039 (December 1973): 42-44
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ON AN ACCOUNTABLE CURRICULUM
Connie Holt Jones
IT IS relatively new in the history of curriculum development for the planners to spend so much time in self-examination. Until just recently, when we pondered requirements for majors we could count on their being in the classroom, ready if not eager to grasp the results of our planning councils. Now numbers dwindle, and curriculum planners assume a new stance. There are economic reasons, perhaps, but there is also a sense that we ought to be responsive, that we ought to be held accountable so that the current generation is not the last generation to be blest with the riches of our disciplines. We are engaged in the kind of self-questioning, moreover, which is congruent with the humanistic search for the truth of what it is that we are trying to do.
There was some initial concern in our group about finding common ground for a meaningful discussion because of the diversity of institutions represented by the participants—junior and community colleges, four-year liberal arts colleges, universities and multiversities; that is, we feared the very diversity which has finally come to be seen not as an obstacle but as a solution to curricular problems. In fact, the consensus has come to be that the missions of these various kinds of institutions are not mutually exclusive, though their constituencies differ, and that there is enough similarity in our problems to justify discussion. But we do need more information in circulation about what goes on in English and foreign language departments everywhere: out of that information will grow a mutual interest in curriculum. Out of mutual interest will come identification of the various bodies which demand accountability of us.
The key body in the range of accountability is what Harold Martin has called “the commonwealth of students.” The term designates not only the majors of the English and foreign language departments, but also the students of the college or university at large as well as those potential students in the community where the institution has its being. “What students do you teach?” Those you have—and you devise “umbrella” courses to draw the interest of majors, or “tracks” to draw people with less than major interest in what you have to offer. You do all of this because, as everybody knows, “the money follows the students”—but you have other, better reasons, too.
For instance, the graduate school or the GRE cannot always be trusted now as validation devices for undergraduate curricula. It was suggested that perhaps schools with on-going Ph.D. and master's programs would feel under greater compulsion to remain accountable to traditional disciplinary requirements, whereas the community college would feel an immediate accountability to students. However, this traditional dichotomy in imperatives is fading as plurality overtakes the traditional curriculum and the rigid line from undergraduate major to fruition as full professor grows wobblier in these parlous times. Community colleges have every desire to protect the academic integrity of their programs, and the big school wants to reach students just as urgently as its fellow institutions. Most schools follow the dictum: “Don't teach the discipline. Teach the student.” Curriculum planners try to ensure several levels of enjoyment for various kinds of students, as well as to demonstrate that languages and literature are valuable, purposive disciplines.
Among the better reasons for devising an ingenious curriculum is the obligation owed to the profession and the discipline. We must continue to find new teachers, to train them and accredit them, even though demographic and other projections show that our mission to train teachers is declining in proportion. In addition, we must draw students to enjoy our disciplines on various levels of interest. The imperative to draw students to the discipline may even lead us to enlarge the scope and dimension of our vision of the discipline itself. For example, it has been pointed out that the English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese languages have taken root in a great variety of nations and communities throughout the world and have fostered valuable and sophisticated literatures which are not at present adequately recognized in the curricula of our English and FL departments. The literatures of these nations and communities frequently fail to gain recognition in academe, not because of any literary or aesthetic fault, but because they emanate from a community or nation relatively poor in economic or political power. Poets, novelists, and dramatists have been writing in English for some time in India, the Caribbean, Australia, Canada, and various countries of Africa. French, Spanish, and Portuguese have also produced rich literatures outside the nations of their origin. Such writing frequently presents special cultural and literary challenges. At a time when one frequently hears laments about the sterility and triviality of current critical and scholarly writing about English and European literatures, these other literatures could well afford a new set of vitalizing critical challenges.
We also owe an accounting to our faculties. A new “umbrella” curriculum devised at William Jewell College represents an ingenious reshaping of traditional course lines. It is said to be a “model that reminds us of the shape of the discipline”; yet a device for frequent informal changes in course content guarantees and expresses the integrity of the faculty. We owe something as well to ourselves, the planners—to our vision of education, which, we hope, will escape the opprobrium of students whom we may fail in the present, or of students who might well turn to us in the future to demand why we stand only among the ruins of our discipline and who may ask what we might have done to preserve it in our time.
The college or university demands that we account to its various divisions, which need our services as they need those of no other single discipline: no study flourishes where students cannot read and write, usually in more than one language. Moreover, the institution's vision of itself shapes expectations that curriculum will fall into line with certain values or traditions or parades of progress. Frequently the English or FL department finds that it must educate the institution, reshape the expectations of those to whom we are accountable. Especially funding agencies such as legislatures, alumni, foundations, or other donors may require from us some explanation of humanistic rather than pragmatic values before they are willing to accept the decisions we make in structuring or unstructuring course offerings.
A final area of accountability has to do with our mission to the public, the society—assessing its needs as it sees them and meeting its needs as only we can. An awareness of public or social needs leads immediately to the knowledge/skill dichotomy in curriculum planning because the public believes one thing and we believe another. The public is willing to believe that we can teach it the skills it needs; and we believe that the society needs the kind of knowledge and sensitivity gained only from languages and literature.
It was generally agreed that the characteristics of an accountable curriculum are flexibility, diversity, and responsiveness. Even our majors are more diverse in their aims and ambitions than we have been willing to permit. If we are to follow the newer and more humane (and more requisite) trend of responding with the diversity of means which students' diverse ends require, we must devise a flexible curriculum. This kind of curriculum has a dual nature: it yields enough to open many opportunities to students, yet stubbornly resists any denial of humanistic values. Much discussion was given to the concept of the “Irreducible Minimum,” a central mass in the curriculum which electives must not compromise. Generally it was felt that each institution would have to stake out the parameters of its IM in terms of the peculiar combinations of obligations each must meet. It was generally felt that there was not to be a hierarchy of IM's—that any was valid if properly accountable.
These, then, are those who hold us accountable when we devise the curriculum: our students, our profession and traditionally humanistic discipline, our faculty and ourselves (the educators), our colleges or universities, our public or society, and our legislatures and other funding agencies. We return to our campuses as messengers to them. We must inform our faculty of our areas of accountability. We must educate those who hold us accountable in pragmatic or antihumanistic ways. We must insist that the conception and the exercise of our profession be enlarged and diversified if we are to remain accountable to those who exercise real moral and fiscal power over our very existence.
The report of Discussion Group III of the ADE/ADFL Joint Summer Seminar, 2529 June 1973 at Washington University. Discussion group leaders were Marvin Schindler (Foreign Languages, Northern Illinois Univ.) and Neal Woodruff (English, Coe College). The author is a member of the Department of Language and Literature at Northeast Missouri State University.
© 1973 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
ADE Bulletin 039 (December 1973): 42-44 |
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