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had no ethical basis, in the case of the small college the moral tradition and ethical questions were seen to be outdated, abstracted from the world, and hence irrelevant.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.

Supporting Documentation

See Supporting Documentation for Standard Two