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Meeting Minutes

February 17, 2006

Workshop with Carol Geary Schneider

A light bulb moment goes off when looking at something through a particular lens.  We want them to be able to engage in different kinds of interpretive practices.  We could have a course where the theme would be cognitive scientists’ point of view, through the lens of a historical paradigm, as in what were the conditions, and through a theological paradigm.  This experience would increase the level of interpretive competence; looking at a poem from a psychoanalytical perspective as well as a cultural criticism perspective. 

Information literacy ranges from evaluation of information all the way to interpretation of theoretical paradigms through which we look at the world. 

Do we define students?  What is an Appalachian graduate? 

People should be learning concepts, not stuff, this gives you the ability to absorb and change and grow.  Students need to know the difference between experimental and literary analysis. 

Interpretive competence is between skills and knowledge.  There is a combination of analysis and synthesis.  Along with that, they would need to have skills, and awareness from being exposed to different things. 

AAC&U is so skills attitudinal based that knowledge drops off. 

Should we do something about communicative competence?  Philosophical and interpretive theories are side by side with rhetorical theories.  I see these as complimentary goals. 

One goal should have something to do with global/international education, students being able to think globally and understand local issues. 

1. Communication through multiple modes is important: receiving communication, reading and listening, speaking. 
2. Problem solving and interpretive competency. 
3. Ethics, social responsibility, and engagement. 

Are we in the position of molding character?  Attitudes and knowledge are not the same thing.  Can we teach tolerance? 

We can model it. 

It’s a lot easier to hate when you don’t know. 

We want them to be people who know there are choices to be made.  How do you do that in an informed and intelligent way?  Is it enough to give them knowledge to make those choices or not? 

It’s just exposure period in some cases. 

We don’t need to teach them how to think, but what science is and what science isn’t.  Problem solving that allows for dialogue; this has to be something that comes out of their conversation that we can’t anticipate. 

We should be getting them to examine the potential effects of these choices.  We have to be able to show that they can do it. 

At least we have learned the process. 

People in student development, we tend to talk about experience vs. theory.  If we get them valuing the process, then they’ll use those interpretive skills.  We have to use the process over and over as many times as the students can cycle through. 

Carol Geary-Schneider:  I have a couple observations:

You need to foster campus discussion about how knowledge and choice start with academic integrity:  Starting with that gets you into one voice.  People are committed to teaching.  There is a commitment to the standard of scientific inquiry. 

We don’t want to indoctrinate, but there are some standards without which what we are trying to teach makes no sense.

We want them to be cultivating a process by which they would make responsible choices.