On Ambivalence

When expertise makes decisions more complicated

New words: pinning ceremony, trustee comments, closed session

One of the reasons I ran for RVC Board of Trustees was because I felt there should be a trustee with experience in higher education. Though it feels like just yesterday I walked across the stage in the RVC PEC to receive my diploma, it was almost 20 years ago, and since then I’ve been a faculty member, a staff member, and an administrator at three universities. And because I apparently can’t get enough of education, I’m also on two boards at other schools—the Illinois State University Alumni Board of Executive Directors and the Crystal Lake Montessori Board of Directors—in addition to being elected to the RVC BoT. My personality (and probably some other key factors that are for another blog post) is such that knowing as much as I can about something helps me feel like I can have an opinion on that something. I am reluctant to weigh in on just about anything if I don’t know a lot about it because I simply feel I can’t, or shouldn’t. Call it Midwestern.

Something I’ve already learned from my very short time on the BoT is that my higher ed expertise will cause me to feel solid in my opinions, but just as frequently, it will cause me to feel ambivalent.

This ambivalence came up this month when the BoT needed to approve to allocate funds for dual credit courses in area high schools. Dual credit courses are college level courses taught in high school settings. These kinds of courses are not unique to our area; lots of schools around the country provide this opportunity for students looking to earn college credit while still in high school. Perhaps even some of you out there in reader-land benefited from this program, either here or in some other area of the state or country.

Make no mistake; I did not and will never get in the way of us allocating funds for dual credit courses. It was an unanimous ‘yay’ vote from this board. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions about it, and those are based on my experience and the many conversations I’ve had with high school and college teachers over the years.

Dual credit courses are all about access, opportunity, and economics. The idea is that if we give students the opportunity to earn college credit in their high school, this saves them time and money, and perhaps entices them to continue their college education after they’ve graduated high school. The story goes like this: the sooner students graduate high school, the sooner they graduate college, the sooner they enter the workforce and get on a path to economic prosperity.

When we start to dig in, though, and think beyond the superficial, some questions arise:

· Who teaches these courses?

o How are those instructors prepared?

o Do these instructors feel supported?

· How are these instructors being compensated for teaching college courses outside of a college context?

· Do students feel prepared by these courses in the same way (or better?) than they would if they took them when they arrived at college?

· And the big one for me: How can we teaching college writing out of the context of college?

Poll ten college writing instructors and you’ll find “big feelings” about this trend. It’s a gnarly topic. Part of what allows college students to succeed in first-year writing courses—arguably the hardest course students take in their first year of college—is the infrastructure built to support them in this coursework. First-year writing is hard, even for the best prepared students. When I was teaching at Rockford University, I had students from some of the most well-funded high schools in the area flounder and fail in their first-year writing courses. And the students who took first-year college writing in high school struggled at the same rate in the next writing course in the sequence as students who took it on campus.

Writing instructors call first-year writing a “canary in the coal mine course” because how a student is doing overall shows up in that course, and vice versa. I believe strongly that first-year college writing is best taught in college because students are taking it in context.

And this is nothing to say of the ways in which shifting college writing courses to high school removes teaching opportunities from colleges and universities and places even more of a burden on the already very stretched high school teachers.

My argument has nothing to do with the capability of high school instructors to teach college writing. They are highly capable and well credentialed. It’s about the stuff going on all around them, as most issues in higher education are…