Workshops Aim to Address Reforms in Higher Education
Starting on March 27, faculty from Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Grinnell colleges will host a four-day program at Vassar’s Institute for the Liberal Arts that will explore ways of reforming higher education in the coming decades. To prepare for the event, two Vassar faculty members and two experts in imagining futures convened on the Vassar campus for three days of workshops sponsored by the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC).
The workshops were organized by Vassar Associate Professor of Anthropology Candice Lowe Swift; Associate Professor of Sociology Eréndira Rueda; New York University Professor Tony Patrick, founder of Tenfold Gaming Initiative, which encourages under-represented teens to pursue tech and game design careers; and Errol King, founder of Hidden Level Games, which enables teens to share digital games globally and encourages them to pursue careers in game design and computer programming.
Attended by more than two dozen students, faculty, and administrators from Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Grinnell, the workshops offered the participants the opportunity to suggest ideas about how they’d like higher education to look in 30 or 40 years. Suggestions included debt-free education, more emphasis on the performing and visual arts, better accessibility for disabled students, increased student input on syllabi in consultation with faculty, greater emphasis on care for the Earth, and a breakdown of existing barriers between colleges and universities and their surrounding communities.
Rueda and Lowe Swift said the AALAC-sponsored event and its March 27-30 sequel had sprung from their experience in co-writing an edited volume, titled Academic Belonging in Higher Education: Fostering Student Connection, Competence, and Confidence with students and faculty at Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Grinnell.
Rueda said the workshops were designed to “create opportunities for educators and students to dream together and think about how we might collectively produce some of what we’d like to see happening in our classrooms, on our campuses, and in higher ed more generally.”
“Of particular importance to the process is the ability to collaborate with students,” Rueda continued, “since learning and dreaming alongside our students is a core component of the work we do as educators, in and outside of formal classroom spaces.”
The March Signature Program will open with a keynote address by Antero Garcia, a former public school English teacher who is currently an Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Garcia’s research explores the possibilities of speculative imagination and healing in educational research.