by Ken O’Donnell
An earlier post described the ways Collective Impact – the structured coordination of effort across settings and sectors – applies to organizations, and drew from a conversation I had with Jane Close Conoley, president of California State University Long Beach. This one brings the focus in closer, to the delivery of high-impact practices themselves.
The field has spent much of its young life in a struggle for equity. Immersive, highly engaging experiences like internships, undergraduate research, and service learning are ubiquitous, but also resource intensive for the student as well as the institution. Making them available to the students who most stand to benefit means accommodating – and leveraging – the student’s life beyond the classroom.
An influence on Conoley’s thinking, and on mine, is Urie Bronfenbrenner. His greatest hit is a 1979 work called The Ecology of Human Development. It recognizes learning as something that happens in multiple, nested contexts:
Most of us picture education in the closest, Microsystem sense of one-on-one relationships: the darkest green lines above. That is, learner to professor, or learner to peer educator, or learner to internship supervisor, for example.
Yuri Bronfenbrenner theorized about multiple, nested contexts for student learning. (Image credit: educativity blog)
Bronfenbrenner’s insight is that each of those settings is embedded in interrelationships of its own (the Mesosystem), along with significant contexts beyond the direct experience of the learner. His thinking influenced not only the field of developmental psychology but also K-12 education, social work, and public policy. In the mid-1960s he was one of the architects of Head Start.
In the framing of Bronfenbrenner, traditional courses are dyadic, and designed mostly with the one-on-one Microsystem in mind. HIPs are not. They often draw their power from confounding, interactive effects, rippling through the nested contexts of the student’s life.
This is where Conoley and I believe a recent article in The Atlantic got it wrong. The writer argued that families who want a full college experience during the pandemic demonstrate their priority must not be on the learning, which is available safely online. Hogwash. The content may be posted there, but to practice the skills, dispositions, and attitudes you’ll need for the rest of your life, you need more than WiFi and a laptop. High-impact learning is a contact sport.
It’s interesting to me that the same attention to multilateral relationships is so essential for both the learning we care about, and the large-scale administration – the tools of Collective Impact – required to bring it about.
I asked President Conoley if anything surprised her about a career spent applying what she’d studied as a graduate student. She thought about it for a moment, and then said “I’m surprised by how well it works.”
(Image credit: Long Beach Post)