Keeping the Community in Community College.
Following the completion of my master’s degree in the summer of 2008, I came to a fork in the road of my educational journey. Although it had long been my intention to continue my studies at the doctoral level and become a university professor, burdensome years of graduate school already behind me and a burgeoning economic crisis looming large ahead caused me to reconsider my plans and opt instead for more modest and immediate employment.
It was thus as a fallback position that I began my teaching tenure at the local community college in the fall of 2009. But despite my initial intention to treat this position as mere placeholder until personal stamina and fiscal stability returned, the lure of this learning community — with its small class sizes, diverse student populations, collegial comradery, and myriad opportunities for personal and professional engagement — quickly caused me to reevaluate my erstwhile ambitions and begin to consider the community college an ideal forever home.
Ten years and a PhD later, my feelings have not changed. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the institution itself. In the time since my tenure began, technology has increasingly encroached on the traditional classroom setting, to such an extent that interactive television (ITV), hybridized, and online courses are now offered with far more frequency, enthusiasm, and institutional support than their brick and mortar counterparts.
And while I understand and even applaud efforts to incorporate instructional technology into the traditional classroom, which can both broaden and experientially enhance it, I worry that current plans to transition to more individualistic and asynchronous learning environments (particularly within the humanities and social sciences disciplines to which I belong) will ultimately result in the opposite of what so many well-meaning administrators intend.
As Aesop once warned of fire and water, I believe the same holds true for informational technologies: they make wonderful servants, but poor masters. Should this trend toward technological dependence continue, rather than a democratization of knowledge (which is an admittedly admirable aspiration), I fear instead a dilution of experience and a deluge of pseudo self-realization amongst our student population to be the far more probable consequence(s).
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that technology has its place in the 21st century classroom. Smartboards and online learning management systems (such as Blackboard and Brightspace) have undoubtedly streamlined the educational process for both students and faculty, and I make regular use of both. Blissfully gone are the days of combating chalk dust, deforestation, and the always surprising scourge of the paper cut simply to conduct a class.
But technology’s successes in simplifying logistics must not be allowed to justify recent attempts to substitute it entirely for the time-honored traditions of discussion and debate that have for so long formed the bedrock of the classic liberal arts education.
Environment is important. As educator C.F. Thwing once said, “Culture is not so much a direct positive product as an atmosphere — an atmosphere going forth from one person, an atmosphere received by the other person…. Most of us who have been to college have forgotten all we ever knew that we learned in college; but the results in culture, in largeness of being, in purity of feeling, in nobility of character, still remain.”
The atmosphere of which Professor Thwing speaks is surprisingly ethereal and, in my experience, it simply cannot be sustained within “the cloud” of online (or otherwise isolating and/or insulating forms of) learning. It can only be distilled by the concrete experience of truly interactive, real-time engagement with one’s instructor and peers, with whom one undoubtedly shares any number of disagreements and disparate worldviews.
Unfortunately, the belief that this is being accomplished via online discussion boards and other asynchronous modes of communication is almost as commonplace as it is incorrect, to which those of us who have attempted to engage in such environments can readily attest.
In a traditional classroom discussion, one is required to confront the inherent blind spots and manifest myopias of one’s myriad perspectives as they are jarringly juxtaposed against those of one’s fellow learners. The end result of such intellectual sparring is quite often a sharpening of one’s wit, a tempering of one’s tone, and an increased empathy for one’s ideological opponent(s). The same simply cannot be said of traditional discussion’s technological doppelganger, with its disjointed debates, discombobulated dialectics, and minimalist expectations of either involvement or empathy.
At best, students are required (over a period of days) to painstakingly piece together the disembodied discussions of dozens into a salvageable Frankenstein monster of meaningful discourse, often with the same misguided intentions and pitiable results as the good doctor himself.
At worst (and far more frequently), they simply elect to read and respond only to the bare minimum of posts required by their instructors, which they often use to either insulate their own ideologies from critique (by choosing like-minded submissions) or to superficially (and thus meaninglessly) deride those of another without ever being required to grapple with the intellectual inconsistencies or implications of either.
My own college is currently contemplating transitioning the majority (if not the entirety) of our philosophical course catalog to an online only curriculum. Similar discussions are underway in the history and humanities departments as well. While budgetary cuts and staffing concerns have shaped some of the conversation, the far more frequently alluded to explanation is the desire to keep pace with the larger and online universities that have already moved swiftly in this direction in the name of innovation and expansion.
As a member of all three disciplines, I am gravely concerned about the isolating, insulating, and ignorance-increasing impact such a transition will have (and arguably already has had) on the civic discourse, professional development, public decorum, and private dignity of the academy and its membership, not only on this and other campuses, but indeed throughout society itself. One need only look at the current and exceedingly polarized state of social and political affairs in this country to see the sad consequence that such confirmation bias not only permits but often entails.
Let us not continue down this path of unenlightened self-assurance and blatant self-aggrandizement in the name of expediency and inevitable, immitigable progress. Let us instead collectively meander our way back to the small campuses and classes of the community college, with its unique ability to humanize higher education and remind us what the spirit and substance of community is truly all about.
Dave Buckner, PhD, is an adjunct professor of history, humanities, & philosophy at Northeast State Community College.
