Various Delights of Learning and Teaching Across the Disciplines – by Neil Baldwin

It was a brisk September morning, soon after classes had begun, when an email arrived in my inbox from Ken Bain, founding director of The Research Academy for University Learning (RAUL) here at Montclair State University. The laconic subject-line read, simply, “A Proposal.” Ken informed me of the nascent plans for a “Big Event” on the Montclair State campus scheduled for May 4, 2011, “in which our faculty members will present posters and sessions (presentations, workshops, discussions) around learning issues. Our special theme will be the cultivation of creativity across the curriculum…Would you [The Creative Research Center] be interested in talking about some co-sponsorships of these events?”

Flash-forward seven months: Ken and I are sitting in his conference room nestled into a corner of the hushed ground floor of Sprague Library, two days before the imminent launch of what is now formally known as The Second Annual University Learning and Teaching Showcase; this year’s theme is, indeed, “Fostering Creativity Across the Campus,” and more than one hundred members of our community  registered in advance to attend. The event is dedicated to exploring evidence-based practices used to understand and improve learning and teaching across disciplinary boundaries, meant to provide local scholars with the opportunity to share their projects, and build toward future collaborations.

And, as Director of The Creative Research Center, I have been given the best responsibility of all: to cover the Showcase day as an on-site blogger and rapporteur. Toward that end, I am asking Ken to give me some insights into what we can expect to see and hear. “This whole enterprise has been put together by Cigdem Talgar and Julie Dalley of our staff,” he says proudly. “The goal is simple, and exemplifies the mission of RAUL – to encourage deeper reflection on the very nature of human learning. The underlying message,” he continues, “as it is with all of our RAUL efforts, is to show that good teachers and good scholars can ‘live in the same body.’”

Donning his historian’s hat — in response to my question about whether there is a fully-fledged, transformative “Movement” running through the American higher educational system – Ken reminds me delicately that “movements, by nature, are not always smooth. They proceed in fits and starts, and, in that sense, Montclair State is definitely onto something. There’s something going on right now. You’ll see what I mean on Wednesday.”

The glorious day – and, despite the inconsistent rain, it was quite glorious from an intellectual point of view – began appropriately with a brief plenary presentation by Ken Bain, accompanied by Jed Wheeler, Executive Director of Arts and Cultural Programming at Montclair State in which they spoke of their new Creative Campus collaboration. Plans are underway, they revealed,  to develop an interdisciplinary, University-wide curriculum predicated upon the creative process, transcending the arts. The course promises to be a unique entrée to the imagination for all students.

The ensuing day’s sessions were elegantly organized into four parallel, coterminous tracks: Student Engagement, Goal-Based Learning, Bringing the World In, and Creativity in Teaching. How I wish I could have cloned myself (now there’s a manifestation of creative thinking!) in order to have listened to all fifteen talks. But even so, the messages of a select number were great metaphors for the entire vision of this day.

Psychology professor Valerie Sessa presented a model for academic engagement in college freshmen, the results of a study she conducted with support from the Service Learning Department and the Charles Engelhard Foundation. Dr. Sessa scrutinized the crucial transition year from high school to college in the larger behavioral context of freshman “dis-orientation.” She reminded us that there is a learning curve for everyone coming in to higher education; and that we, as teachers, need to be mindful of it, because first-year students are not accustomed to the proper manner in which to interact with their mentors.

 Zoe Burkholder of the Department of Educational Foundations led us through an engrossing exercise predicated upon a film demonstrating American racial stereotyping during the 1940s. We were asked to describe our responses to the film from an observational standpoint as a way of rehearsing a powerful lesson suitable for pre-college age.  In the classroom setting, students would be asked to re-write the film as it relates to their world – the Zeitgeist of today, wherein racial bias to some degree has been supplanted by sexual and socio-economic prejudices. And she directed us to a Web site that was a revelation: www.understandingrace.org.  Dr. Burkholder’s book on the subject is coming from Oxford University Press this fall.

Meanwhile, down the hall, Ashwin Vaidya and Mika Munakata from the College of Science and Math were holding forth on creativity in their respective disciplines.  Again there was a participatory ambience, as we were asked to define “creativity” in our respective fields. I wrote that “creativity is the use of the imagination.” I was struck by the commonalities among a varied group from departments across the University. We then engaged in a series of (supposedly) simple mathematical and scientific exercises that succeeded in questioning our predispositions and long-held illusions about the physical world around us, from Euclid onward through the present day and into the uncertain future of the planet. “We are giving you permission to break your own paradigms,” Vaidya and Munakata told us. It was fun – and a little scary.

Meredyth Appelbaum of Psychology and James Dyer of Chemistry and Biochemistry revealed their research into the “C.R.E.A.T.E.” [acronymic for Consider – Read – Elucidate Hypothesis – Analyze and interpret data – Think of the next – Experiment]  method of research role-playing for undergraduates. What an original and fascinating way to break down the buildup of pre-scholarship fear so prevalent among the younger generation – intimidating long papers, statistic-laden studies, complex methodologies. The presenters brought home the dangers of force-feeding information in today’s crowded media environment; stressing, rather, how to successfully indoctrinate students into the concept of research by projecting themselves as originators of the studies they are explicating. “There is not just one approach to scientific research,” said Dyer at one point; and I thought, “I just told my Play Script Interpretation students the very same thing about the nuances of literary criticism.”

Speaking of “fear…” walking midway into the dense presentation by College of Business Professors Yam Limbu and Avinandan Mukherjee, I was gripped by the anxiety of incomprehension at first. But then, a wonderful phenomenon occurred: I allowed myself to relax into their statistical rhetoric — a study of marketing standards applied to student affect correlated with the degree of engagement of their professors —  and lo and behold, it was as if the scales dropped from my eyes. It felt like an immersion class in learning a new language, where, in order to survive, you had better start swimming. These two men possessed narrative skills such that they were able to convey the intrinsic meaning of data — because the data, in and of itself, was cogent. Student Engaged Techniques (“SET”) built upon cultivating a secure feeling of helpfulness and clarity invariably led to greater comprehension and pedagogical effectiveness. Yes, Limbu and Mukherjee were speaking of the focused realm of business marketing curriculum, but – yet again – the subject did not matter.

After a chatter-filled, collegial lunch (I must add that the dessert brownies were the best I have tasted at any University function)  all the conference participants – there were, indeed, many more than one hundred people in the room — convened in University Hall 1070 for the highly-anticipated keynote talk by Nobel Prize winning Professor Dudley Herschbach of Harvard, Reflections: Achieving the Balance Between Research and Teaching. 

Introducing Dr. Herschbach, Provost Willard Gingerich referred to teaching as “energy-transfer.” I wrote that down on my trusty legal pad to be certain I included the excellent analogy in my report. What a perfect metaphor for the process, and it needs to be reciprocal: I want my students to feel my commitment to the subject; and I know they are looking for signs of my passion, because that emotional engagement will help them learn in a more sustained way.

“Nature speaks many tongues,” Dr. Herschbach began. An avuncular, genial octogenarian, he responded ably and humorously to Ken Bain’s questions and prompts and, after awhile, began to amble to and fro in the front of the room like a talk-show host who (refreshingly!) did not take himself too seriously. He seemed to relish the interchange with the audience arrayed in front of him.  His chemistry students write poetry, Herschbach told us, because, from the outset, he wants them to understand that the exactitude of science is over-rated. Just as in the arts, there are variables and subjectivities galore.

“There needs to be much more accommodation to different points of view in science, as there always has been in poetry!” Dr. Herschbach declaimed. “We need to take a liberal arts approach to science…and furthermore, none of it makes sense outside the perspective of history, and so we must remember to maintain our grounding in that area as well.”  He reminisced of his required undergraduate course in The History of Western Civilization and how that changed his mind forever.

Dr. Herschbach spoke with eloquence about why he teaches Freshman Chemistry at Harvard to this very day: “Teaching that requires you to meet new students forces you thereby to think from their point of view and to deal with the basics – the fundamentals of learning – those are the most important.” [“I agree!” I wrote in the margins of my legal pad.]

“Science offers so many opportunities for personal exercise of the imagination!” he exulted, “Every child begins as a scientist and an artist. We must remember this fact, and let our students take ownership of the subject-matter. Kids cannot go on thinking of teachers as judges. Rather, we must appear to them as coaches – therein lies the hope for our future.”

By this time, Dr. Herschbach had the audience in the palm of his hand, and I realized it was because of his unflappable and innate command of story telling. I thought, how pleasant it would be, to just sit there jotting down his bon mots for the rest of the day, letting his vignettes wash over me, one after another, on and on into the afternoon, each quote more illustrative than the previous one: “I hate to be taught, but I love to learn,” he said, quoting Winston Churchill, of all people; and “learning a subject is like learning a language…it doesn’t matter what you study – it’s how you apply what you learn to your life!”

The room was abuzz with energy and excitement as Dr. Herschbach slowly and deliberately (and I sensed reluctantly) concluded, to appreciative applause.

I unfurled my umbrella and headed out into the grey day and thought about the roots for my exultation. There were so many brilliant and interesting teachers at Montclair State whom I had not met until this conference, and there were undoubtedly many others. At first, this realization made me sad, but then I consoled myself that the embarrassment of riches surely was the ultimate meaning of  “The University.”

I reflected upon the common denominator of every talk I had heard, every conversation I had overheard (or eavesdropped upon) during lunch: they were all about the students.

Scholars in our special disciplines — this is the essential base from which we ideally progress and grow. Then, we must seek to apply such rigorously-cultivated knowledge to the art and craft of teaching, a humanistic pursuit at the vital core of The Research Academy for University Learning.

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Save the Date:  Symposium on The Uses of the Imagination in the Post-9/11 World. Wednesday, 10/12/11 at 2:30 pm, Memorial Auditorium, Montclair State University. Free and Open to the Public.

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