today we realize that highly-educated people are an equally- critical resource, one that also moves freely around the world. Canada’s future prosperity depends on our ability to create and attract the most skilled and knowledgeable people.
In tomorrow’s world, the greatest competition will be for brains. The best educated and the most innovative people are highly mobile and they will go where the best opportunities are. We need to create those opportunities all over Canada. Canada must invest more in higher education. Spending on post-secondary education is one of the most effective ways for government to spend tax dollars and to make an impact on the productivity and competitiveness of the Canadian economy. Canadian businesses, universities and colleges can and should work together to achieve this objective.
Education is not a canning process that starts at kindergarten and ends when you graduate from university. It is a lifelong process, a permanent engagement to which our society and our government must be committed.
Competition today is fierce and it grows every day. We have no choice but to benchmark ourselves against the very best in the world. Canadian universities have to conduct research and provide a standard of education that will help us meet that test. For example, through its talented faculty and innovative curriculum, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) makes a vital contribution to equipping a new generation of Canadians with the skills they need to succeed. UOIT’s focus on developing practical knowledge and skills helps graduates be better prepared when entering the workforce.
Looking to the future, Canada faces many skills-related challenges and opportunities. Our success in addressing these challenges and improving the competitiveness of our nation is essential both for our businesses and for our workforce. The investment we make today in education, skills, training and life-long learning will bring even greater benefits to the Canada of tomorrow.
Rebalancing the Academy: teaching and research at Canadian universities
Canadian universities are in danger of falling out of balance.
Many of this country’s academic institutions – squeezed between the rock of mandated affordability and the hard place of constrained support from the public purse – are facing significant financial challenges. As a result, the foundational core mission of a university – teaching – may be getting lost in the shuffle.
Operating budget shortfalls have prompted campus discussions about the roles of teaching and research and the relative resources devoted to each at the expense of the other. There can be little doubt that less time will be devoted to teaching when the quality of an institution is measured by the total research dollars coming in, and faculty are evaluated largely based on the volume – we are not as yet very good at measuring quality – of their publications.
Some of us in the academy have lost sight of the fundamental reason our institutions were initially created: to teach students. This is the main reason why provincial governments fund us; that is what students and their families pay for.
So what can be done to ensure we provide quality education to more students, while maintaining research excellence and maximizing our impact on scientific, economic and social innovation?
First, we need to work to eliminate or reduce other time-thieving obligations that must fit in to a professor’s day.
Measures could include:
- Eliminating unnecessary or redundant committees and bureaucratic exercises that have long since lost any value they once provided
- Rethinking standard classroom contact hours to focus on the quality of instructional time a student gets, rather than its quantity
- Placing many administrative tasks in the expert hands of non-academic staff
- Focusing our curricula on carefully designed outcomes rather than on inputs and processes
Second, we need policies and actions – and, yes, reward systems – that reflect the ideal of achieving an equal emphasis on teaching and research. At Queen’s, for example, we have inaugurated a summer research fellowship program for undergraduates, and our annual Inquiry@Queen’s conference suggests new directions in teaching that can better integrate the excitement of discovery into the classroom. Our ongoing academic planning process will be built on the premise that research and teaching are values to be held in balance.
Third, we need to take a hard look at the ways we teach. We live in a 24/7 wired world; our students can do a lot more, with guidance, on their own – precisely the way they will be required to operate in the work force. We need to reexamine the model of dispensing knowledge in three-hour blocks, evenly dispersed through a 12 or 13-week term.
Canada’s future depends to a great extent on the scholarship and discovery that our academics generate, frequently working with industry, while commercializing inventions or translating knowledge into practice and public policy. But the pipeline for inventors and innovators, and for the much larger pool of educated citizens who work outside academe, does not begin at the academic presses, the granting councils or the research parks. It begins in the classroom.
It is time to acknowledge the effects of a persistent squeeze on resources and reassess the balance between teaching and research. We must take measures to recalibrate the mission and function of our institutions in the best interest of our students. They are our primary stakeholders, and our most important legacy.
