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THE sentence “United we stand; divided we fall” paraphrases a line from one of Abraham Lincoln's speeches (69). In our contemporary society, that paraphrase may be so familiar that its significance has diminished. For example, in the early 1970s, when the singing duo Sonny and Cher recorded a best-seller entitled “United We Stand; Divided We Fall,” its lyrics encouraged a couple to remain together despite emotional and financial stress. Of course, when Lincoln warned that a house divided against itself must surely fall, he meant a unit larger than a couple or a household, namely, the United States. Lincoln feared that divisiveness would lead to secession and civil war and permanently fragment the nation into distrustful enemy camps.
Educators would do well to consider the statement “United we stand; divided we fall” on the scale of Lincoln's original admonition. A nation of educators can ill afford dissension among their ranks, and foreign language and literature faculty are no exception. From elementary school teachers to graduate faculty, from lecturers and instructors to full professors, from faculty at local community colleges to those at graduate institutions with a national clientele, they need to cooperate. If they do not, they risk permanent fragmentation, which would render it difficult to improve instruction, to promote articulation, to address the concerns that they share as members of the same discipline, and to maintain solid programs for students from age six to the mid-twenties and beyond.
Successful cooperation among colleagues who teach at various institutions and educational levels requires working with one another on a regular basis. Unfortunately, the professional training of foreign language and literature faculty does not necessarily prepare them to cooperate in this fashion. They might seek a model in another profession: medicine, for example. While serving as interns and residents, physicians begin to collaborate with their peers. In the early 1900s, Jane Abercrombie of the University of London Medical School studied the effects of collaboration on decisions made by interns at that institution. She observed that, when a team of interns conducted rounds, each member initially arrived at a tentative diagnosis for each case. After consulting with one another, they arrived at a consensus diagnosis, rarely identical to any single intern's tentative one, for which the entire team shared the responsibility (Bruffee). After internship and residency, American physicians collaborate with an even larger number, of their colleagues through county medical societies, on a monthly or bimonthly basis. Specialists attend meetings with generalists; those who have wealthy clients meet with those who practice in welfare clinics. Like teams of interns conducting rounds, these groups of professionals accept a collective responsibility for the quality and standards of practice in their localities.
Without duplicating the hierarchy of the American Medical Association, foreign language and literature faculty might establish similar locally based collaborative professional groups. Strengthening the Humanities through Foreign Language and Literature Studies, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the University of Pennsylvania, is currently fostering such groups. Its premise is that, like doctors, all teachers
The project is divided into four stages. Stage I ended on 1 April 1983, when, after a national competition, the project staff and regional directors selected seventy-five groups as participants. 1 Faculty from 130 post-secondary institutions and more than three hundred elementary and secondary schools and school systems collaborated on applications. In accordance with our specific requirements,
The seventy-five groups that submitted successful applications are based at community colleges, private liberal arts colleges, state-supported colleges and universities, and graduate centers, in places as widely separated as the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, Maine, and Oregon. All of them include faculty from the secondary and post-secondary levels; some include colleagues from elementary schools. Each group meets once every month or two during the academic year. More than thirteen thousand foreign language and literature faculty teach in the localities they have identified as their service areas.
Although more than eight hundred people requested applications prior to the 1 March deadline, not all of them formed steering committees to complete those applications. Four major reasons for this lack of interest emerged. Perhaps most important was the scarcity of financial rewards. In one of his essays, Samuel Taylor Coleridge urged his readers to practice “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (191), to accept the content of his poetry as if it were true. In a manner of speaking, not all of the original project audience could willingly suspend disbelief: they could not accept the proposition that external financial aid is not always the best antidote for curricular or institutional problems. Since our project has no grant funding for research, program development, equipment, course-related materials, or foreign travel, some decided not to participate.
A faculty member from Auburn University, in reporting on his group's progress, inadvertently responded to this objection. Initially, his dean, who had expected to receive more money than the project offered, was wary of applying for participant status. However, after consulting with members of the foreign language and literature faculty, the administrator began to realize that the proposed funding format was exactly what the Auburn area needed. The'project would not tie funding directly to specific programs, thus forcing the faculty to implement a program designed by someone else. On the contrary, local colleagues at all educational levels would have the opportunity to design programs according to their own needs and to benefit from the project staff's assistance in seeking funding for implementation, continuation, and dissemination.
For some college and university faculty, a second reason for not applying was lack of interest in working with local elementary and high school teachers. In particular, faculty at institutions that traditionally draw students from a national rather than local cluster of applicants reasoned that, since most of their freshmen do not graduate from local high schools, cooperation with local school teachers would not necessarily benefit college faculty.
The lists of elementary school and high school texts submitted with applications provide the basis for a response to this rationale. For example, many secondary school French faculty indicated that they use the Scott Foresman series Son et sens, Scènes et séjours , and Promenades et perspectives as course texts. Similar patterns of frequently used texts emerged among German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish teachers. If there are certain standard high school textbooks for each language, college-level faculty can expect that first-year students, regardless of geographic origin, have studied from them. Thus faculty can learn about the proficiency of incoming students and provide better articulation with their own courses by consulting local teachers who have experience with these widely used textbooks.
A third reason for lack of interest in the project was the amount of work required to apply. Faculty at different schools, colleges, and universities needed to begin collaborating immediately. Steering committees met more than once to discuss problems and goals and to assemble data. Between meetings, members collected data, discussed the project with administrators, and secured letters of commitment from those administrators.
The first response to this objection relates to the difficulty of overcoming long-term inertia. If high school and college faculty have never before met as colleagues, they may need an externally imposed baptism by fire. Like Isaac Newton's bodies at rest, they will remain inert if a forceful nudge never comes, and the most forceful nudge the project staff could devise was the elaborate preparation required of applicants. The second response relates to the psychological concept of delayed gratification. After the rigorous application procedure, the acceptance notice and the monthly meetings constitute a blissful reward and respite.
A fourth and final major objection came from faculty who feared that the local collaborative would duplicate benefits already offered by other groups. If so, colleagues might abandon those groups. Membership and, subsequently, financial support of various well-established foreign language and literature organizations might suffer.
A pragmatic consideration of foreign language and literature meetings yields an answer to this objection. The various state, regional, and national meetings offer important advantages:
Collaborative group meetings complement but do not duplicate these advantages:
The agendas at state, regional, and national meetings remain too crowded to allow sessions devoted to such specific local problems.
In their applications, participants stressed the need to address problems at the local level. They repeatedly identified ten major problems shared by elementary, secondary, and postsecondary faculty. The problems are listed in order of importance according to the percentage of faculty citing them:
Elementary school and high school teachers have three additional problems:
With these three exceptions, problems identified exist at all educational levels. This overwhelming similarity of concerns should indicate the need for collaboration among foreign language and literature faculty at all levels.
Frequently, in applications, college and university faculty signaled their recognition of the possibility that, through collaboration, they could learn from their peers in the elementary and high schools. One example appeared in a letter of support from a senior faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh:
Probably the most general problem is that old phenomenon that we in language and literature really are not trained to do our everyday teaching. We have Ph.D.'s and national reputations as scholars of literature , but most of our teaching is in language. Simply stated: we old-timers need to brush up (or acquire for the first time!) expertise on foreign language acquisition. … I fully support interdisciplinary studies such as comparative literature—and I love to teach in such programs, but in the final analysis, our bread and butter has to be with language acquisition, and we do not always take this part of our program as seriously as we ought.
Another expression of this desire came from the Mary-mount collaborative. While helping to prepare an application, Marymount College faculty learned that all members of the foreign language faculty at the local Hackley School had attended one of John Rassias' workshops on the intensive method. The collaborative plans to ask the Hackley faculty to present a similar workshop to the entire group. For a change, the high school faculty will lead a workshop, and group members will save the time and expense they would ordinarily need to invest in a complete workshop.
Like the Marymount collaborative, participating groups began meeting early to address the problems identified in their applications. Each one has access to a specifically assigned consultant. Most consultants and their groups had already communicated with each other at least once. This period of meetings and consultant support since 1 April constituted Stage II of the project. The entire period is actually preparation for Stage III—each group's regional conference. The Northeastern conference was held in Philadelphia, in October 1983; the Southeastern in Raleigh, in early December; the Far Western in Santa Cruz, in late January 1984; and the Midwestern was scheduled for mid-April in Cincinnati. Approximately twenty groups sent representatives to each conference.
Unfortunately, the word “conference” has developed a negative connotation—something brought home to the project staff as they pursued the last stages of funding from private foundations. This bad reputation is not entirely undeserved. At many conferences, participants are talked at , albeit sometimes by brilliant colleagues. Even so-called working conferences often focus on identifying problems and occasionally on laying blame. Participants depart for their separate cities in frustration because they have devoted no time to developing possible solutions or to establishing future courses of action.
This project's conferences were not forums for identifying problems. Each group was asked to send a five-member team to participate in one regional conference: three team members who are foreign language and literature faculty from at least two different levels of instruction; the fourth and fifth members are administrators—one at the elementary or secondary level, the other at the postsecondary level—who are not in foreign languages. By the time each team arrives, its group has already identified and begun to address local problems. The regional conference concentrates on developing several possible solutions to those problems. Consultants, project staff, and the team participants present new professional developments focused on improving the teaching of oral/aural proficiency, reading, writing, and critical thinking skills in foreign language and literature classes and improving the teaching of the great texts and cultures that remain the responsibility of humanities faculty. Their presentations also serve to orient foreign language and literature faculty in various academic sectors toward working together on a permanent basis in the future.
The conference schedule was also designed to permit participants to confer with one another: college faculty with high school faculty, administrators with faculty members, and so on. Teams confer as they prepare implementation plans that incorporate valuable suggestions from the sessions. The consultants' work is crucial to developing each team's sense of its own ability to sustain collaboration and bring to its group's institutions sufficient improvements to give them recognition as regional centers of foreign language and literature studies.
At the suggestion of Steven Lavine of the Rockefeller Foundation, the project staff invited humanities officers from private funding agencies to attend the various regional conferences. Foundation officers benefited from the opportunity to observe groups of faculty and administrators from different sectors working together to improve teaching and learning in this profession. The staff hopes that, as a result of these conferences, some humanities officers will welcome proposals from collaborative groups that seek to establish regional centers for outreach and continued faculty development.
The fourth and final stage begins after each regional conference and continues for six months or until the end of this project, whichever is longer. During Stage IV, each group will face several challenges. The first will be implementing the plans that its team and consultant designed at the regional conference. Depending on their complexity, some long-range portions of each plan may not be implemented for years. The second challenge will be establishing two similar collaborative groups in the immediate geographic area. The interpretation of “immediate geographic area” will vary according to the group: a metropolitan group may establish two additional groups in the same city; a rural one may need to travel to a nearby county to locate enough faculty to support a group; one in the western cordilleran region may need to travel to another state. By early 1985, approximately 225 collaborative groups of foreign language and literature faculty will exist across the country. For any group interested in developing support for programs, equipment, or faculty development at its regional center, locating funding will provide a third challenge.
What will result from these four stages, which some have described as grueling? In their applications, faculty anticipated seven general benefits:
In addition, they expect to learn from their association with members of other collaborative groups around the country that have similar problems and goals.
Group members have reported to the project staff that they are already realizing some of these benefits and simultaneously resolving some of the problems they had identified in their applications. In fact, with support from the staff and consultants, they are truly helping themselves.
Ideally, the successful efforts of the foreign language and literature faculty participating in this project will serve as a model for the professional development of their colleagues in other disciplines. Officers of the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Association of Independent Schools, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the New York Council on the Humanities have already expressed interest in consulting with the project staff in Philadelphia or sending observers to one of the regional conferences at their own expense to learn about the project firsthand. Even if colleagues in other disciplines decide not to duplicate this model, the possibility of its extension to additional foreign language and literature faculty still exists.
The project staff hopes for the following situation in years to come: When candidates interview for a foreign language teaching position at the elementary or high school level, they will want to know whether the school district teachers have access to a collaborative group and whether regular participation is rewarded with in-service credit or recertification units. When college-level candidates interview at the MLA convention or on campus, they will inquire in general about the history of collaboration with local public and private schools and specifically about the existence of a collaborative group that meets on a regular basis. Candidates at all levels will inquire because they will no longer want to teach in a house divided. By collaborating to remain up to date in professional literature, to work toward better articulation among all levels of instruction, and to address local concerns, they will seek to build an academic house that stands stronger than before. 4
The authors are in, respectively, the Department of Languages at Georgia Southern College and the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. This article is based on a presentation delivered at ADFL SeminarEast, held at Brown University, 13–16 June 1983.
1 The project director is Claire Gaudiani of the University of Pennsylvania. Clara Krug, the associate director, is currently based at the project's Philadelphia office. Regional directors are Charles Byrd, Emory and Henry College; Alan Gait, the University of Cincinnati; Bette Hirsch, Mills College; and Arlene Malinowski, North Carolina State University.
2 These approximate percentages are based on calculations by the project staff.
3 20% of the applications cited combined classes as a problem; 10% specified low faculty morale; 5% of the high schools represented have no foreign language program.
4 The authors are indebted to colleagues at ADFL Seminar East for their comments and to John Humma, Department of English and Philosophy, Georgia Southern College, who read an advanced draft of this article. Their criticism was invaluable.
Bruffee, Kenneth. “Collaborative Learning.” Presentation at the Writing across the University Colloquium, Univ. of Pennsylvania. 17 Feb. 1983.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria . Ed. John Calvin Metcalf. New York: Macmillan, 1926.
Lincoln, Abraham. “On Lincoln's Nomination to the United States Senate, Springfield, Illinois, June 17, 1858.” In Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln (1832–1865) . Ed. Merwin Roe. New York: Dutton, 1912. 69–77.
© 1984 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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