June 1, 2006

By Lauren Heaton

A few weeks after the end of the first year in which Antioch College implemented its new curriculum as part of the Renewal Plan, administrators, faculty members and students said the mood on campus was positive, although many said they were exhausted.

As literature professor Ben Grossberg put it, Antioch was not only transitioning to a new way of delivering its academic program but also figuring out what that program was.

The Core Program, the new curriculum for first-year students, was the most difficult because it focused on the interdisciplinary team teaching that is at the heart of the Renewal Plan.

“The first year of implementing the Core was challenging for the entire Antioch community,” Grossberg said.

Some hard evidence
As far as the success of the first year goes, Andrzej Bloch, Antioch’s dean of faculty, likes to rely on quantifiable facts.

In the past, Antioch’s student attrition rate, particularly for first-year students, has hovered above 20 percent. Partly because the college did not have time to adequately publicize the new curriculum, the class that entered Antioch in the fall of 2005 was a small group of about 54 students. But at the end of the year, according to Bloch, the school had retained 48 or 49, a step, he said, in the right direction.

This year’s freshmen also earned an average of three more credits per term than their predecessors, and, according to Bloch, submitted end-of-term evaluations that appeared to be more positive than in the past.

In addition, Bloch said, nearly all of these students have already committed to one of three co-op jobs next term, which indicates that they will likely still be enrolled at Antioch as sophomores in the fall.

“All of this is confirmation to me, that if students are succeeding, meaning they’re learning and earning credits, it means they are more likely to stay,” he said. “It might be some evidence that the program is working better. It may be some confirmation that this was the right change for Antioch.”

The college also expects to welcome in the fall an incoming class of 120 to 150 students, Bloch said.

Janice Kinghorn, economics professor and coordinator of the core program, and others attribute the increase to the college’s ability to advertise the complete first- and second-year curriculum and parts of the third- and fourth-year studies program.

While many students may be enthusiastic about the new program, some faculty members have had difficulty managing the change. Seven faculty members, including some who were tenure-track professors, left last year, which has stretched an already small faculty very thin, some said.

View from the faculty
From the perspective of several faculty members, the past year was full of both challenges and exhilarating experiences.

Photography professor Denny Eagleson, who is also the coordinator of the upper-level curriculum, said she learned a lot by teaming with literature professor Jean Gregorek and anthropology professor Beverly Rogers to teach an interdisciplinary Core course, “American Identities,” in the fall.

“We were challenged to create something new that was outside our expertise, but teaching with colleagues we get to learn how others’ perspectives inform our own body of knowledge,” Eagleson said. “I got to be in a classroom working with ethnic literature and the formation of cultural identity and self-representation through photography. It was very compelling.”

Grossberg and Kinghorn said they also felt excited by working closely to create connections between their seemingly disparate disciplines and produce something engaging for their students.

“It was hard to tell people what to expect, but as they went through the program, they experienced things that were powerful and amazing,” Kinghorn said. “You can hear about what integration is and how it happens, but until you do it yourself, you don’t get it.”

“This is a paradigm shift for Antioch. It’s a different philosophy of education,” Bloch said. “Before, new Antioch students could take any course they wanted, but now they enter the Core Program and it’s immersion into the liberal arts and integrative learning embedded into the curriculum.”

Because of this shift, however, Eagleson said she realized early into her core course that the ideas and interdisciplinary connections she and her colleagues had planned to cover were sometimes too complex for students who were struggling to read at a college level and write an in-depth research paper. Focusing on the liberal arts meant helping students develop basic skills, which left less time for the deeper academic investigation she was accustomed to, she said.

“In some ways the interdisciplinary content felt less rigorous than in my ‘stand-alone’ classes,” Grossberg said. “I would have loved to dive more deeply into our study of literature and creative writing. Teaching in the Core involves giving up some of one’s disciplinary focus.”

The fact that first-year students were isolated in a triad of integrated courses, Eagleson said, also meant that they had no upper-class students to model motivation and engaging classroom discussions.

On the other hand, math professor Eli Nettles said, she learned more about her students by meeting with them on a daily basis and observing them thrive in another professor’s classroom. It gave her insight into her students’ different strengths and ideas about how to teach her subject from a new perspective, she said.

And Grossberg acknowledged that the first-year students needed the curriculum change.

“Right or wrong, I believe we will make it the right choice by enacting it in an effective manner,” he said. “I am part of a very strong faculty, and I half suspect we could make anything work.”

View from the students
Several first-year students expressed support for their initial experience at Antioch.

Michael Durant said he knew what to expect when he came to Antioch, and he felt that he was able to make compelling connections in his first Core course, “Embodied Minds, Thinking Bodies.” As a pre-med student, he said, he was interested in studying how stress in the mind can trigger the body to break down and develop certain diseases, and how bad posture can produce stress.

“I saw how the world is very connected, and that the entire body is one, which is what holistic medicine is about,” he said. “You can make connections on so many different levels and see how all disciplines are integrated with each other. I had a tremendous experience.”

But Durant said he had difficulty with writing proficiency at the college level and did not get enough support to take full advantage of his second Core course.

Grouping all first-year students together in and out of class gave Kai Qualben a strong sense of connection to the Antioch community, he said. But both he and Durant also said they were frustrated at times with being stuck not only taking classes with the same group of students, but also living with them in the dorms.

Third-year student India Davis said she was concerned that the Core Program would limit students’ sense of autonomy and freedom to choose their own courses and define their education. She said she thought it could lead students to doubt whether the administration trusts them as mature adults who are able to design their own curriculum.

In some ways, said 2005 graduate Shelby Chestnut, who works in the student government office and has served on planning committees for the new curriculum, the new curriculum isn’t that different from the old Antioch. Both are founded on the liberal arts, she said. But with the new program students are making cross-disciplinary connections at the beginning of their career, she said, whereas with the old program, students were more likely to make connections in their upper-level classes.

Chestnut said the program would succeed because of the “brilliant and committed faculty” and because of Antioch’s legacy as an innovative survivor.

“This year hasn’t been easy, but people are working hard to make it work,” Davis said. “I don’t think the learning communities are the reason people are staying here and committing, but it’s because it’s Antioch.”

Future of the new curriculum
After next year, 90 percent of the faculty will have experienced teaching in the Core Program, and there will be just the upper-level courses to implement, Kinghorn said.

The second year of the new curriculum has been mapped out to encourage exploration of disciplines through clustered and linked courses.

According to Bloch, the curriculum still encourages integrative education, but the clustered courses involve two closely related disciplines that are taught separately around a common theme, with a weekly seminar in common. Linked courses are similar, except they involve a common group of students.

Grossberg and Eagleson are teaching a cluster course in the spring of 2007 around how image and text inform both writing and art. Environmental studies professor Colette Palamar and art professor Nevin Mercede will teach a linked course, “Seeing Environments: Art, Earth and Perception.”

The other key piece of the new curriculum is the first co-op experience in the fall semester of students’ second year, Bloch said. Students have three location choices, Washington, D.C., the Santa Fe area or the Yellow Springs/Southwest Ohio area. The co-ops will be paid jobs, and students will maintain connection with an onsite co-op community coordinator, often an alumnus, who will be asked to play the role of mentor and help connect the students to people and organizations within the co-op community. There will also be academic work to connect the experience in the field with the academic life of the classroom.

When students return to campus in the spring of their second year, they will begin taking cluster courses, and seek an advisor to help them begin to define their own individually designed major.

Both second-year students and upper-level students can take the cluster/linked courses, and when the new curriculum is fully developed, there will be practically no stand-alone courses, Bloch said.

By designing the program and implementing it within a matter of two years, Eagleson said, the faculty has had to work extremely hard. At the same time, professors have also had the opportunity to design the program the way it works best for Antioch, she said.

“You don’t transform a place easily. Transformational change is really, really hard,” Eagleson said. “It’s really a creative enterprise, if people have the energy to do it. I feel like, wow, we could make something quite amazing.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com