Standard 2

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Evergreen is unique in American Higher Education, It identifies itself in the latest strategic plan as “the nation’s leading public interdisciplinary liberal arts college.” Its commitment to interdisciplinarity, to student responsibility, to collaboration, and its vision of an inclusive public egalitarian liberal arts education must be understood as the product of its history

The college must be seen as a response to the tensions around the critical debate within higher education in the nineteen sixties and seventies. This debate involves two quite distinct but crucial critiques that contributed profoundly to the college pedagogical and assumptions and practices. First was a critique of the multiversity. This was a critique of the large-scale public multi-disciplinary institution that had blossomed in the post-war years. From the point of view of this critique, most forcefully embodied in the Berkeley ‘Free Speech” Movement, the multiversity existed primarily for the benefit of a corporate/governmental interests. Its function was to maintain a supply of useful technicians and professionals. This critique saw the public university as serving class interests, of not living up to the ideals of a democratic educational system that would empower citizens broadly. The second critique was a critique of the liberal arts tradition itself as manifested in the small private liberal arts colleges. This critique began with the stodginess and irrelevance of the canon and the unwillingness of the college to take on the issues of race, class, war, and revolution. At the center of this critique was the failure the liberal arts college to act on its own professed values as it distanced itself the world of action. In the face of the crisis of civil rights, the Viet Nam war, and questions of class privilege the colleges were stuck defending texts, traditions, and positions that did not question the status quo. In the critique of the multiversity the question of moral judgment had no ethical basis, in the case of the small college the moral tradition and ethical questions were seen to be outdated, abstracted from the world, and hence irrelevant.

The founders of Evergreen, for the most part men and women in their thirties and early forties, wanted a college that was above all relevant and engaging. They wanted a public college that could provide the best elements of the liberal arts college – a college that could acknowledge and deal with ethical issues, one which saw the world as intellectually comprehensible and one which offered student opportunities to learn and act for the good of the community, not simply for individual or class aggrandizement. In short they were interested in public education as a public good. They wanted an education that would support action, engagement, and collaboration with diverse others. They wanted education within a meaningful community context. They wanted an education that was ethically informed. Simultaneously they wanted each student to take control of their own education, to make real value centered coherent choices about what they learned, how they learned, and what they did with the education they received. At the heart of this was a passionate debate about concern for authentic learning. All of the above characterizations of the college were contested, but in the crafting of the structure, the template the college has been tinkering with and transforming ever since, these were central values.

As was argued in the opening pages of this self-study the President and the founding faculty wanted to create a public college devoted to teaching and learning in a interdisciplinary, collaborative framework within which students must exercise autonomy and judgment. Charles McCann’s four nos: No academic departments, no faculty ranks, no academic requirements, and no grades were seen as a vehicle to liberate faculty and students. The lack of departments and ranks allowed faculty to work and collaborate across disciplinary boundaries and across differences in age and experience. The lack of requirements and grades freed students to work together to share and collectively create their learning. Collaboration, not competition, was seen as the fundamental vehicle for organizing teaching and learning. While within the college the breadth of the challenge to the conventions of higher education was reasonably well understood, the external world tended to know the college in its first decades on the basis of the above negatives.

The Five Foci of an Evergreen Education

By the mid 1980’s the need to rearticulate the challenge to frame the college around it’s positive vision for all the world (especially potential students and legislators) to see became an imperative. And in the work leading to the college’s first strategic plan and in the 1988 Self Study for Accreditation the five foci of an Evergreen Education were first enunciated. They have served the college well as a central embodiment of it’s mission over the years. The following section lays out the five foci and articulates the ways in which the foci implicate each other and lead toward the educational practices of the college.

The Five Foci of an Evergreen education, interdisciplinary study, personal engagement in learning, linking theory with practice, collaborative/cooperative work, and teaching across significant differences have played a central role in creating both a curriculum and a rationale for a curriculum. They inform both the programs and our articulation of them at all levels of the institution. These foci capture much, but not all of what we do at Evergreen. Many of our actual activities can be understood as contributing to more than one foci.

Interdisciplinary Education

Interdisciplinary study is a fundamental at Evergreen. At the heart of such study is the intellectual conviction that nothing can be fully know in isolation and that for us to know complexly demands that we see from diverse perspectives and ask our own questions of the phenomena we study. Interdisciplinarity is seen as providing students with at least three crucial intellectual understandings that help them recognize their perspectives and generate their questions. First, different disciplines can indeed hold different and valid understandings of the “truth” about some particular phenomena. Thus interdisciplinarity helps force students beyond a simple view of truth or falsehood and forces them to complicate and contextualize their view of truth. Second, Interdisciplinarity illustrates the ways in which different disciplines illuminate differing aspects of reality thus complicating student’s views of what a phenomena actually is. Finally an interdisciplinary understanding of the real world more accurately reflects the world as they do and will encounter it.

There is little orthodoxy about which church of interdisciplinarity we attend at Evergreen. It is important to note that all that is interdisciplinary is not team teaching and vice versa. Individual faculty members can expose students to more than one discipline and single program with two faculty members with similar back grounds may or may not be interdisciplinary. Acolytes of multi-disciplinarity, thematic study, project based experience and more teach at the college, yet nearly all agree that interdisciplinary work provides the essential pattern that allows for the emergence of connections, the creation of new kinds of understandings, and ultimately the possibility for students to find their own way/work into the curriculum.

Personal Engagement

Personal Engagement has multiple dimensions at Evergreen. At the heart of it is a desire that students develop a capacity to know, speak and act on the basis of their own self-conscious beliefs, understandings, and commitments. Thus critically the idea of one’s own work that emerges and develops throughout a student’s participation in the curriculum over time is central to their sense of engagement. The emphasis on participation, on reasoned evaluation and involvement in their own, their colleagues, and their faculty’s work strengthen this engagement. Such engagement is reflected in the college’s emphasis on full time work for 16 quarter hours per quarter. The lack of graduation requirements further pushes students to make reasoned choices about their work and presumably impels them toward creating a body of work that reflects growing intellectual sophistication. Such work could in the end be something quite conventional, a doctor, a wildlife biologist, a philosopher or it could be rather unconventional, a Kayak maker, an independent film-maker, or a specialty vegetable farmer. What would distinguish this work would be the way the work implicates the person as whole.

Finally, work in programs, especially programs that extend across several quarters, is engagement in a full time learning community. Here the relations are to the material, but also to the persons with whom they work. This conflation of persons and materials can lead to an intensification of engagement that creates powerful shared intellectual, social, personal, and aesthetic excitement. Students discover that personal engagement and engagement in a community are often complementary realities. This complex reality in which students are both pursuing their own goals and doing this through shared endeavor and cooperation is the center of the experience of a learning community and critical to most student’s experience of Evergreen.

Linking Theory and Practice

Linking theory with practice arises naturally from the engagement of students to their work in a social context and from the experience of interdisciplinarity. Both suggest that knowledge exists not simply for its own sake, as an isolated artifact, but as a part of some larger intellectual, cultural, or political whole. The necessity of linking theory with practice for the college arises out of a central concern for educational relevance and the college’s fundamental commitment to providing an education that will promote effective citizenship. Engaging in a conversation between theory and the experience of practice strengthens both and allows students to place their growing sense of personal work and commitment into a realistic and purposeful context. Theory, central concepts, or ideas then are constantly tested in three major ways in student’s experience at the college First and most significantly students are constantly asked to take their experience in the classroom into the world, in hands-on projects, internships, performances, presentations, case studies, and a wide variety of research work. Learning about a phenomenon is frequently tested against the experience of it. Ideally an Evergreen student should be learning and being challenged in both worlds. Beyond this theory and ideas are tested against the disciplinary and interdisciplinary phenomena it is purported to explain. Does the theory in fact illuminate the phenomena? If so how and to what extent? Finally, theories and ideas are tested against the context of culture and society within which they arise. How do theory and ideas inform cultural practices? How are theories and ideas explained by power relations, religious interpretation or some larger cultural/social reality? Thus the linkage of theory and practice is fundamental to the development of judgment, to the awareness of the cultural and political dimensions of knowledge, and the creation of active citizens who are capable of entering into dialogue with the world in which they live.

Collaborative/Cooperative Work

Collaborative/cooperative work is a cornerstone of the educational experience at Evergreen. The capacity for sharing and creating work within a cooperative context of respect for individuals and their diversity of perspectives, abilities, and experiences, is a central motif of nearly all Evergreen studies. In an array of practices such as seminars, group projects, narrative evaluations rather than grades, peer review of student work in all fields, the frequent inclusion of students from widely diverse and levels of back-ground and experience within programs, the fundamental assumption is that students can benefit from working with each other to create their education.

The fundamental pedagogic assumption is that collaboration is in the long run more conducive to the creation and acquisition of complex understandings and useful knowledge than is competition. By creating collaborative learning communities the college seeks to create both a context within which quite diverse ideas and concepts can be examined, but also a context that allows students to bring within the classroom some of that array of conversation and learning that in most schools occurs informally. This inclusiveness of experiences and ideas both from other portions of the program and from student lives creates the possibility that learning communities can capture and promote the experience of real dialogue about ideas, texts, art and experience that make education engaging and exciting. Finally, the college encourages cooperation because we believe despite the rhetoric of competition in this society most of the work that is accomplished is a product of cooperative engaged choices.

Teaching and Learning Across Significant Differences

Teaching Across Significant Differences reflects the fundamental recognition that we do not bring to our experience of education the same array of qualities and life experiences. These differences are both the source of our capacity to learn from each other and, potentially, a barrier to that learning. These differences are both socially defined and personally experienced. They include such obvious and important categories as race, ethnicity, religion, class and gender which underlie so much of American experience, but they also include less obvious and well defined and understood experiences as age, disability, first generation college experience, rural or urban up-bringing, or personal qualities such as sexuality, intelligence, shyness, mental illness and the like. Differences bring within the context of the college both a potential for great learning and a possibility of great damage. They call upon us to develop qualities of respect, attentive listening, and sensitive and thoughtful speaking. They are at the heart of our capacity to communicate and participate responsibly in a diverse community. Central to Evergreen’s experience of these differences is the practice of narrative evaluation and the desire to promote collaboration. While these practices have their own pitfalls, they suggest that a single standard and an assumed uniformity of experience is not the case and that respectful recognition and awareness of difference is an essential element in working with students to help them define and achieve the overall goals of an Evergreen education.

The Six Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate

In the 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 School years at the urging of the commission the college undertook a review of it’s understanding of General Education. During two years of debate, discussion, and struggle, the college produced an important document that attempted to articulate the goals of an Evergreen education from the point of view of the student. This document – The Six Goals of An Evergreen Education - has proved useful in articulating for advisers, students, and prospective students some of the elements that describe and effective pathway through Evergreen. The goals are understood to be just that – goals- not subject matter requirements nor mandatory skills. Thus students may, and often do, undertake meeting these goals, the requirement in fact falls on faculty to to make sure that as often as it makes sense the opportunities to meet the goals are present in the curriculum. As will be more explicitly argued below the goals main complex and important ways onto the five foci and can be seen as a rearticulation of the goals in terms of potential outcomes for students.

The Six Goals of an Evergreen Education are

• to articulate and assume responsibility for your own work,
• to participate collaboratively and responsibly in our diverse society,

• to communicate creatively and effectively,

• to demonstrate integrative, independent, critical thinking,

• to apply qualitative, quantitative and creative modes of inquiry appropriately to practical and theoretical problems across disciplines,
• and, as a culmination of your education, to demonstrate depth, breadth, and synthesis of learning and the ability to reflect on personal and social significance of learning.

The work students are capable of is seen as complex, linking and engaging analysis from different disciplinary perspectives, responsible in seeing a cultural/social context, communicable, and significant both to the individual and his/her society. Such an education then neither replicates the faculty, nor simply replicates the disciplines, traditions, professions, and skills that they profess. Instead, it encourages each student to ask his or her own questions, to test their own hypothesizes, and to make new mistakes. This education is at once potentially conservative and radical. Conservative in that one’s work is tested against the society and academic disciplines broadly, radical in that it is always implicitly a challenge to our conventions and knowledge. At the heart of Evergreen’s understanding of education is a belief that whatever that education is in terms of substance, it should be self consciously and reflectively chosen by the student. Central to the goals of the college is the capacity of each student to see and articulate their own work in the context of their engagement with others. Skills and capacities are seen not as simply autonomous and instrumental, but as embedded in the context of a person’s education as a whole and more broadly embedded in the social order through the participation in and reflection on that order by students.

The five foci and the six expectations are different articulations of very similar understandings about the central nature of Evergreen. The foci speak primarily to the content and nature of the curriculum offered. They articulate the emphasis on interdisciplinarity, cooperation, work across difference, the constant interplay of theory and practice, and student engagement. The six expectations are an expression of the qualities a curriculum organized around these ideas should be manifest in its graduates. Here is one version of the relationship of the foci and expectations.

Personal Engagement – Articulate and assume responsibility for your own work. Participate collaboratively and responsibly in our diverse society. Reflect on the personal and social significance of your learning.

Teaching and Learning Across Significant Difference – Participate collaboratively and effectively in our diverse society. Communicate clearly and effectively.

Collaboration - Participate collaboratively and effectively in our diverse society. Communicate clearly and effectively. Articulate and assume responsibility for your own work.

Linking Theory and Practice - Apply qualitative, quantitative, and creative modes of inquiry appropriately to practical and theoretical problems across disciplines. Demonstrate integrative, independent, critical thinking. Demonstrate depth, breadth, and synthesis of learning and the ability to reflect on the personal and social significance of that learning.

Interdisciplinary – Communicate creatively and effectively. Demonstrate integrative, independent and critical thinking. Apply qualitative, quantitative, and creative modes of inquiry appropriately to practical and theoretical problems across disciplines.

Liberal Arts as Reflexive Thinking

One way of expressing some critical aspects of Evergreen as an interdisciplinary Liberal Arts institution centers on the concept of reflexive thinking. This way of understanding the central work of the liberal arts – to promote reflexive thinking- helps us see not simply the contingent, but necessary ties among the five foci. It has the advantage of bringing to the fore the public nature of learning the complex mix of public and private knowing, and the centrality of freedom and responsibility that is contained in acts of judgment. By simply asking how can I know this? How does this affect me? Where did I come from? Students are pushed into a world that entails the holistic view of the world implicit in the work of a Public Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts college.

Reflexive thinking is not simply the act of the learner reflecting on what he or she has learned. Reflexivity is the capacity for that a learner has to think about the situation and conditions that underlie her own personal and collective experience of thinking. It implies that the learner needs to be aware of how she has learned and what she has become through the process of learning. This form of thinking makes the learner a problem for her self. Not only does she need to know the ostensible subject of the learning, but that subject matter is embedded in whole array of questions that ask questions about her own motives, embeddedness in society, desires and development. But beyond that reflexivity brings the learner to ask questions about how the ostensible subject of her learning has come into being in a society. How an approach to knowing (a discipline) and she as she becomes associated with the discipline become embedded in a complex historical and social web of connections that underlie that discipline. Beyond that the learner comes to see herself in the present as interacting with others through the learning she has entered in to. This form of thinking that makes problematic our understanding of self and society makes interdisciplinarity a necessary condition of clearly understanding ones position. It arises as a learner comes to see each discipline as a partial account of knowing himself in relation to the world and knowing. We are problems for ourselves that must be seen as arising from multiple points of view.

As learners come to understand themselves, both singular and plural, and learning in this complex way, they start to exercise judgment. The learner starts to exercise freedom to make judgments about what he has learned about himself, the material, social conditions that allow this way of knowing to exist. In other words the learner starts to exercise freedom and responsibility about the knowledge he has about the society and himself. By making these judgments and exercising this freedom the learner creates new meanings. These meanings typically do not take the given assumptions that lie behind the disciplines as settled truths; they inherently challenge established understandings. This process of creating new meanings, of creating new knowledge necessarily engages the learner with others in a public process of sharing understandings. Participating in this world of reflexivity pushes the individual learner to recognize difference and diversity of views and positions. In particular it demands that the learner engage not simply in reflection but in representational thinking, thinking through the eyes of others. This extraordinarily difficult and never completely successful mode of thinking, forces a learner to take seriously the understandings and ways of perceiving and knowing that exist in the world. This process of thinking though the eyes of others demands that the learner and indeed the community he/she is a part of must learn to think historically. This means that we see how the structure of ideas that define our views of others has come into being and is changed over time. It also implies that we see how the social institutions that have grown up historically to define the place of others and ourselves in a society. Thus reflective knowing is ultimately necessarily both very personal and political.

Supporting Documentation

See Supporting Documentation for Standard Two