Changing the Landscape of Higher Education

She anticipates more growth more quickly in the field of active learning, growth that will change the landscape of higher education. So said Kim Eby, the Associate Provost for Faculty Development at George Mason University and the keynote speaker this morning at the National Forum on Active Learning Classrooms. She discussed how she and others at George Mason were working to encourage the development of active learning classrooms and the faculty to teach in them. Given the increasing accessibility digital technology gives to people who wish to educate themselves, or in short, the competition universities and colleges face from other media and methods of education, Eby claims it makes good sense to promote a style of learning that teaches people how to use that information rather than simply presenting it in a traditional format. Moreover, she suggested that these changes are needed in the face of advances in technology and the responsibility to prepare students for careers and, much more significantly, a future that is increasingly harder to predict with the rate of technological change.

Additionally, Eby spoke of the greater effectiveness of active learning in teaching more veterans, more non-traditional students, and more under-represented students. Considering all this impending change, she encouraged more administrative support for faculty taking innovative risks and more decentering of the classroom. What I found particularly accurate in her description of active learning was her dismissal of the either/or proposition of the sage on the stage or the guide on the side, instead promoting the idea of “meddlers in the middle;” which I took to be a middle position of sorts between the teacher-focused method of the lecture and the model of teachers quietly and delicately advising as they watched their students self-educate--a position that suggests more teacher input than sideline coaching, if I’m not misrepresenting her point.