Education: ‘What
remains after you’ve forgotten everything you
learned’
BY DIANE MANUEL
As an undergraduate at the
University of Texas at Austin, Ramón Saldívar recalls,
his professors opened worlds of knowledge to him -- and
yet . . . "Knowledge was transmitted to me, but it
was all too often, even in small classes, a one-way
street," Saldívar, vice provost for undergraduate
education and professor of English and comparative
literature, told a noontime audience Feb. 25 at the
"Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching" lecture
series sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning.
"The professor stood
at the front of the lecture hall or seminar room and
conveyed information to us," he added.
"Sometimes we would engage, but it was quite
limited."
In a talk titled
"What I Learned About Teaching and Learning in
Sophomore College," Saldívar recounted the academic
goals he had in mind when he designed the program and
spoke about the personal satisfaction he has found in the
course he has taught for the past four years.
Saldívar also situated
Sophomore College in demographic and philosophic changes
that he said are being felt nationwide.
"There's a quiet
revolution occurring in American higher education,"
Saldívar said. "It has something to do very
specifically with the nature of knowledge and it also has
to do with the expectations of students and their parents
as they enter the university, [in terms of] what they
want back."
Partly in response to
those expectations, Saldívar said, Stanford
administrators and faculty today are looking for ways to
"create a process where teaching and learning, and
instruction and research are combined in a single
enterprise."
Drawing on Hegel's
assertion that education is the art of making people
ethical, Saldívar said that ethical process involves
teaching students clarity of mind, precision of thought,
rigor of analysis, eloquence and creativity of
expression.
"In my view, our
single most vital task as scholars and as educators is to
help develop the conditions where that kind of learning
can take place," Saldívar said.
Sophomore College, he
said, has been one "nuts-and-bolts, practical,
real-world attempt to address many of those
questions."
Why "sophomore"
college?
As a result of his
experience as a resident fellow in Roble Hall, a
four-class dormitory, Saldívar said he had found that
freshmen made the transition to college on the strength
of their excitement and enthusiasm, and that juniors and
seniors typically had mentors in their departments who
helped them lay out career goals and educational paths.
"But the place where
I saw calamities was with the poor sophomores,"
Saldívar said. " 'Sophomore slump' is not a myth,
and I saw existential crises."
Looking at those
difficulties as academic and curricular problems,
Saldívar said he conceived of Sophomore College as an
opportunity for faculty to design courses that would
emphasize the nature of intellectual exploration as such.
He also thought the college could provide sophomores with
a reorientation to the academic resources on campus.
Five courses were offered
in the first year of the college, and students were
selected by faculty on the basis of their answers to the
question: "Why do you want to be in this
class?"
In the past four years,
the number of courses offered has grown to 27, and
Saldívar said he anticipates that 35 classes will be
taught next fall. In the seminar settings, professors
meet with 12 students for two hours every day for two
weeks, just before the start of fall quarter. Each course
also has two teaching assistants who live with the
sophomores in the dorms and serve as resident assistants
and academic associates.
In the course he has
taught for the past four years, "Comparative
American Urban Cultures," Saldívar said he has been
overwhelmed by the students' ability to analyze complex
materials.
"They read about
contemporary postmodern theory, urban design and issues
in critical legal studies," he said. "And they
run with it in a way that I used to think only my
advanced undergraduates and graduate students could
manage."
In an effort to make the
learning more active, Saldívar has moved his course
beyond the confines of the classroom. He regularly takes
students on tours of San Francisco's Mission District,
Chinatown and Yerba Buena Gardens. The sophomores also
learn how to participate creatively in the class by
posing questions and making formal presentations
"B. F. Skinner once
wrote that education is what remains after you've
forgotten everything you learned," Saldívar told
his audience. "I think he was suggesting that you
forget the things but learn the process. And that's the
quality of understanding I want students to learn, along
with an ability to express themselves eloquently and
rationally, with conviction and persuasive power."
SR
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