Abstract
Adults are typically required to make values-based decisions multiple times each day. Why, then, should a discussion of values not be explicit across the college curriculum and intentionally integrated into the cocurriculum? The authors describe a place where the work of values education is widely shared.
JUDGMENTS ABOUT VALUES ARE AN IMPORTANT PART of most of our personal, professional, and civic lives. What should we do when a good friend does something bad or even illegal? What is the appropriate balance between work and play and between career and family? Where do we stand on legislation guaranteeing workers a living wage? How do we respond when the CEO encourages us to produce a financial report that makes the firm look more profitable than it is? Figuring out what to do in these kinds of situations in a thoughtful, enlightened manner is critical to individual happiness and the well-being of our society.
We in the academy hope that a college education will produce graduates who can make responsible and considered judgments about such important matters. Our traditions and mission statements are consistent with this noble goal. Moreover, as Arthur Chickering and Linda Reisser point out in Education and Identity, our students come to us at a point in their development when most are ready to think about values and ethical issues in more nuanced ways. And according to Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini in How College Affects Students, most are open to reconsidering their values, and in fact, many students’ values change significantly during their college years through their reflection on the new experiences they encounter.
Although students come to college ready and able to think about values critically and reflectively, too often institutions fail to take full advantage of this opportunity to educate thoughtful citizens. John Merrow, in his New York Times article “Survival of the Fittest,” maintains that at large public universities, the isolation, anonymity, and low expectations that many students experience are at odds with the kind of challenging, holistic approach to education that nurtures critical thinking, reflection, integration, and meaning making. Moreover, Ann Colby and her coauthors in Educating Citizens and Campus Compact's declaration on civic responsibility point out that the narrow vocationalism that all too often characterizes the undergraduate experience fails to encourage students to ask questions about purpose and meaning, prepare them to grapple with ethical issues, or foster civic engagement. (In her recent About Campus article “The Interdependency of Vocational and Liberal Aims in Higher Education,” Kathleen Knight Abowitz does make a compelling argument for the integration of vocationalism and liberal education.) In addition, the John Templeton Foundation's report on colleges that encourage character development states that recent ethical scandals across the nonprofit and for-profit sectors have prompted calls to change undergraduate education in ways that promote greater reflection and civic engagement and educate ethical leaders.
Bowling Green State University (BGSU) has embarked on an ambitious effort to make the study of values the hallmark of its undergraduate education. Through the program known as the Bowling Green Experience (BGeXperience or BGeX), BGSU seeks to make critical thinking about values central to its curriculum and cocurriculum, help first-year students forge strong relationships with one another and with faculty, promote student success and intellectual engagement, and produce students who are prepared to make thoughtful judgments about difficult issues they will face at the university and beyond—as professionals, parents, and citizens. This focus on critical consideration of values also provides rich opportunities to help students understand the relationships between academic subjects they study and important public issues, fostering closer connections between their curricular and cocurricular experiences and encouraging greater civic engagement.
Shortly after his appointment in 1995, President Sidney Ribeau sought to reinvigorate undergraduate education at BGSU. In doing so, he insisted—to the surprise of many on campus—that values were central to higher education. In 1996, he provided the impetus for adoption of a set of university core values: respect for one another, cooperation, intellectual and spiritual growth, creative imaginings, and pride in a job well done. Then, in April 2000, Ribeau established the Committee on Vision and Values and charged that committee with developing proposals designed to “integrate values education, critical thinking, character development, and civic responsibility throughout the entire cur-ricular and co-curricular experience.”This charge grew out of the president's vision of creating a learning community “that is focused on student learning, connects students and faculty members, recognizes the centrality of values to higher education, integrates students’ cur-ricular and co-curricular experiences, and prepares graduates who are principled citizens.” Ribeau explained, “Our ultimate goal is to produce distinctive graduates who are recognized not only as skilled professionals but reflective, ethically aware individuals who will become leaders in their communities.”
The Committee on Vision and Values met regularly for about a year. Comprising faculty, academic administrators, student affairs educators, and students, the committee debated the nature of its task, the nature and role of values in higher education, and how to best accomplish their charge. The committee focused on critical thinking about values and took great care to distinguish between telling students what they are to value and providing students with the tools needed to reach well-reasoned values-based decisions. The committee offered wide-ranging recommendations under the umbrella of what it labeled “The Bowling Green Experience”:“an integrated program of curricular initiatives, co-curricular activities, and common experiences for freshmen and advanced undergraduates that revolves around values exploration and enactment and is designed to prepare principled graduates who are reflective citizens of a democratic society.”
Most of us are all too familiar with committee reports accepted and filed away, never to be seen again. This is absolutely not the case with the report of the Committee on Vision and Values. Despite the sweeping nature of its recommendations and the substantial challenges involved in their implementation, some of which will be discussed later in this article, almost all of the committee's recommendations are alive and well. Some have already been implemented; others are in the process of being implemented; and some are still on the drawing board. None have been shelved.
The Bgexperience Program
BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY is a predominantly undergraduate, residential campus. Approximately 7,200 of the 16,000 or so undergraduates live on campus. The vast majority of its commuting students live in apartments near the cam-pus. To support this residential environment, the university has an experienced staff of student affairs educators supported by many highly capable interns enrolled in the institution's well-respected college student personnel master's degree program or higher education administration doctoral program.
From its inception, BGeXperience has been viewed as a coordinated effort involving both academic efforts and student life. Student affairs was generously represented on the committee that conceptualized the program, and staff members have served on every program-related committee that has been established since then. The initial focus of the program has been on first-year students, all of whom must enroll in one BGeX class. These are small discipline-based classes of approximately twenty-five students that satisfy BGPer-spectives (general education) requirements. They are taught by full-time faculty with the assistance of an upper-division peer facilitator chosen by the instructor.
The course instructor and peer facilitator begin the program by offering an intensive two-and-a-half-day introduction that takes place right before the start of classes. During the BGeX introduction, students participate in discussions that introduce them to college life and to language and concepts that are useful in exploring val-ues. They begin using this language to explore the role that values play in general decision making, in issues that arise in the common reading they were expected to complete over the summer, and in issues relating to the subject matter of the BGeX course they will be taking together.
The faculty and peer facilitators are compensated for participating in the program. In addition, faculty who are teaching in the program for the first time must participate in a weeklong series of half-day workshops focusing on the teaching of values. Peer facilitators also have the option of receiving academic credit for their participation. The program was launched in 2002 as a small pilot with 125 students in five pre-existing general education courses that had been redesigned to accomplish BGeX learning outcomes. Since then, it has grown exponentially; in fall 2005, all 3,600 first-year students participated. There were 148 BGeX courses and introduction groups, offered in more than twenty-five different disciplines and taught by 146 faculty who were assisted by an equal number of peer facilitators.
Any discussion of such a far-reaching effort is necessarily selective and will therefore omit many elements. We focus this discussion on two features of the program that we believe will be of most interest to the About Campus audience: our model of teaching values across the disciplines and our approach to the assessment of learning outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of future directions the program may take. Information about other aspects of the program can be found at the Bowling Green Experience Program Web site, which can be accessed from the university's home page (http://www.bgsu.edu).
Teaching Values across the Curriculum
THE BGeXPERIENCE involves faculty from disciplines across the university, who incorporate discussions of values into introductory general education courses in the disciplines. For example, an introductory course in biology, in addition to covering standard disciplinary content, might also involve consideration of such issues as the ethics of cloning, the morality of using animals in laboratory experiments, and the values-related issues raised by global warming. It might even go further and discuss the values implicit in the scientific method. An introductory course in art, in addition to its standard content, which would normally include issues of aesthetic value, could expand the discussion to include the extent to which pornography should be controlled and whether the government should support the arts. The issues raised would vary widely across courses, both from discipline to discipline and from instructor to instructor within the same discipline.
There are alternative approaches to incorporating critical thinking about values into the curriculum. One would be to require all first-year students to take an introduction to ethics or a moral problems course in the philosophy department. This approach, although perhaps the easiest to envision, was rejected as too resource-heavy for BGSU. The philosophy department would have needed to be expanded in a dramatically disproportionate fashion. However, it should be noted that other institutions, including Notre Dame, Ran-dolph-Macon College, and the University of Pittsburg, have successfully used the first-year ethics requirement.
A second approach would be to create a new course, perhaps titled “Critical Thinking About Values,” that would be taught by interested faculty regardless of their departmental affiliation. This approach is also easy to envision, given ready access to an expanding literature base on critical thinking. It is more feasible than the first alternative in terms of resources because it would not involve the expansion of one department. It does, however, have several drawbacks. It requires faculty to learn a new literature and to teach a subject (critical thinking) that may be new to them. It also requires adjusting general education requirements to make room for another course. Most important, it separates the study of values from the disciplinary knowledge bases that students are working to learn.
In contrast, the teaching-values-across-the-disci-plines approach requires faculty to incorporate discussions of values into the introductory courses they normally teach. It helps students see that even the most empirical disciplines both make assumptions of value and give rise to questions of value. For example, implicit in the academic enterprise is the assumption that knowledge is a good thing. Yet it is easy to imagine instances in which that assumption could be questioned. Not everyone would agree, for example, that just because one has the capacity to learn how to make the atomic bomb, one should.
At the same time, the teaching-values-across-the-disciplines approach does give rise to concerns. Philosophers may be concerned that those from other disciplines who teach in the program do not have a rich enough understanding of the nature of values. For example, instructors may take a values clarification approach in which the goal is for students to state what they value, without being pressed to justify or defend those values. Instructors may assume a naïve subjectivist approach to values (for example, “It is all a matter of personal opinion”) without being aware that there are various forms of subjectivism as well as objectivist alter-natives. They may have little awareness of the importance of such key distinctions as intrinsic and instrumental value or consequentialist and deontologi-cal approaches to morality.
There are several points that can be made in response to these concerns. For one, values issues can be productively discussed without the depth that one would discuss them in a philosophy course. Indeed, people do this all the time, and some faculty members already do this in their introductory courses. Consider the analogy to writing-across-the-curriculum programs. Greater rigor in writing may be expected in English classes than in other classes, but it does not follow that students should only be expected to write in their English classes. By the same token, one could claim that although a greater depth and rigor in the discussion of values may be expected in a philosophy course, it does not follow that this is the only place in which values can be productively discussed. Indeed, after being exposed to the discussion of values in a discipline-based course, students who have come to see the importance of a more rigorous understanding of values may enroll in a course or courses that meet this need.
A program in which values are taught across the curriculum suggests to students that values and the need to make value judgments arise everywhere. Thus, a program that integrates the examination of values into the academic curriculum but ignores the role they play in cocurricular activities would be far less effective than one that integrates values education into both. For this reason, the BGeX program involves teaching and learning about values in the cocurriculum as well. Student affairs educators facilitate values discussions and workshops primarily for first-semester students, all of whom are also enrolled in a BGeX class. More than a hundred of these events are offered each year. Topics range from facilitating diversity dialogues to the value of voting in elections to the values involved in a range of personal and career-related choices. For example, one workshop entitled “Attitude Is Everything: The Importance of a Positive Attitude Toward Education” is described to prospective participants as follows:“Do you view college as going through the motions to get a degree or as an opportunity to give your mind an invigorating shower of knowledge? Are general education courses requirements to ‘get out of the way’ or opportunities to learn about a new subject? The approach you take can mean the difference between a successful college experience and a grim one.”Another workshop entitled “I Wanna Leave Ohio But I'm Scared—How to Find an Internship or Job Out of State” is described this way:“For those students who yearn to explore opportunities outside their traditional borders, this session will help them explore the value of security versus that of freedom of choice, equality of opportunity versus that of equality of condition, and comfort versus individual gain.”
Teaching values across the curriculum requires the adoption of a common vocabulary. If the term values were to be used differently across courses or workshops, the result would be confusion at best. A common values vocabulary is necessary for students who take one values course to communicate effectively with those who take another one. A common vocabulary is also needed to facilitate discussions of values in living units and in student volunteer and service-learning activities. Finally, a common vocabulary helps achieve the goal of extending BGeX beyond the first year, as we will explain later in this article.
Although use of the term value is common, giving a precise definition is not simple. There are different ways of understanding the term, and one definition is not accepted by all. The challenge for a program such as BGeX is to arrive at a definition that is flexible enough to facilitate discussions of values in various disciplinary settings yet has enough substance to capture the core idea behind the term value. Given this difficulty, it should not be surprising that the definition of value used in BGeX has evolved over time.
At the outset of the program, faculty were asked to use the following set of definitions:
Value: an abstraction referring to our sense of what is good or right.
Value conflict: a clash between values. This move from values to value conflicts is tremendously important. It undercuts the idea that some people have values, while others lack them. As long as moral discourse is seen in that dichotomous light, we can separate ourselves into the good and the bad, the noble and the evil, thereby precluding consideration of the basis for our conflicts and differences. Once we accept the idea that acting on a value places us in tension with certain other values, we have entered the intricate space where reflection about values becomes so challenging.
Value preference: a personal commitment to a particular value priority. Another way to say the same thing is that a value preference serves as a personal stance with respect to a value conflict. For instance, one might want to say in an economics class, “In this context I would prefer to rely on efficiency instead of social justice to justify my beliefs or behavior.”
These definitions gave rise to a variety of concerns. The notion of a value as “an abstraction” was a source of both confusion and consternation. Faculty were unclear about what this means and how to use the definition. Some spent more time puzzling over whether such concepts as education and the environment, for example, which they considered values, were abstractions or not. Some found that the focus on value conflicts, although helpful in some situations, was confusing and problematic in others. Some were concerned that understanding a value preference in terms of “a personal commitment to a particular value priority” might reinforce the naïve subjectivism that most students bring to considerations of value and might conflict with the focus on critical thinking about values. In short, there were strong feelings that the vocabulary impeded rather than facilitated the discussion of values. Most of the faculty who taught in the program felt too constrained in their efforts to integrate the discussion of values into their classes; a few just ignored the definitions; and others simply refused the invitation to participate in BGeX.
As a result of these concerns, after a two-year trial period, the definitions were replaced by the simple definition of value that is found in most dictionaries—that is, a value is “a principle, standard, or quality considered worthwhile or desirable.”Among the advantages envisioned for this single new definition were the following: it is intuitively clearer and therefore more user-friendly than the original definitions; it more readily lends itself to the way faculty want to discuss values in their respective disciplines; although compatible with a subjectivist understanding of values, it eliminates the perceived sub-jectivist overtones of the original definitions. There are still some concerns, as, presumably, there would be with any definition. However, to date, the reactions to this new definition have largely been favorable.
Student Learning Outcomes and Their Assessment
ASSESSMENT of student learning outcomes presents special challenges to the BGeX program. Because BGeX courses are introductory courses in the disciplines which carry BG Perspectives (general education) credit, the BGeX learning outcomes are added to those set by individual departments and to those set for general education courses. This tripartite division makes it imperative for the BGeX learning out-
comes not to be so burdensome as to make it impossible to address the three sets of learning outcomes in the same course. At the same time, the learning outcomes must be flexible enough to accommodate the fact that BGeX courses are offered in more than twenty-five disciplines or program areas.
The learning outcomes for the Bowling Green Experience courses that teach values across the disciplines are as follows:
Recognize and describe values that arise in the methods or content of the subject area
Identify ways in which these sometimes unexamined values shape or relate to academic or public discussion of issues relevant to today's citizens
Understand, articulate, and evaluate reasons and justifications that can support their own and others’ value choices
In thinking about the best way to assess these learning outcomes, it is helpful to distinguish between two purposes that assessment of student learning outcomes can serve. The first purpose is to generate data demonstrating the extent to which the learning outcomes have been accomplished by BGeX students as a group. The second purpose is for individual instructors to gauge the extent to which the learning outcomes have been achieved by individual students in their classes. These two purposes, while mostly compatible, sometimes diverge.
The first purpose would seem to require a single assessment instrument that produces some kind of quantifiable measure and that would be completed by all students in the program. Among the many concerns that can be raised about proceeding in this way, three stand out. First, it is not clear that one instrument that effectively measures learning outcomes across many disciplines can be produced. Second, even if such an instrument could be constructed, there are concerns about the extent to which it would create a “teaching to the test” mentality that might both dampen faculty creativity in the classroom and impede student learning. Finally, there is the concern that the results of this form of assessment might be used to evaluate faculty performance rather than student learning. The concern is not that the results would be used in this way (there is no intention to do so) but that a perception that this could happen would have a deleterious impact on faculty interest and commitment to the program.
To reduce these concerns, a one-size-fits-all approach to assessment for BGeX courses was rejected in favor of course-specific assessments developed by the faculty member teaching each course. Instructors are given the option to select one of three ways to assess their students’ progress on BGeX learning outcomes. Each of these approaches involves tailoring the specifics of the assessment instrument to a particular class. This approach is appropriate for meeting the second purpose of assessment, to gauge the extent to which the learning outcomes have been achieved by individual students.
One technique has students complete the same values-related exercise or assignment at the beginning and end of the course. By comparing these two assignments, the instructor can assess the extent to which individual students do a better job on the second assignment than they did on the first. For example, in a course that includes a philosophical discussion of the moral issues involved in gay marriage, students could be asked at both the beginning and the end of the semester to write a paper in which they explain the issue, present an argument given on each side, and conclude by presenting and defending their view on the issue. By comparing the papers written at the end of the semester with those written at the beginning, the instructor can assess the extent to which students’ abilities to think critically about a values-related issue have improved.
The second assessment option is to have students create a portfolio of work completed during the semes-ter. The instructor can review the portfolios, focusing on the assignments that address values-related issues, to assess the extent to which students have progressed in their ability to identify values and to offer a rationale for their position on issues. This approach lends itself well to the use of electronic portfolios.
The third option is to use a generic assessment instrument in which students answer several questions related to BGeX learning outcomes. For the first outcome (recognize and describe values that arise in the methods or context of the subject area), students are asked, “What values are embedded in the methods and approaches of this subject area?” or “What are some values or value conflicts that you studied in this subject area?” With regard to the second learning outcome (identify ways in which these sometimes unexamined values shape or relate to academic or public discussion of issues relevant to today's citizens), students are asked to choose a topic relevant to the course and explain how a value or value conflict studied in the class might shape discussions of this topic. For the third learning outcome (understand, articulate, and evaluate reasons and justifications that can support particular values), the instructions are as follows:“Using the same topic or a different one, explain how and why this might be a controversial issue. Stake out your own position on the issue, explaining what values inform that position and how they do so. Then, present the strongest objection to your position and, with reference to your values, explain why you favor your position over the objection.”
Each faculty member teaching in the program chooses which of the three approaches to assessment to use and how to implement it. If an outside evaluation of the assessment results is desired, a qualitative approach is used. Faculty are asked to make the assessed assignments available to an independent group for review. This group reads the completed assignments from an appropriate sample of the classes and assesses the extent to which they believe the students are achieving the learning outcomes.
Future Directions
GROWING THE PROGRAM to include all entering first-year students within a four-year period has been the primary focus of the BGeX initiative to date. With this accomplished, BGeX-perience is ready to expand beyond the first semester of the first year. We believe that the seed planted during the first semester requires cultivation if students are going to leave the institution as individuals who recognize the value dimensions of what they do and have the desire and ability to reflect on them in a careful and critical way. As currently envisioned, areas of future expansion include the following actions:
Emphasize values in first-year writing by (1) identifying and discussing the value choices that writers make and (2) focusing some of the assignments on values-related issues.
Create a comprehensive set of general education courses incorporating service learning that students can take in the sophomore year. These courses will continue the focus on BGeX learning outcomes, encourage students to act on their values, and promote an ethic of community service.
Create a variety of intensive junior-year experiences (courses to be completed over spring break or in a May term) that involve students in academic experiences away from campus. These experiences would have an experiential dimension and would incorporate BGeX learning outcomes.
Promote capstone courses in the major that address values central to the discipline or professional area.
In short, the goal is to create a challenging and rich curriculum and cocurriculum that weaves critical consideration of values throughout the undergraduate experience.