I have been dwelling for some time with ideas for rethinking the professional writing major in response to phenomena that aren’t going away, such as the inadequacy of the university for life-long learning and the unsustainable way that public education is funded.
Life-long learning and development is a must, and somebody provides and will continue to provide learning opportunities over time. This is currently not the traditional university. Think here of the technical communicator who must now produce videos to support user learning. If that person received any school-based education for her job as a technical communicator, it almost certainly didn’t help her learn to write with video—and probably still doesn’t. At best—and this would be wonderful—it helped her learn how to learn.
Educational institutions are too rigid to accommodate this simple situation. We have no intellectual relationship with people over time, people who might purchase from us the education they need in their lives (and their numbers are large). We have no long tail (and our long tail would look different than Amazon’s anyway).
Furthermore, our current models of “delivering” undergraduate education are simply not sustainable. Most university education models are based on valuable content that is transferred to students. But having “content” as a value proposition is declining rapidly. Universities no longer control the distribution channel. Open educational resources, for instance, place the value of content itself at close to zero, and new ways to deliver content will continue to put tremendous pressure on universities. Educational programs predicated exclusively on owning and distributing content by itself are not sustainable. This model is too expensive, too slow, and increasingly irrelevant.
So what would it look like to restructure a major, for instance, as a learning community, as a community of practice? What—or where—is the value of a highly interactive learning program like our writing programs, majors, and graduate programs?
I would begin by restructuring the professional writing major around a set of competencies. Really challenging stuff. The notion of competencies is interesting to me as a way of anchoring a new approach to the major. In this new approach, the major would be characterized in terms of asking students to have X number of experiences, and each experience would be tagged to Y number of competencies. A major, therefore, is characterized in terms of demonstrating X competencies by way of Y number of experiences as a participant in a community of practice/learning. The competencies are stable—and least for a time (see below)—but the experiences are highly variable. A community of practice would need to revisit competencies regularly and seriously. Every 18 months. And it would need to offer a suite of experiences that would appeal to life-long learners.
There are a number of problems with this simple idea, of course. Here are two. One is a problem that I would characterize as a problem of theory. The approach I am outlining values change, but it should also value permanence and reflection. In fact, I think its power is in identifying habits of mind that translate and transfer, habits that enable learning, problem solving, theorizing. So theory, perhaps ironically, will likely grow in importance given a competency and experience-based educational program. The tough task will be identifying that which is more or less “permanent” and that which is more or less “dynamic.” What theories really matter and how do we require learners to demonstrate competency in something like “theorizing?”
Problem number two: Who has the faculty to pull this off? The administrative support?
Some additional implications that I think are exciting:
1. It will not have escaped anyone’s notice (who is still reading) that the boundaries between undergraduate, graduate, and life-long education blur, and this is a really good thing for everyone. This will present a number of challenges to institutional processes and category systems. We should welcome this.
2. The teaching and learning community that must be created and continually recreated—an activity that is productive in its own right and hopefully exciting—must of necessity become a research community. The model requires persistent research of our own work. So the educational program is also a research program.
3. This model requires a “skunk works” within it, which really should make everyone’s nerve ends tingle: a fluid group of people, students and professors working quickly on risky, innovative ideas that support the larger learning and research community. Skunk works initiatives have very short life spans. Groups should form and reform quickly. Failure should be celebrated. Success implemented.
4. Knowing stuff still matters a great deal. Universities have a brand that is still quite valuable, and the ability of a learning and research community to produce knowledge and make it actionable through a learning program is a big deal.