Purposeful Faculty Development
A Q&A with W. Gardner Campbell
Here, Gardner Campbell, a national and international leader in the field of education transformation, champion of connected learning, and an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, tells CT that faculty development programs, even when they focus on operational, procedural, or technical details, can and should reflect higher education's fundamental values and principles, provide time and space for insight, and encourage deep thinking about higher purposes.
"It is rare that faculty have the opportunity or encouragement to consider larger questions about the nature and purpose of the work they do." — Gardner Campbell
Mary Grush: Should faculty development programs go beyond technical training in specific operational policies and procedures, also to consider the underlying fundamental values of higher education?
Gardner Campbell: Operational policies and procedures are always very important concerns for the institution, but they are not supposed to exist for their own sake — they are the means toward an end. We should ask: What are the fundamental values and principles that should inform the way we think about our policies, procedures, and the new IT strategies we are buying and deploying?
Higher education institutions are very complex organizations, and it's easy to load up your plate with operational details. But in faculty development programs, we don't want to end up with a situation where we are not deeply reflective about what we want to accomplish with what we are doing.
Colleges and universities typically have very idealistic mission statements. They may include goals like preparing students for a lifetime of fulfilling work, learning, and civic participation. They may delineate the institution's role in expanding the frontiers of human knowledge. Within faculty development efforts, we need to be able to think about the values and principles that we put in these outward facing documents and to consider whether what we are doing operationally actually aligns with them.
What are the fundamental values and principles that should inform the way we think about our policies, procedures, and the new IT strategies we are buying and deploying?
Faculty are by nature drawn to thinking about big ideas. Faculty development programs can use this to jumpstart deep thinking about our roles and the higher purposes in everything we do.
Grush: You've spoken, in keynotes and other forums, about insight as a higher purpose in teaching and learning. What is insight in this context and why should it be considered in faculty development programs?
Campbell: At its core, insight is about making connections: between concepts, between facts, between actions, and so on. Neuroscientists who study insight tell us that the moment of insight can be detected scientifically, as a burst of energy in the brain that results from that moment of connection. Now of course insights must be considered and discussed. Connections are not always strong, or persuasive, or helpful, or even true. But that fundamental act of connecting, and the strong surge of energy that results, is essential to learning. It's the "a ha!" moment of understanding, which Jerome Bruner defines as "going beyond the information given."
I strongly believe that education fails when it does not provide space and opportunity for these acts of connecting — these insights — to occur. In The Relevance of Education, Bruner writes about a pattern game he used to help students understand parts of speech. The game requires that students discover the pattern for themselves, which means it also requires that teachers wait for students to discover the pattern for themselves. Otherwise, Bruner writes, the students "will become obedient and non-comprehending". That space of waiting and the art of encouraging students to look closely and consider what they are seeing work together to foster insight instead of mere obedience.