Trans-discipline

The Return of Undergraduate Transdisciplinarity

New month, new academic year, time to start up the blog after the summer hiatus... The third annual junior fellows transdisciplinary seminar began at Woodbury University last week and we're focusing on the global economic crisis. I've been accused of naivete and foolhardiness in trying such complex analysis and problem solving with undergraduates, but our previous studies of the interconnections between oil consumption, plastic pollution, human migration and sweatshop labor in year one and overpopulation, climate change, urban policy and sustainability in year two have been richly rewarding projects even if the final versions of the students' work were somewhat unfinished and unpolished.

This year's students are investigating issues related to the current global economic crisis (including its origins and consequences) through examining: the need for educational improvements (especially in terms of global and international affairs), the role of grassroots community activism as a source of progressive social change, and the place of governmental intervention in the reform of bank and consumer lending practices. They will also consider how the current global economic crisis affects the conception and implementation of ethics in the corporate world, the demand for technologically and scientifically equipped leaders, and the individual personal transformations and critical consciousness required.

We begin by considering Paul Krugman's "The Return of Depression Economics," where he examines to begin with the causes of our blindness to the approaching crisis. In my words, there are: 1) The End of Socialism left us with no apparent competitors, hence we were smug about our success... "The End of History" and all that; 2) The Mastery of Money Managers left us arrogant, as if we had solved all the problems and all that was left was the tinkering of technocrats; 3) Techno-Wizards rule and any problem can be solved (and productivity and profit increased) by the application of IT, making us fall prey to "heroic romanticism" and false optimism; and 4) Integration into the World Economy as the magic key to rising prosperity seemed like a 'no-brainer,' which itself should be a warning phrase to us all. In short, for those of us aspiring to be transdisciplinarians, the lessons are strong: we were smug, arrogant, romantic, optimistic and thought the magic genie would take care of it all; we need instead to be open, humble, rational, realistic and responsible.

Baseball's Back

The beginning of April and baseball is back again. The joys  of the sport are best recounted by George Carlin (even if a bit sarcastically).  Baseball is all about spring, parks, picnics, and open-ended-ness, but even more appealing is Carlin's insights about the relationship of the ball to the game. The ball is not to be controlled by the offense, but to be put into play, and, once one is running the bases, to be avoided. It is the perfect metaphor for our work. The object of study, of transdisciplinary work, is not an object of control, but one of play; not something owned, but something that facilitates the game. In a world that appears to value only products, results, outcomes, we step back and also value the slow roll of innings played, the gradual slide of daylight into evening, and the comparison with past accomplishments and experiences.

Baseball also has what Carlin noted as a pre-technological, pastoral spirit. In our post-technologial age, we often think of progress as moving beyond the present in just one direction. Our perpective just as easily moves back, looking at reappropriating and reclaiming within a contemporary context values that may have been laid aside by others. We are never simply about being number 1, beating the competition, or coming out on top. We are also about success understood differently. Any seasoned baseball observer knows that today's win guarantees nothing and that the results of one's efforts do not often bear fruit as victory. You can throw an unbelievable pitch and the batter may still get a hit. You can crush the ball only to have the wind push it back into the field of play. Victor and vanquished alike have to deal with the truth of the cliche: "There's always next year," if not the next pitch or at bat. Competition, struggle, strategy, wins and losses are all part of the game, not the ends in themselves. The end is playing the game, making the comparisons, enjoying the atmosphere, telling the stories. And after October passes, waiting for April again.

A Poem (sort of...)

humpback dromedary
blind apothecary
curly moe and larry
quick tinker bell fairy
transdisciplinary
look isn't that jerry
hard itinerary
getting to the ferry
old coal mine canary

old tarpaulin
merseyside inn
new bulletin
not my own kin
transdiscipline
rent sardine tin
open medicine
reach back put in
venial sin

solid silver rarity
no inferiority
giving up his sanity
such a thing as parity
transdisciplinarity
irregular scarcity
holding on to clarity
way too much hilarity
cutting edge neutrality

Hospitality

--Do not neglect hospitality, for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels. Heb 13:2.

We were recently hosting candidates for two new positions, one in philosophy, the other in politics. During our conversations, it came to me that an essential element of transdisciplinarity comes down to hospitality, a fundamental and reciprocal openness to others is crucial. The acceptance of the stranger into one’s home, the deferral of one’s own agenda, the potential conflict of values, the disruptions of everyday life, the sacrifice of time and energy, and the intrusions on privacy are the more immediate concerns, if not benefits.

Hospitality also reveals our assumptions about the notions of rights and prerogatives, the tensions of obligations and refusals, the pressures of forced intimacy, and the need to provide and serve. Lastly, hospitality confronts us with the ethics of asking and of surrender, the relationship between guest and host and its implicit (if not explicit) power relationship, the images and prejudices surrounding the concepts of citizen, immigrant, and native, and the complications of tourism, voyeurism, and superficiality.

All of these issues are constantly transposed and shifted in a transdisciplinary practice, where all are both host and guest, served and server. With an interdisciplinary approach, we never really have to place ourselves at risk, we can remain within our disciplines and share, we can admit as through a screen the ideas and offerings from the other, but never really have to let her through the door all the way. Transdisciplinarity requires such an opening, a vulnerability, just the kind one offers through hospitality.

Is it Relevant?

I don't know how many times I've taken part in conversations where someone is making an argument only to be challenged with the question of relevance. And yet the questioner is not asking if the speaker's issue is germane, to the point, or even enlightening (the root of relevant being from the Latin relevare "to lessen, lighten"); they are challenging whether or not the point is contemporary, modern, "with the times." We have merged the terms so well in common usage that they seem synonomous. Yet in actuality we use the term relevant as a stand in for contemporary because the former is so much more powerful rhetorically. 

Listen the next time someone accuses you of making a point that isn't relevant. Ask yourself if what they really mean is that your point isn't contemporary. If this is the case, ask them the same. Given our times prejudice towards the modern, the contemporary, it's no wonder the terms seem so similar in usage; it assmues that only those things "with the times" are "enlightening." Yet to succumb to the challenge is to leave the prejudice at the heart of it unchallenged.

Are we in such a new era that only those things that are new are relevant? There are those who still see the past as Henry Ford wanted it to be: "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today." (Chicago Tribune, 1916) If you too believe so, then the contemporary is the relevant. I however tend to think of the past as Santayana would have it: "Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (The LIfe of Reason, 1905) And I think one need only look at the current economic crisis and the Republican insistence on more tax cuts or the recent lapses of the Vatican regarding Holocaust denial to see the destructive power of this forgetting. And I'd prefer not to let others push me towards the same kind of forgetting by the simple shifting of a simple word.

Inauguration Day

Reflections on an historic time... we still, remarkably, have the ability to transgress the limits of our past, to reshape the future to the image of our wills, and to cross divides once thought unbridgeable...  the high-point: Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery... made my wife's list of the five most significant moments in her life so far...we have transcended race and yet we are still bound by race; the look of your face and the color of your skin still determine who you are even if they no longer determine who you can be... did Joe Biden ever stop smiling (was there any reason to)...  may my daughters one day see someone like them in more than color take the oath in front of the Capitol... the low-point: the other guy who prayed first... the most amazing thing for me is not the first black President, but the first from an amazingly multi-racial entended family (there is a party tonight unlike any other in the White House)... oh, and do we keep calling it the "White" House?

Avoiding Assessment as Fetish

Those of us in higher education are increasingly called to accountability, and rightly so. The accountability concerns student learning, and thus the focus on any account needs to reside there. But like so many trends in education, which have intrinsic value, the ends have to be kept in focus: understanding how and what students learn and working to improve both. To think otherwise is to make assessment a fetish, and a new talisman is not going to help Johnny read (or Judy deconstruct a postmodern novel). 

So the basics (as I see them): There are outcomes or objectives or (my preferred term) expectations that refer to what a student successfully does, knows or values at any given time in a course or in a curriculum. These outcomes, objectives or expectations must be clearly expressed so students and faculty alike know what they are after. They also need to be assessed in a manner independent of individual course grades in order to obtain a measure of collective attainment. Such assessments may be indirect (surveys, focus groups, etc.) or direct (student work, portfolios, etc.) as best suits the outcomes, objective or expectation and fits reasonably within the abilities and resources of the institution or department.

The point of such practices, as I said, is primarily to improve learning and teaching (and only secondarily, but importantly, to create accountability), so priorities must be established concerning which outcomes, objectives or expectations are assessed and when. While ideally one could have an assessment plan that assesses all outcomes, objectives or expectations over a multiple-year cycle, professional judgment concerning questions and issues should be allowed to direct the annual assessments. Completing the cycle for completion’s sake (or unifying language for unity’s sake) misses the point that the end is improvement, not the assessment itself.

Initially, as we try to bring such practices more and more into the life of a university, one must be willing to be flexible and tolerant of diverse vocabularies and possible ambiguity. The doing of the work to achieve the ends we seek, however irregular or unorthodox, is better than delaying implementation until we get all the details just right. Sometimes it’s best to allow things to go forward and make adjustments through learning rather then try to create the best from the beginning.

My concern is we will be caught assessing for things that we do not believe are issues or problems when more obvious issues of problems confront us.is It is also important that we do not waste time and energy on debates concerning taxonomies and vocabulary (or worrying about thoroughness or obsessing about reliability at the 95 percent confidence interval), but that we frame the right questions, select the appropriate assessment instrument, and get results that are usable as evidence for decisions on improvement. The point is always about the students and their learning, and how we should be open to learning ourselves

Making the Implicit Explicit

So your university is requiring you to undertake some form of assessment. It usually comes down as a mandate loaded with jargon like outcomes, rubrics, assessments, etc. It is usually feels like you are being asked to prove you are a good teacher and your students actually learn something in your classes. It all seems like an imposition, a demand to prove yourself after years of academic work as if you are some newly-minted teaching assistant. So what to do?

Start with what you already have, what you already know, and what you already do. Imagine your typical grade book. A column of names down the left-hand margin; a row of criteria or assignments across the top; a matrix of scores and grades littered between. What kinds of assignments are listed there? What kinds of marks are recorded there? Are there any patterns that emerge? Imagine. A professor uses a grade sheet to notice that there is a consistently weak aspect of student performance: the research paper. This is a good start, since writing a good research paper is a course expectation. If she has more detailed records of how students did on various aspects of the paper: organization, thesis, use of evidence, strength of argument, etc., she might be able more clearly to pinpoint the source of the problem.

She could also ask and see if other professors have similar issues (which we all usually do over a beer or a cup of coffee). She could ask her students what they find difficult about the assignment (what some edu-pros call an indirect assessment). She could take this information and then change her approach to teaching the research paper, repeat the analysis on the next term or terms, and see if there is a result (a process of revision we are all familiar with).

Going further, she could ask her colleagues to save copies of their students’ research papers (they are all probably buried in the e-mail archive or on their hard drives anyway). They could look at their common student work (and maybe their common grade books) seeking common strengths and weaknesses. They could put their heads together to come up with new, innovative and creative strategies to address their findings.  They could create common criteria and levels of performance (what some of those same edu-pros call a rubric). Lastly, they could put their observations, conclusions, and recommendations into a brief report (or program review, so to speak) and refer back to it in a year when they gather again to see if their innovations created any significant change in the quality of their students’ work.

The point I'm trying to make is that even when given what seem to be external demands irrelevant to our chosen profession and driven by political winds, we should have the power to choose how we respond to those pressures, how we answer those calls, and how we reach into already established practices to answer them. In turn, we need to keep an open mind as to how these demands may reveal for us ways we can do what we already do better, ways we can make our implicit expectations and evaluations more explicit (to ourselves, our colleagues and perhaps more importantly our students), and ways we can assit our students to actually learn better the ideas, skills and values we hold dear and what have lead us into the professoriate in the first place.

Scylla and Charybdis

Change may be eternal, but it is not defined by jumping from stage to stage; it's more like navigating a dangerous course among different challenges. One doesn’t “get to the next level” (please tell me if anyone has ever concretized exactly what this means beyond serving as a rhetorical cudgel to bash the brains out of anyone who stands in the way of a change we want make happen) and leave the old level entirely behind, basking in the glow of a new found idyllic condition, as much as one might want to. The previous stage persists in innumerable ways, which is not always a bad thing.

Take for example organizational structures in higher education, which are remarkably like small states or societies. Many are characterized by what one may call "patrimonial administration." Decisions are made and controlled personally, through oral communications and defined by custom. Leaders’ discretionary powers are wide and subordinates are more like a personal staff than anything else. Oral tradition as shared guidebook, power wielded through exercising historical consciousness, and flexibility and rapidity in response to crises and opportunities mark this power regime.

Even when organizations move to a more “bureaucratic administration,” where office holding primarily confers authority, where written communications and rule-bound order prevail, and where technical, impersonal and legalistic practices determine the limits of discretionary power, patrimonial characteristics continue to exist. Policy manuals as action guides, legalistic citations as rhetorical power, and thoughtful and many-sided considerations of responses may be more characteristic here, but one needs only to reflect on the role of charismatic leadership in this setting to see the continuity of certain elements of a patrimonial regime. (See the notes on Weber’s sociology of bureaucracy here.)

Add to this a more recent “post-bureaucratic administration” where common responsibility for the success of the whole, not just for my small part, is stressed, leadership exercises authority through consensus making among stakeholders, and structural development occurs through a meta-process of deciding on how the rules will be written and enforced. This post-bureaucratic world exists along side the bureaucratic one, the same way post-modern and modern uneasily cohabit our cultural world.

More accurately, all three forms of organization exist along side and intermingled with each other: patrimonial, bureaucratic and post-bureaucratic. The result is that there are contingent and context-driven associations and groupings within the organization along with periodic and dynamic reformulations of organizational structure that may conform to one any of these models at any given time. (On the post-bureaucratic, see Heckscher’s  paper here.)

The transdisciplinary perspective here is not about railing against the persistence of the paternalist old regime, or the mind-numbing and Byzantine delays of modern rule following, or even the unfairness of the current order’s privatization of profit and socialization of risk. It is about successfully discerning the dominant operating mode in any given situation or organization, developing an awareness of when the other two crop up or control circumstances, and imaginatively navigating a path through, around and among these reefs and shoals. It may feel like getting away from Cyclops only to be confronted by Scylla and Charybdis, and then once finding dry land again realizing one is back on the island of the Cyclops, but that would be submitting to pessimism. Instead, the power of these three may be strategically harnessed and used in transformative and even transgressive ways. That is the challenge.

Sustainability

The increasing number of human beings on the planet (from 3 billion in 1960 to more than 9 billion in 2050) creates a host of issues for us to confront. Growing numbers of people (with increasing density in East Africa, East Asia, Europe and South Asia) place increasing demands on the complex systems of human adaptation created over the last couple of centuries by the urban, industrial world in the West and its imitators/developers all over the globe. On the most fundamental level, there are the effects of population and the demand for modern lifestyles on global climate. There are also the concomitant effects on the provision and distribution of resources, especially those required for the provision of energy and transportation, the design and creation of shelter and the production and distribution of food. The destruction of the old city of Shanghai (below), the relocation of its mainly poor residents, and the replacement of these dwellings with high-end developments are just one set examples of the ethical issues involved. 

Issues of security and safety (creating socially sustainable spaces) and the need for effective conflict resolution and justice systems (enforcement, courts, prisons) in an increasingly crowded living space also arise. Managing the health consequences of these numbers, from effective waste disposal (sewage treatment, landfill use, recycling) to treatment of communicable diseases (HIV, malaria, influenza, etc.), is more and more complicated. Questions regarding cultural identity, merging, and transformation along side issues of privacy and individual choices are intensified and distorted by increasing population and the waves of migration (both rural-urban and international) that this creates.

Obviously, quantity affects quality in innumerable ways. In order to preserve and expand the availability of a quality of life to which we have become accustomed, fundamental questions need to be answered. How can we mobilize individuals and communities to seek low-cost, sustainable solutions to these issues? Should we take a short-term view focused on mitigating impacts or a long-term view on transforming the causes? Can charitable organizations and the desire to do good be sufficient? Or will we need to focus on adaptation to inevitable change and the demands for survival? How involved must entire social and economic systems and their members be in order to address these problems? Are there cultural, political and educational options available and how effective will they be?

The Junior Fellows in Transdisciplinarity at Woodbury University will begin to address these problems and issues by studying two seminal works on global ethics: Simon Dresner’s The Principles of Sustanability and Peter Singer’s One World: The Ethics of Globalization, both written in 2002. Following this review, as well as immersion into current international coverage of these issues, the junior fellows will invite local guest speakers and journey to local sites of interest to begin to develop an analysis and propose a response that will have global and local dimensions. A public presentation of their work will come in December.