Deirdra Stockmann: An education all your own

Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? 15 years ago, before CD-ROMs and Play Station 2, they were the premier interactive childhood experience. It was a book, but you actually had some say in the action.

Alas, as we sit in lecture with 200 of our closest colleagues, that level of involvement and engagement is long forgotten. We have moved on to "higher learning."

At any big university, lecture classes are a given. In effort to efficiently fill those requirements, we have all had our share. Grading is objective and straightforward. Either you memorize the facts or you don't. You read just enough to write the essays. And you forget what the class was about within an hour of taking the final exam.

Sure, sometimes we want to sit passively and listen to a professor who expects little of the students beyond looking like they are interested. Undoubtedly, professors have a great wealth of knowledge and expertise in their disciplines. Some are even able to connect their scholarship to our lives today.

At times, it is nice to have a well-read expert provide a reading list, narrowing an insurmountable library of information to a cogent list of highlights. And there are those rare occasions where that introductory survey course opens a students eyes to an untapped interest.

But is this all there is to "higher education?" Is there more to the undergraduate experience at a prestigious research institution like the University of Pennsylvania than professor-dominated and dictated lectures?

Indeed, seminars are trumpeted as more individual-based academic opportunities. But what is a seminar? Is it just a class with an admissions cap? Does a small class necessarily imply a more personalized learning experience? Surely, a professor can lecture to 20 students as easily as she can to 100.

In fairness, many of these smaller classes are discussion-based. But too often the discussions are fabricated out of yellowing, apparently "hand-me-down" lecture notes. Rarely is the curriculum driven by the interests and knowledge of the students. Rarely do they choose their own academic adventures.

On a scale of political characterization, most universities have a lot of classes on the right side of the spectrum. Here, where students are passive receptors of knowledge with little input, so their output is practically insignificant. Students have little respect for the work they do in professor-dominated classes, and undergraduates as a whole acquire little respect from professors who have not created the opportunity for students to show that they too can gain knowledge through creating it.

As you move to the left on the scale towards greater student participation, the opportunities disappear. Outweighed and overshadowed by the authoritarian majority, the classes that revolve around the student's participation, collaboration and action are given little notice outside of grant proposals and viewbooks. In a society normatively built on democratic values, the dramatically non-democratic character of the university curriculum is alarming.

There are simply not enough "choose your own course of study" classes. Professors and administrators will be the first to note that creating student-driven academic classes requires more work of them. Understood. So what can students do about that? How about create the classes they want. Many undergraduates have taken the initiative to establish the relationships, design the curriculum and create the environments that enable their fellow students engage in their own learning.

Many professors who have collaborated with students in these precious few endeavors hail the experience as their best in teaching. But they are not rewarded for it. Qualitative involvement in the democratic learning experiences of undergraduates, those that have potentially the most formative impact of their educational career, carries no weight in tenure decisions.

As students in a capitalist democracy, it is our responsibility to create the demand for the kind education our society needs. Only when we contribute actively to the market of knowledge, will the supply meet our desires. But as students step into that role, it is the obligation of the administration to respond in kind. If the University of Pennsylvania, among its peers, is truly committed to democracy, it must value faculty who embody that goal. It must reward those who engage undergraduates in the generation of high-quality knowledge.

Those books may have been replaced by more sophisticated new media, but choosing your own adventure need not have gone with them. Instead, we must acknowledge the increased opportunities and responsibilities we have gained in their absence. We need no longer accept the limited possibilities that have been written for us. The future will be one of progressive change toward better democracy only when we choose among opportunities we have determined ourselves. We can, and must write our own adventure. Determining the course of our education is the place to start.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.