28, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 1-2
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From the Editor
Elizabeth B. Welles
CHANGE in academic life occurs gradually. Rarely does an institution, a department, or a course grow or decline rapidly; rarely do teachers embrace new approaches, modify the curriculum, or revise the reward system without lengthy deliberation. Transforming students is an equally slow process, and learning a foreign language is notoriously long and arduous. Recently, however, our community has become conscious of changes in higher education that seem to have arrived overnight. These, launched both from outside educational circles and from within, have produced new academic realities that we must accommodate. The essays in this issue describe this developing context and examine how foreign language professionals have grappled with the resulting situations.
One of the most influential developments has been the emerging public suspicion of higher education. Whether or not this view has precipitated funding decreases, most colleges and universities are experiencing some sort of financial stress. To deal with straitened circumstances some administrations have allowed the corporate model of decision making to creep into their institutions and their rhetoric, bringing along the now-familiar buzzword accountability . Foreign language departments, like all others, are now accountable not only to students and administrations but also to trustees, graduates, legislators, parents, and the community, who ask: How well are students learning? Why are part-timers instead of the highly paid professors teaching my child's language courses? How does college prepare students for jobs? Why should students learn any language but Spanish? These questions filter down from administrations to departments, whose chairs are expected to answer them. Such questions often motivate substantial departmental reviews that can lead to the restructuring of language and literature teaching in the light of new student populations, advances in technologies, in methodologies, in assessment measures, and—among the most crucial developments for foreign language departments—enrollment patterns. Or such questions can foreshadow the danger of cuts; thus chairs need to know how to defend foreign languages, humanities, and even the idea of a liberal arts education in an increasingly pragmatic society.
In the keynote address at the 1996 ADFL Seminar West Dorothy James tackled the ecology of issues enmeshing foreign language and literature teaching in American higher education. She sees that fiscal constraints and traditional departmental structures have combined to create a crisis in leadership. The reward system that privileges research and publication has created a hierarchy of academics ranked by prestige and pay, ranging from literary stars down to introductory language teachers. Chairing and otherwise “minding the store” is left to those who are willing to take the responsibility and do the work. This system, she believes, is no longer congruent with what the students who are swelling the ranks of introductory language classes today want and are prepared and willing to learn. Further, she comments, any sensible administrator would think twice about using scarce resources to have highly paid professors teach small numbers of students in upper-level literature seminars. And that same administrator would likely conclude that lower-level language courses, which enroll the most students, could be cheaply taught by those who are paid the least and thus happily entrust this task to adjuncts to avoid the need for expensive full-time faculty lines. She urges chairs to lead the way in bringing literature and language, research and teaching back together in a curriculum that integrates language and culture throughout the undergraduate experience and into graduate school. Chairs must overcome their reluctance and ask senior professors to teach the full array of undergraduate courses and to sacrifice some research time for the good of their departments. At a time when languages are threatened with downsizing, the department would at least survive and might even thrive. As James says, “The best hope of a genuinely high-level, multiple-option education in foreign languages surely lies for many of us in having one faculty that will work with language in a cultural-literary context and open the doors to the highest levels of literacy for our students” (James 8).
Three essays deal with more specific aspects of change: student populations, technology, and teacher preparation. Madeleine Lively offers a valuable perspective from a successful foreign language program in a two-year institution. Since more than half of all freshmen and sophomores are enrolled in two-year colleges, students like Lively's will help shape the future curriculum. These students are likely to be adults who graduated from high school years ago, who have jobs or families, who are taking courses for career advancement or personal development, and who have little spare time. Lively contends that it is therefore important for faculty members to be creative in accommodating a wide range of student goals, time constraints, backgrounds, and capabilities, creating different kinds of course structures and schedules. Distance learning and the research opportunities that cultural and linguistic Internet sites provide have made technology essential to this flexibility.
Lively's espousal of electronic media is borne out by Gilberte Furstenberg, who has not only organized a course around them but also created a major multimedia program ( A la rencontre de Philippe ); she believes the electronic media provide an opportunity for positive change, but only if faculty members learn to use them. She points out that such materials can allow interactive exchanges and create cultural and linguistic contexts that are as near immersion in the language as a student can get without leaving campus. Furstenberg finds that students who use technology become more actively engaged in learning and less dependent on the teacher. For the teacher, technology can suggest a new kind of pedagogy that gets away from the text, blackboard, or audiotape and encourages teachers and students to collaborate in discovering and constructing new connections among types of language and knowledge.
Gail Guntermann expands the list of factors pressing for change to include the school-reform movement that calls for substantial review of teacher preparation. However, because academic departments and even schools of education have not held that endeavor in much esteem, there are few resources and faculty rewards to provide incentives for improvement. But Guntermann sees positive signs for teacher preparation: a greater awareness of its urgency, a greater attention to articulation between high schools and colleges, a greater number of specialists hired in applied linguistics, and a shift in the reward system toward recognizing teaching.
The essays by Reed Anderson and Elvira García examine the role of department chair in the face of these changes. Anderson connects the evolution of the chair from colleague-leader to manager with the adoption of the corporate model for college administration that sometimes clashes with the collegial habits and scholarly interests of department members. The dilemma is how to establish new values so that we reward success in the discipline and yet foster faculty commitment to the department and institution. Now that money is scarce and enrollments are shifting, the situation has become more difficult because of reliance on part-time faculty members who have little incentive for such commitment. He urges chairs to keep up with national trends in higher education, to be engaged in the profession as well as the discipline, and to take seriously their role as leaders in understanding and confronting the new order. García sees the chair primarily as a mediator between new forces and old practices. Chairs need to translate external demands into palatable tasks to maintain faculty productivity and curriculum development, and they must encourage faculty members to embrace new solutions rather than to cling to tradition.
Much of the conversation about change in foreign language education has been dominated over the last year by enrollment issues, in particular the effects of the increases in Spanish and the declines in French, German, and Russian. Anecdotal reports were confirmed by the MLA survey on foreign language enrollments released in October and published in the Winter 1997 Bulletin . While these trends have evolved over two decades, they stand out in greater relief in times of financial hardship.
The forum of nine papers published here—the first forum section to appear in an ADFL Bulletin —resulted largely from discussions about enrollment shifts held at Seminars East and West in 1996. Sensing the urgency of the issue, we added a session at the end of each seminar, in which participants compared developments in their institutions, described solutions for the allocation of resources and staffing, and offered strategies for confronting the wide variety of educational and financial problems that have arisen as a result of the enrollment trends. While seminar attendees worked toward consensus, potential fault lines in language departments caused by the choices facing us lurked just below the surface. No amount of collegiality can eliminate the anxiety behind such questions as How can departments maintain under-enrolled upper-level literature courses? What about starting a consortium or a distance-learning program to keep undersubscribed languages afloat? How can chairs retain vacated faculty lines? How can departments staff introductory courses in Spanish or reduce the registrations in them? The sense of the meetings, reflected in these papers, was that the great interest among Americans in learning a foreign language (Spanish) was a good thing but that programs in other languages needed to be maintained in the college curriculum. However, since the enrollment shifts pose one of the main issues facing the profession, language faculty members need to work together and not allow themselves to engage in mutually destructive turf battles.
Such are the tensions that change has caused in foreign language teaching. Diminished resources and accountability to constituencies that do not share our humanist assumptions, combined with the traditional divisions among languages and literatures, are stretching the departmental fabric. At the same time, resourceful, hardworking faculty members and chairs who see change as an opportunity to be creative are attempting to make a new departmental tapestry that can accommodate tradition while incorporating new methodologies and technology, teach literature while integrating it with language and culture, and maintain support for traditional literary and linguistic research while recognizing new fields. This community of foreign language professionals will help us rise to meet our challenges and help us think about the system-wide changes in the academic landscape.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 28, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 1-2 |
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