Doing it with Your Hands

A description of the typical liberal arts education usually doesn’t include exploring Boston neighborhoods or teaching in the city’s public school system. Yet the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning offers just that: courses that require students to apply their classroom experience outside the wrought-iron gates of Harvard Yard.

For those who feel they can’t handle another Ec1010b lecture, the new Activity-Based Learning Project’s classes provide a way for students to get their hands dirty. But as with anything new at Harvard, the potential direction of the project has been a cause of controversy. The General Education Board’s proposed exploration of expanding the scope of activity-based learning has incurred the ire of critics who fear bureaucratization of student-run extracurricular activities.


CLOSE READING FOR A CAUSE

The Bok Center’s Activity-Based Learning Project began in the spring of 2005. It now offers 12 courses that have action components ranging from creating a photography portfolio to working for a political campaign. Most of the courses offered require that every person in the class participate in an outside activity that utilizes the material taught in the course. For instance, in Spanish 60, “Spanish and the Community,” a course exploring the Latin immigrant experience in the U.S., students volunteer at a variety of organizations that serve the Latin immigrant community in Boston.

For Hanna E. Melnick ’07, a Social Studies concentrator, Spanish 60 offered a welcome break from the monotony of reading Durkheim in Social Studies 10. “Working in the community actually gave me idea of what it is like to be a Latino immigrant in the U.S.” she says. “You cannot learn about people whose lives are not like yours without interactivaccination against ng with them.”

This semester, Lecturer on History and Literature Timothy P. McCarthy ’93 and Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Teacher Education Program Orin Gutlerner have designed an independent study for History and Literature students with a similar outside component. The course pairs undergraduates with teachers at a local charter school to help design a history and literature curriculum for their classes.

Even though one would not necessarily think of History and Literature as a hands-on discipline, McCarthy is quick to cite the value in applying the subject to the real world. “I take a broad approach to humanities. The study of humanities is the study of what it means to be human, so we can become more humane in the world. This independent study teaches just that,” McCarthy says.

Andrew Barrow Malone ’07, a history and literature concentrator taking McCarthy’s course, points out that he can help people while learning in a nontraditional method. “I plan on analyzing texts the same way that I would in an English class, but then to go a step further and ask, ‘Is this a suitable text for high school?’ To do that successfully you’ve got to think about the text as critically as you would if you were writing a paper. It’s kind of like close reading for a cause.”


BUILDING A BUREAUCRACY?

Last fall the Task Force for General Education, made up of Harvard Faculty, two students, and an assistant dean, met to determine the future direction of the undergraduate curriculum. Based on the undergraduate community’s apparent passion for extracurricular involvement, their proposal recommended that a committee be formed to explore ways to link students’ existing activities to their current coursework. This differs from the existing Bok Center program in that it lets students take initiative in relating their non-academic pursuits to classes instead of offering courses with a specific outside component.

But the Task Force’s proposal has some students afraid that the initiative would mix their academic and extracurricular lives unnecessarily. A Feb. 15 Crimson staff editorial voiced concerns that “the only thing that such a policy would accomplish would be to bureaucratize extracurricular life at Harvard.”

“It’s the specific use of the word extracurricular that I have a problem with,” says Rowan W. Dorin ’07, a history concentrator. “I only disagree with activity-based learning if it integrates existing Harvard activities. If you want to teach a class on Russian drama and have everyone perform a play by Chekov, that’s great.”

It is important to note that the aim of the Task Force’s proposal is not a forced integration of extracurricular and academic pursuits. Instead, it seeks to give students the opportunity to link the two if they choose. According to Kemper Professor of American History James T. Kloppenburg, “The goal is to give students more flexibility to plan their own undergraduate programs, experiment with various alternatives, and make changes. Locking students into a rigid curriculum ...is now seen as a problem rather than a goal.”

Lisa Boes, a research officer of the Activity-Based Learning Project, states that the ideas of the initiative are not set in stone. “My understanding of the language of the Gen Ed proposal is that it is just a start,” she says.


GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Though detractors of the ideas contained in the report state that students’ tendencies to separate academics from extracurriculars is “a boon not a burden,” others believe that mixing the two encourages a unique and effective way to learn.

According to Melnick, “More than anything, [activity-based learning] will teach you how to think. By putting myself in lives that were completely different from my own, I was able to objectively examine the way that I think.”

The Harvard faculty has yet to draft legislation from the Task Force’s report. Once it reaches legislative format, the proposal will face discussion in April and a final vote this coming May. But for now, the future of activity-based learning at Harvard remains in limbo.