Previous Mission Statement
New Mission
Statement
Speakers' Commentary
Dr. Rich Becherer
Dr. Ron Cox
Dr. Debbie Ingram
Dr. Wilfred McClay
Dr. Mark Mendenhall
Dr. Gail M. Meyer
Dr. Irven Resnick
Dr. David Sachsman
Dr. James Tucker
Dr. Kim Wheetley
Dr. Michael Whittle
Review Session Summaries
September 20, 2001
September 26, 2001
Questions About Our Mission
Kim Alan Wheetley
Lyndhurst Chair of Excellence in Arts Education
Deciding on an institutional mission and goals is like deciding which wall we want to lean our ladders against before we begin to climb. But that is just the first of a multitude of questions. Who will be climbing the ladders? Who won't? Who will be holding the ladders steady? Where will everyone else be as we make the climb? Who will be above, below, and beside whom? Who will be ahead and behind? When will we reach the summit? Will we realize our mission, or will we encounter more walls to scale? What are we doing? Are we ascending or descending or just hanging on? Why are we on the ladders in the first place?
Who? Where? When? What? Why? There are lots of questions.
Who?
CLIENTS OR COLLABORATORS
The current stated mission of UTC is "the education of students: to assist in the enlightening and disciplining of their minds and their preparation for ethical and active leadership in civic, cultural, and professional life. To achieve this mission, the University engages in the complementary and mutually supportive activities of teaching, research, and service." Where is the humanity in this statement? Isn't it rather impersonal and sterile?
"...the education of students to assist in the enlightening and disciplining of their minds" Isn't that somewhat presumptuous? Cicero observed, "The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn." Just what is the relationship between student and teacher? Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, "Is indeed, not every man a student?" Is teaching a monologue or a discourse? Should it be reciprocal?
There is an Oscar Hammerstein lyric which goes, "If you become a teacher, by your pupils you'll be taught." "Good teaching rests neither in accumulating a shelf full of knowledge nor in developing a repertoire of skills. In the end, good teaching lies in a willingness to attend and care for what happens in our students, ourselves, and the space between us." (Laurent A. Daloz) An elder from the Hopi tribe advises, "Teaching should come from within instead of without." How do we enable this to happen?
Where?
A COMMUNITY OF LEARNERS
Are we a staid institution or a dynamic community? Benjamin Disraeli wrote, "A university should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning." Do we think of our University as a center of learning; perhaps a community of learners?
Michael Harrington observed, "Life is lived in common, but not in community." A community is a group of people having common interests. Who makes up the University community? Administrators, faculty, students, staff, supporters? Do they all have a vested interest in the University's mission? How does our intellectual community foster collegiality and cooperation? Why are we a hierarchy rather than a democracy? Can we be a collective?
And how can we expand our community beyond our campus into the Chattanooga area, throughout the region, across the country, around the world? Think tanks and collaborative ventures can involve colleagues near and far, especially if we utilize evolving technology.
In this age of information, our communications have made a critical shift from a tradition of print to far greater dependence on imagery. This has had a profound effect on how we see our world, how we think about it, and how we solve its problems. Readily accessible technologies and information from television, film, video, and the Internet are changing the way we perceive, think, and function. Marshall McLuhan writes, "The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive 'outside' world created by new information media. Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery - to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms." Can we bring the University up to speed technology wise? Can we afford not to?
When?
FUTURE THINKING
Thomas Huxley wrote, "The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge." But Bertrand Russell observed, "It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young." George Bernard Shaw said, "I'm not a teacher; only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you."
Does our mission ensure that we look ahead? How can we prepare for future opportunities, challenges, and uncertainties? Neil Postman writes, "The curriculum of the future is most likely to consist of fields of inquiry from which students learn how to learn about that which is unknown." Inquiry-based learning is experiential, motivating, and empowering. Students who are actively engaged in thinking and learning generate questions. Their inquiry, however, is not about finding the "right" answers. It is about formulating relevant questions and exploring possibilities. We recognize this process in the world of science, but inquiry is also the realm of the arts.
The arts allow us to communicate messages, tell stories, and understand the world around us. Eugene Ionesco observed, "Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together." At all times, but particularly at moments like now when we grasp for meaning and guidance during crisis, the arts explore and define the essence of the human experience. They hold the power to build understanding and offer alternative ways to communicate our thoughts and express our feelings. Children, young people, all of us are especially in need of the arts today as people around the world urgently seek to understand and learn from each other.
Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century. Should our mission be to seek not just knowledge, but wisdom? Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.
What?
INQUIRY, MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES, AND THE ARTS
In 1992 the US Department of Labor published a document called What Work Requires at School for Workers in the Year 2000. They identified three categories: basic skills, thinking skills, and personal qualities.
- Basic Skills incorporated reading, writing, mathematics, and speaking.
- Thinking Skills included creative thinking, the ability to problem-solve and make decisions, the capacity of reason, seeing things in the mind's eye, and knowing how to learn.
- Personal Qualities desired were being responsible and sociable, having a sense of self-esteem and integrity, being honest and skilled at self-management, and exhibiting empathy.
Fostering those skills and personal qualities is exactly what our University does. So let's tell people clearly what we do. And let's do it better.
Our mission statement points out that "Effective teaching and faculty involvement in scholarship, research, and creative activities are interdependent." Research might be thought of as formalized curiosity. Perhaps that is why Albert Einstein observed, "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." In the words of William Wordsworth, do we sometimes get "lost in a gloom of uninspired research"? The art of teaching is "the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. (Anatole France) Socrates realized we cannot teach anybody anything. We can only make them think.
In his book, The Basic School - A Community for Learning, Ernest Boyer wrote, "Language is, without question, central to all learning." He defined language broadly " ...to include not just words, but also mathematics, and the arts - three symbol systems that have their own unique characteristics and, at the same time, relate intimately to each other."
Howard Gardner maintains that we do not merely absorb or memorize knowledge; we construct it through one or more of our multiple intelligences. This thesis is reinforced by the research of neurologists who have found that vision and hearing are direct forms of understanding, not subservient to reason or the intellect. Indeed, they have discovered that the emotions occupy discrete areas of the brain and operate through their own hard-wired circuitry.
We now understand that our perceptive, sense-based capacities have as much to do with learning as our intellectual or rational capacities. Given the variety of learning styles, we must engage students through all forms of intelligence. This has enormous implications for institutions that have enshrined the lecture method of instruction.
Perhaps we should broaden our understanding of what constitutes art in education by teaching all academic subjects more artistically (including the individual arts disciplines, which are academic subjects in their own right). Albert Einstein noted, "It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."
Why?
PASSION
According to Samuel Johnson, "Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last." Passion. What is it about our mission that engages our emotions? Ideology supplies the explanations, but it is passion that impels our deeds. Without passion we are a latent force poised for possibility, like the flint, which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark. "Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community." (Anthony J. D'Angelo) If we are to invest our minds and energy, we have to see ourselves in the mission. It has to speak to our hearts as well as our intellect.
We live in a country that is rooted in imagination; the vision of what might be. It is our responsibility to educate our extended community to understand that there are still unlimited possibilities for the human spirit. The future itself rests with the imagination we will bring to what we do. At the core of learning is the inherent need to question and the ability to imagine. This is what enables us to look at life from different perspectives and encourages us to engage in innovative exploration. To this end, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga should joyously be about nurturing creative inquiry in teaching and learning!