I had a great conversation with a colleague today about adapting one's teaching approaches to one's students. She observed that her students were increasingly self-confident and sure in the direction they wanted to take their education.
She could no longer approach each class as if it was a repetition of the same, because the students were different in each case, with different desires and goals, and she felt compelled to adapt to those desires and goals. And the compulsion was a positive thing, 
because it kept her sharp, agile, and challenged, preventing complacency and making each course a different , and often surprising, experience.
The reality is that at Woodbury students are incredibly diverse, and not just in the usual demographic ways. Most of our students are from lower socioeconomic status levels, have some transfer credits, come from a minority community, and are the first in their families to attend a four-year college. All of these factors mean that when one tries to control for prior educational experiences, certain prerequisites, or even a common basis of knowledge and/or skill among one's students in a particular course, one is constantly frustrated by the inability of the system to place in front of you a consistent kind of student so that you can teach the kind of course you've set yourself out to teach.
You find yourself adapting, adjusting, tap dancing, rearranging and reconsidering. It is exhausting, unpredictable, challenging, but also often exhilarating. For some it's a trial; for other it can even be too much of a good thing. One can respond by trying to control more fervently the inputs, rigorously enforce prerequisites, limit the acceptability of transfer credit, and constrain the curriculum so that the vast majority of students in a course are guaranteed to have had a similar prior educational experiences of similar high quality. Or one can take them as they come, imperfect, unevenly prepared, without the skills and knowledge you wish they had brought to the party with them, but also interested, passionate, curious, and seeking guidance and learning if only given the chance. One can try to control one's environment, or respond and adapt to what one is given.
I think the transdisciplinary approach is the latter one, the one that takes students as they come into one's course, or into one's university, and tries to respond by providing the knowledge and skills they need now, tapping into the wider resources of the university, the assistance of one's colleagues, and working with each class as if it's the unique collection of individuals that it is. It's probably easier to control the inputs on an institutional basis, to assure some commonality and minimal standards, but it is also less rewarding, less challenging, and certainly less applicable to the kind of students we have at Woodbury. And in the end, it is probably easier to change who we are and how we approach each class, each student, than to try to change the system to make our increasingly diverse students conform to us. If we let them lead with us in crafting their own educations, they will take us to amazing places.
Important questions of pedagogy and something that Dewey, I believe, deals with elegantly and thoroughly in Experience and Education -- the educative experiences REQUIRING that teachers create the conditions in which students' prior knowledge and experiences interact with new experiences in meaningful contexts -- WHICH thus requires teacher to know something about the students' knowledge(s), beyond a test score, understanding the education is a much broader - intellectual, emotional, spiritual, cultural - achievement. As well, understanding that there are such experiences which are mis- and non- educative...
Your post also brings to mind an article I read recently re: the historical occurrences (recurrences) of mismatch between schools and students who were labeled failures (in various ways) based on attitudes and institutional conditions of the time. The various explanations make your questions more salient given how student failure is explained in the current educational environment characterized by standardization, conflicting attitudes about who should be "college material," and the recently published recommendations for overhauling the K-12 system.
For article: Deschenes, S., et al. (2001). Mismatch: Historical Perspectives on Schools and Students Who Don't Fit Them. Teachers College Record, v. 103,n. 4, pp. 525-547
For Executive Summary of Tough Choices or Tough Times (report on k-12):
http://www.skillscommission.org/executive.htm
Posted by: Samantha Bartholomew | December 16, 2006 at 06:33 PM