Abstract
M. D. Wilson bridges the practical and the academic with the “pracademic,” his answer to engaging students in the learning process.
“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” noted the Greek poet Archilochus. This current chasm of cultures between wide– and single–minded thinkers—the foxes and the hedgehogs, respectively—still persists, specifically in higher education. However, an emerging type of thinker–doer, the Pracademic, deftly blends the fixed and growth mindsets by fusing the practical with the rigorous. “Pracademic” combines the “practical” with the “academic”; it is a scholar—hyphen—practitioner who draws from both sides and not merely from the either–or camps that seem to forever disconnect academics and professionals. If education is the means to invoke Heraclitus's proclamation “nothing endures but change,” then higher education is a critical place for advancement and acculturating the traits of foxes, hedgehogs, humanists, and scientists at large.
Many academics run the risk of becoming too specialized, or what social philosopher Max Weber called, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” (p. 124). In this sense, academics are hedgehogs, knowing only one great big thing. This, then, is a call to prevent further dismissiveness, which often arises from being too myopic. The future of education requires self–exploration, group experimentation across disciplines, and the experiencing of life lessons.
The Problem
It is easy to toss around numbers under the auspices of quantifying or seeking significance, especially within fields such as economics or engineering. However, quantifying citation counts or publication metrics alone is not validation of superior research. The academic pecking order of disciplines and sub–disciplines is typically inconclusive. Consequently, students of every size and on every kind of campus skip the majority of PowerPoint lectures, opting instead to “Snapchat.” Thumb–control is less mundane than a thermodynamics lecture laden in top–down theory.
To be sure, the world may be heading toward drone testing and potentially even drone teaching, thereby creating a pool of monochromatic undergraduates (relying on Google searches for answers to umpteen problem–sets is one biting example). But for now, Deidre McCloskey, professor and historian at the University of Illinois in Chicago, warns (as Weber also attempted) of the “sins” in falling for the continuous on/off head–fake in qualitative theory or in only applying big data statistics within empirical work. Research requires uncritical acceptance by using/applying mixed methods, quantitative analysis, and learning theories. Borrowing from Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase, McCloskey painstakingly points out that “blackboard economics” (borne only of the classroom rather than including the boardroom) is neither sufficient, nor the answer to the education of the new generation clamoring in a new world, craving diverse approaches. And yet, a recent survey by the National Center for Education Statistics shows that Blacks and Hispanics each made up 9 percent of all 2012 computer science graduates; whereas nationally, Blacks make up 12 percent of the U.S. workforce, and Hispanics 16 percent—not even ISTEP's (Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress) long–division is a checklist requisite for such paltry math/stat findings. The practicing ethno–botanist Wade Davis explains, “cultures do not exist in some absolute sense; each is but a model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of intellectual and spiritual choices made” (pp. 1–2). Race, like a single discipline continuum, is a fiction. Experience is essential, not for a single answer but for the raw practice and participation in change, as we hedgehogs and foxes know we must. Understanding firsthand, not simply handed down, is the power, strength, and inspiration behind learning.
How Pracademics Cross–Train, Cross–Disciplines
For the Pracademic, converting argument and theory into reality is the enduring learning, the new takeaway. Such learning resides in a liminal space, a space of transition and growth. There may not be a better place than academia for practicing forms of engineering, but the process involves the experience of doing, as reflected by this comment from blogger Eric Evinchick, an electrical engineering student at the University of Waterloo: “You can go through an undergraduate degree by jumping through the usual hoops. You'll still get the same piece of paper. The only way to get real experience is to actually do work in your field. If you're in university or headed there, find a team with a project you like and get the full value out of your tuition.” The university must enable and empower such worthwhile endeavors and opportunities. Engineering Projects In Community Service (EPICS) at Purdue University is a prime example of a program that seeks to integrate grit and gumption with intuitive research. This is a refreshing programmatic approach where academia becomes street–smart and makes connections across the campus, across the country, across the globe.
Pracademia celebrates certainty of self over conformity. The burdens of an academic career mandate that the folklore of the “ivory tower” be adopted, and yet it is necessary to criticize the rigid paradigm in order to progress. Imagine a room full of students desiring professorial facilitation instead of answers to regurgitate. As a result, the students learn extensively instead of wanting an “A” on the Scantron for the single purpose of inflating a grade point average (GPA). Imagine an engineering curriculum that develops leadership skills and encourages the acceptance of ambiguity while providing time for reflective thought and flexibility in assignments, rather than requiring another definitive set of differential equations sans answer keys.
The academic approach needs to change to one that Dr. Michael Wesch proffers, that allows students to be “knowledge–able, not knowledgeable.” Theory needs to be arrived at through practical experience. Theory as knowledge is useful when engaged through experience—the real value beyond thinking.
As early as the 1980s, Seymour Papert, an MIT mathematician responsible for constructionism learning theory, often and aptly cited John Dewey's mantra: “The road of the new education is not an easier one to follow than the old road but a more strenuous and difficult one.” Papert's own conviction helped lay the foundation for the use of Legos in teaching schoolchildren to think spatially, and to learn how to code and create algorithms without calling the process by clever acronyms or monikers. The kids constructed, engaged in play—enthralled by the learning process.
Therefore, the transition from educational experience to lifelong learning calls for—if not outright mandates—authenticity in which the students, mentors, and teachers unite. Additionally, as facilitators, great teachers provide a foundation of deliberate practice to improve cognition in both perception and performance. Acting more as a coach, the instructor provides meaningful and continuous feedback. Many mentors know all too well the opportunity cost from failing efforts.
Thomas Cech, Nobel prize–winning chemist, praises the benefits of a liberal arts experience for the “incorporation of courses in the humanities and arts that promote intellectual ‘cross–training’” (p. 210) much in the way athletes might combine strength and conditioning to improve a golf swing. We must move away from an art vs. science society. Consider what C.P. Snow said in his 1950s essay “Two Cultures”:
Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had (p. 16).
The push for thermodynamics over Shakespeare now appears topsy–turvy or worse, a two–culture reverse. Hark! The rejoinder is that both the humanities and the sciences matter. A liberal arts education is imperative to improve what the President of Smith College, Carol T. Christ, calls “capacities” over narrow disciplines. By this she means that mastery of a single skill will likely not translate well in a multilingual, multi–global society likely enveloping multiple skills and multiple careers in this millennium. President Christ contends that “very few will spend their lives at a single station in the world's factory” (p. 5). Thus, we humanists and scientists need to unite, and quickly, in order to produce well–rounded professionals of practice—what the Rhode Island School of Design calls STEAM over STEM (including Art in the acronym), or how the “Stanford 2025” website promotes personal mission statements over majors for future students combining disciplines as never before.
A hybrid model integrating professional practices drawn from both humanities courses and from STEAM provides the potential for holistically preparing the global student. Ernest Boyer suggested in his seminal work Scholarship Revisited, that “the scholarship of engagement means connecting the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical problems, to our children, to our schools, to our teachers, and to our cities” (p. 13). I agree. The shocking truth is that academia thrusts recent PhD graduates into teaching with very little if any training to actually teach. The student and parent stakeholders deserve more in the way of the scholarship of teaching. In the future, research universities must mandate a certification of teaching process for all faculty members. As emeritus Professor Richard Felder laments on his website, “College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which no preparation or training is provided or required.” This provides fodder for the “entrepredemic” (the entrepreneur turned academic and/or the academic turned entrepreneur) willing to convert practice into praxis. This is where the higher education community can provide critical awareness of self–reflection and action in order to transform students for an enduring, lifelong learning mindset affecting problem–solving work in ways where tacit meets theory.
From campus to campus, can we ignite faculty engagement, lead through change, and escape the status quo without excluding other possibilities or alternatives? The best institutions, to remain stalwart in education and to compete with newfangled MOOC and Khan Academy offerings, shall seek accountability and high standards. Penultimately, the paradox is that the scholarship of research transforms and balances the scholarship of teaching as a way of being rather than a process of becoming. The new pedagogical platform needs to embrace “doing engineering or economics or entrepreneurship” by electricians, statisticians, and technicians, all the way across the professoriate disciplines. Ultimately, the rhetoric of being inclusive must trump the practice of being exclusive.
The “Chaord” (Chaos and Order) of the Pracademic
Sadly, most of us exist in academic encampments cloistered by assumptions and specialized rules coveted by the adroit. Though the modern university tacitly acknowledges a need for less student mastery/puppetry and more choice, very few colleges leave room for professional skills within pre–requisite curricula. For most students following a rigid educational system, there is value in affording students some “elective” space to push their minds and cognition perhaps through leadership (“soft skill”) classes—with a goal of growing and becoming. A learning canvas is meant to be open, to produce unexplored patterns through unadulterated investigation. This is learning. Academic snobbery has no place in a system seeking transformation. John Dewey, Ernest Boyer, Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, and many present–day educators (McCloskey, Wesch, Davis, Cech, Christ, and Felder), all tout real education forms/forums in the unflinching and unfurling ways of doing. To this end, the Pracademic bridges the gap.
The dawn of the Pracademic is here and begins with pracademic curriculums open to intellectual cross–training; with sustainable conviction in the pursuit of better teaching practices; and finally, with the capacities for seeking, distilling, persuading, expressing, demystifying, and, above all, doing worthwhile projects. Any hierarchal pox needs to give way to allowing students to get their hands dirty. Decades of evidence articulate the rich benefits of active and project–based learning. As such, we are charged with teaching and training students. Let us then blend the practical and the academic, amalgamate the foxes and the hedgehogs, in order to fully cultivate our lifelong learners.