Better than high impact
January 24, 2019 |
What our world needs now is… more high-impact practices? To support “persistence” and “retention”?Whether you’ve been reading tweets or listening to the radio, perhaps you—like me—have been thinking that our polarized society could benefit from what our Xavier can offer.
That certainly includes a critical approach to interpreting social media, as our own Leslie Rasmussen reminds us.
How else can our liberal arts foundation prepare our students for meaningful, difference-making lives in this society? That’s where the AAC&U’s eleven “high-impact practices” (PDF) come in; the list includes First-Year Seminars and Writing-Intensive Courses as well as Undergraduate Research and Diversity/Global Learning.
I find the evidence for the effectiveness of high-impact practices compelling.
I find the rhetoric of high-impact practices uninspiring. Only a pedagogical technocrat could love the language of HIPs.
As a Jesuit Catholic university, we can do better. What about promoting, for instance, what one of the past week’s more thoughtful tweets suggested—namely the “culture of encounter” championed by the current pope, himself a member of the Society of Jesus?
What would that entail? Just look around. Seek challenging, thought-provoking ideas and experiences, even as you design the same for our students. Examples already abound.
Try Friday’s Cohen art gallery opening of a pair of exhibits about race (including Greg Rust's photography, as above) and the related E/RS conversation on February 18 with the founders of Mirror of Race.
A culture of encounter: a worthy pursuit, I’d say, for our Jesuit Catholic university.
