Gardner Campbell: Educating the Whole Person

- We're talking about lives.
We're talking about minds.
We're talking about, ideally, as Randy Bass puts it,
the whole person.
And the whole person is much more than
a set of accessories bolted onto a body.
It's about a life lived in space and time
with the potential to touch many other lives.
(slow electronic music)
- Thanks for joining us today, Gardner.
- It's my pleasure. - Appreciate you coming in.
- How do you define personalized learning?
- I'd like to tell you a story about personalized learning.
I took a creative writing class at Wake Forest University
when I was a junior.
The creative class was taught by a professor I had had
three or four times before that.
So I was very eager to be in the class with her.
Really loved her approach to literature.
Was really eager to see what she'd have to say
about writing creatively, not just analyzing the poetry.
The first day she came in with a collection
of newspaper articles that were going to prompts
we could use for our first writing assignment.
One of them had to do with a brain behavior relation story.
And I said, I'll take that one.
And she smiled and she said, "I thought you might."
That's personalized learning because she knew me as a person
over time, in all the variety, all the ignorance,
all the curiosity, all the eagerness that I brought
to the learning situation.
It was personalized because I counted as a person
in the eyes of another person
whose expertise would guide me
through a new learning experience.
The problem with that kind of personalized learning,
obviously, is that it doesn't scale, although, it might.
We have civilization.
We keep trying, as human beings,
to get those personal contexts to pervade our relations
with each other.
I like to think there might be ways to make those
kinds of personalized encounters scale,
especially if we look at networks not just as tools
or information distribution systems
but opportunities for connection.
- People are trying to make college more accessible,
which means more students,
which means more overload of faculty.
At the same time, budgets are being cut.
How do you make these gears grind together?
- It's a great question.
I fully believe it is our obligation
to make the experience I've just described
as widely available,
across socio-economic class,
underrepresented groups,
as possible, all people deserve that kind of human contact.
Many accessibility strategies focus
on certain kinds of scaling that, to me,
has a cruel irony attached.
The irony is, what we eventually make available,
is a very thin version of what it was
that we wanted to share.
So if 100 people have access to a thin experience,
I don't know that that's a great gain
over 10 people have access to the real thing.
The bottom line, for me, is we have to figure out a way
for 100 people to have access
to that thick, rich experience.
One of the ways we can do that, is to power the individuals
to scale their own meetings on the network.
Meeting is kind of a terrible dread word
for a lot of us in administration
because it means, as Ken Robinson says,
our bodies will take our heads to another place
and we will sit there.
But there's another way that we can describe meeting.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about meeting
as one of the spaces in which humans encounter each other
in particularly rich and meaningful ways.
But to do that, those have to be meetings that
emerge from the individual and a desire for connection.
It turns out the web was built facilitate
that kind of connection.
My question is: Is higher ed ready to tap in
in very meaningful and deep ways
to students' dispositions to connect?
Can we guide and grow those dispositions,
empower students to be aware of the possibilities
of connections in ways that are far beyond
complying with requirements and getting a degree?
That, it seems to me, scales multiple individuals.
Most importantly, it scales across a life.
- Well, if we look at the sort of hype
that's around personalized learning right now,
what do you think that's bubbling up that's new
that have people talking about this?
Because personalized learning, I guess,
in one form or another has been around since
you were a child.
- It's an excellent point,
personalized learning is one of the things
that schools were built to facilitate
in the sense that I described earlier.
A real sense of connection between the expert learner
and the novice learner.
Why getting so much interest now?
Or, I guess, another way to put it is,
why is personalized learning buzzing?
I think it's because, and I hate to say this,
but I really do have a strong suspicion,
we are now learning how to work with
personally generated information at scale
in ways that lead us to believe that we can use
the information or the data people produce
to design personalization for them.
And then we get into a weird metaphor which is,
we can fit your feet exactly
because we can measure your feet better than ever before.
Well, there's value in that, as anybody who wants
a nice fitting pair of shoes will testify.
But we're not talking about shoes.
We're not talking about people and clothing.
We're talking about lives.
We're talking about minds.
We're talking about, ideally, as Randy Bass puts it,
the whole person.
And the whole person is much more than a set
of accessories bolted onto a body,
it's about a life lived in space and time
with the potential to touch many other lives.
I wish that latter part
was the really energy behind personalized learning
as it's buzzing today.
I fear that it isn't.
I wonder if it's too late to bring the whole person
back to the conversation about personalized learning.
Maybe it isn't.
Maybe there's a way to bring the learners themselves
into this conversation in ways that are not
just about granular analytics
but about building mindfulness and the disposition
towards reflection more deeply.
Not just into particular classes or an e-portfolio
but into the experience of curriculum itself.
I've been working on this very hard at VCU
with a number of really great colleagues, it's a challenge.
People really do shape curriculum in ways
that they believe will conduce to the education
of the whole person.
But given the way schools are put together
and they way we've managed certain kinds of scaling,
curriculum ends up being stacked like bricks.
Pieced together like Legos and students treat it
as just a stack of stuff because that's the signal we send.
Can we think about personalized learning
with regard to curriculum as a support
for those learner initiated connections?
That's a very interesting question.
I think it plays in very well with what Randy Bass
talks about when he describes the digital ecosystem.
It's not just the world we live in,
it's the world we helped to make.
How do we bring that knowledge to students
over the course of a curriculum,
over the course of a degree?
That's an interesting question.
- Analytics. - Right.
- Great, useful tool.
Bad word.
- Well again, it depends on what we're talking about.
- Student success
and personalized learning.
- Golly. (laughs)
You know, one of my most charming qualities
is that I will rise to any bait, it really doesn't matter.
I don't care what the lure is,
I don't care what's on the hook.
It's like, oh, bait! (slurps)
Brian Alexander will tell you that as well.
So, let's see.
Analytics, certainly we want to be able
to generate meaningful data,
and data are not meaningful all their own.
That's the first thing I want to say.
But we want to be able to generate meaningful data
to help us understand things
in ways that will enhance our ability to predict,
enhance our ability to meet needs.
We've learned this from cellular biology.
You can look at my arm and never figure out what's wrong
but if you have an x-ray machine
or you have a theory of cells or germs,
these are very useful tools, they're analytics.
But what about analytics with regard
to the whole person idea of human learning?
Randy Bass, to use him,
I just came from Randy Bass' plenary,
it was incredibly inspiring,
so I've got Randy Bass on the brain,
which is a nice thing, I like that.
I like it when he lives in there for a while.
Randy Bass, a couple of years ago,
talked about this idea he called, slow analytics.
And I don't think he's really built that idea out a lot,
although it's implicit in some of his work now.
But the idea was like the slow food movement,
where weren't just trying to get it over with.
Analytics would similarly have a useful extension
through time that would help us understand
not just what the signals were in a particular course
or even a particular degree program,
but I think what he meant, you can ask him,
raised the learner into an awareness of the analytics
they can imagine and perform for themselves.
Now, learning theorists have had a word for this
for a long time, they called it metacognition.
Thinking about thinking.
If there are analytics and analytical frameworks
that can help the institution meet the needs of students
but also help them meet the greatest need of all,
which is for students to have a more sophisticated
understanding of their own needs and identities as learners,
I'm on board with that, I think that's great.
And I think we can empower student to continue to track
their own learning throughout their lives.
Recognizing opportunities
not just to find a job, but make a job.
Recognizing opportunities not just to be shaped by culture
but an opportunity, indeed, an obligation
to help shape and build culture themselves,
as agents, as empowered learners.
If what we do in our institutions
build out in our own practices,
and empower our students as a result of those practices,
to shape meaningful analytics for themselves,
for their entire lives.
I think that would be great.
I have to be honest that most of the talk
about analytics right now
doesn't seem to rise to that level of aspiration.
And I think the danger is, bricks are useful
but if that's the metaphor with which you build your world,
you may not end up with anything but a pile of bricks.
I also want to stress that there is an ethical obligation
that we have to students to help them understand
what data we collect, why we collect it
and that, in the end, it's their data.
They need to make informed decisions
about how and when to share that.
Not just in the context of FERPA,
let's not share anything, we'll take care of that,
don't worry your pretty little heads, students,
we have protected you.
As Michael Feldstein pointed out
in his recent article in The Chronicle,
students to understand the benefits of sharing data
about their learning and how that story can be told
in ways that will benefit them beyond any single course
or degree program.
We have this thing at VCU we talk about
that's called generalizable education.
Education with impact beyond any single course
or degree program or major.
And the idea is,
you will have this experience.
It will help you shape the shaping
for the rest of your life.
Analytics, the generation of data around activity,
certainly has some part to play in that.
But not in a custodial arrangement
on behalf of the institution,
especially not on behalf of the institution's claims
towards prestige, but instead, as a way
to help students understand
how we're trying to understand them.
So that can lift them into a higher sphere
of self-understanding.
- There's a mindfulness you have.
There's a society you see in your head
that 90% of the population doesn't have time to think about.
Doesn't have time to envision.
Doesn't even have time to participate in.
They're busy eating at McDonald's while you're busy
trying to make slow food
and that's gotta be a frustrating place to be.
The things that you talk about in terms of envisioning
the whole student as a mind
that's more than a set of bricks for courses.
You've got a big wave against you.
Because accessibility to education,
is not looked at that way at all.
It's how can we piece mail it out
to as many people as possible so they can check that box
and say I have college degree.
What do you do with that kind of frustration?
- I struggle with a good way to describe a struggle.
So, as is always the case,
I'm always going for the meta thing.
It is a necessary set of ideals,
principles, mindfulness, I think,
to advocate for.
These are ideas and principles and a kind of mindfulness
that I try to practice, not because I thought it up
but because a great cloud of witnesses
throughout my life,
including, most emphatically, my own best teachers
showed me what that would be like.
I am the product of educators
who cared deeply about the kinds of things
I try to talk about and live.
And in many instances,
those beloved professors
found ways to do this despite enormous odds.
Having to do with their own sexuality,
or their gender when women weren't in the academy
in great numbers.
Or the unpopular opinions that they were to espouse.
Or their stubbornness in their English department meetings.
People kept the faith for decades,
preparing for the moment in which I would
be able to be empowered and enlivened by their presence.
I am sure they got frustrated,
just the way I get frustrated.
I am sure that they had days in which they thought,
"You know, maybe I just go need to find an honest way
"to make a living, 'cause this just doesn't seem to be it."
But they kept the faith.
And I feel like if I didn't keep trying
in my own ways to do that,
I would have betrayed the gift they gave me.
I may not do it the right way all the time,
probably, I don't.
I may not do it with the success that they had.
But these are not principles I made up.
They are not idiosyncratic.
They may be difficult ones to think about at scale.
Good, that's a challenge, let's get going.
We're human beings, we eat problems for breakfast, let's go.
They may be difficult to fold into the busy administration
of a very large university, okay, I get that.
Lots of tasks, we'll get them done.
But task number one is,
how do we look at the people who empowered us
to be here today and keep that standard aloft?
Keep that flag waving.
Do something honest and heartfelt and smart
to honor what they gave us as we got here.
And then, in turn, make that more available to more people
across all social lines for the future.
That's the future I want to build.
Do I get frustrated, absolutely.
Absolutely, I get frustrated.
I get frustrated when people talk about this stuff as,
"Oh, that's the 30,000 foot level, what are we going
"to do about this, that and the other thing?"
I get frustrated for two reasons.
I don't think it's the 30,000 foot level.
I think it's the foundation on which we build.
But I'll be honest, I also get frustrated
because I understand how complex it is.
And I understand that a lot of people of good will
are really trying to build a better higher education
for the future and for more people.
And I get frustrated because of the enormity of the task,
I just feel overwhelmed.
And I know that others around me do too.
But when I see great colleagues doing amazing work
that inspires me, I feel like,
well, you know, in the grand scheme of things,
I won't quote Casa Blanca, right,
but the problems of my little world
don't amount to a hill of beans in terms of
what it is that we're trying to build together.
And I feel that in my work, I want to honor and support
those whose work has been so vital for me.
But I'll end that with a little story.
A story about one of the things
that really keeps me going.
Monday night...
About 36 hours ago, I guess, or so.
I was in a room with 24 young learners
who had gathered together to take a course called Milton.
I'm the instructor for that course.
Milton is my disciplinary specialty.
We sat in that room together, I asked them,
alright, it's May, what's the happy ending?
What is it that you hope will have happened
as a result of this experience?
A couple of them spoke of grades.
Most of them did not.
Most them had within them a idealism and a hope
and a courage for what they wanted to do
that far outstripped this idea of bricks or Legos
laid end to end.
That's what keeps me going.
That's why I never give up, never surrender
because there is still hope, most conspicuously,
in those learners that this will be something greater
than the sum of its parts.
In a Milton class! (laughs)
Alright. - Right.
(mid-tempo electronic music)

Gardner Campbell: Educating the Whole Person

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