What we mean by integrated humanities is we're trying to get these different disciplines out of their silos, the academic disciplines in higher education, they tend to exist in these palaces where they, they don't go outside of their walls because they're so focused on what's going on in their own discipline. The problem with that, if you've ever been a part of a large scale project anywhere outside the world of college, you know that it takes a multitude of disciplines sitting down at a table to make a large project occur. So that's the world that students are going to be walking into, and they get out of here. So we want to educate them to be able to navigate that world and so we want to create experiences that involve multiple disciplines. A traditional
liberal arts education, which exposes students to science, math, social science and humanities is the cornerstone for American universities and colleges. But with a rising need for education in technical trades in specialized fields, do traditional liberal arts core curricula resonate with students in the same way. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. Our guest today is working to find new methods to connect students with the vital skills developed in humanities courses, even though those students are looking for careers outside of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. In short, he's working to answer the student question, how do I use this in real life?
My name is Wayne bass. I've been working at Heartland since 2017, I was hired as a humanities and Religious Studies professor, and I've been in education for over two decades now and in the classroom are very passionate about it, I very much enjoy my job. I hold a BA in English with a concentration in education, I was a high school teacher, I was a high school coach. Then I moved on to get a master's degree in religious studies with a focus on Eastern religious traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism. And then I hold a PhD in Asian languages and cultures where I also focused on Asian religious and philosophical traditions. And then because of that background, and because of my teaching experience, I was hired in 2017, to come and kind of build on the non western side of our humanities offerings here. So I've been here for six years, and have enjoyed my time very much.
Well, community colleges, I would say are, in some ways, maybe more diverse in your student body. That even though when we think of more classical liberal arts education, community colleges, it's a classical liberal arts education for transfer students who are going to go on pursue a bachelor's degree, but you have a lot of community college students coming from a lot of different backgrounds pursuing a lot of different things. What is the importance in introducing those students, they might be studying nursing, they might be studying industrial technology, to start to get a little bit of that liberal arts education?
Well, I think the answer to that lies in the learning outcomes of the different courses that they teach, that they take, and that we teach. But those outcomes, those learning outcomes tie to more broader skills, what we call the essential competencies here, and I think that's where, for anyone, I think that's where the real paydirt from what it is that we teach, that's really where you'll find it. So in my classes, where there's a huge emphasis on problem solving, critical thinking, there's a big emphasis on the ability to communicate, there's a big emphasis on diversity, that is not just appreciating that sort of everyone is different. But being able to represent yourself and who you are, and where you are in the mix of things, and understand where other people are coming from and what things they're bringing to the table. Those skills are broadly applicable. They are broadly marketable, they're come modifiable in almost any professional or personal context. And so in my classes, that's what I really, really emphasize, is that that's what you're going for here. You're going for an appreciation of diversity, the ability to represent yourself communicate, and the ability to look at problems, think critically about problems and in the end, solve problems, because I think the conversation in our culture has shifted from what did you learn today? To what problems have you solved today? So I'm big on problem solving, there. And again, that's all encoded in the learning outcomes of our courses and how their attire to what these things that we call the essential competencies at the college?
Do students always understand that coming into the courses, I think that it's not uncommon for any college student, any high school student, any student and I was like, how am I gonna? I'm never going to use this explain to in your last answer, how it could be used. But an incoming student might not necessarily understand that or warm up to that idea.
Yes. And that is where I feel like We on the side of higher education should do a better job of making that clear to students and teaching to those skills, and making sure that the classes that we're offering are really targeting those skills so that students are learning to think critically learning to solve problems learning to communicate, learning to appreciate, like really actually not just paying lip service to these things. But that's what we're communicating to students that that's what they're here to do. And that's what we're actually assessing is their ability to do those things. For me, for my courses, me having perceived where I feel like in higher education, we don't do a good enough job of making this transparent. The first week or two of my class is spent explaining this to students. This is why you are here, this is what you were doing. This is what you're going to take away from this class, if I do my job properly, and you do your job properly, this is what you're going to walk away from this class having really acquired that you can use the actual real world, because I'm a big advocate of the idea that if we're not teaching them things that are transforming their lives in the outside world, then what good is it? I call these teach twos. That is you have to teach directly to this thing that you're trying to get them to do and not just depend on it being a kind of after effect. So to answer your question, pointedly, I think we need to do a better job of that and making that clear to students. For my own part, there's, if you take one of my classes, you're going to hear a lot about why you are taking the course and it's something that's going to be reiterated again and again throughout the semester. And it's constantly going to be tied back to those essential competencies, critical thinking, problem solving communication, diversity.
Well, there's something that you were a part of recently at Heartland Community College that I don't know if it was a pilot program, or if it was just something that was developed to try to put more structure to that very thing you're talking about. It's integrated humanities, can you explain a little bit about how these integrated humanities courses were developed, what the goal was and how that all came about? Sure.
That's a lot to talk about. So let me just talk about one specific example of what it is that we're doing this idea of integrated humanity. So what we mean by integrated humanities is, we're trying to get these different disciplines out of their silos, the academic disciplines in higher education, they tend to exist in these palaces where they, they don't go outside of their walls, because they're so focused on what's going on in their own discipline, like religious studies, or psychology or whatever. And so that's the problem with that, with having that kind of structure, the discipline structure is that creates a disconnect between what's going on on the college and what goes on in the actual world. Because if you've ever been a part of a large scale project, anywhere outside the world of college, you know that it takes a multitude of disciplines sitting down at a table to make a large project occur. So that's the world that students are going to be walking into, and they get out of here. So we want to educate them to be able to navigate that world. And so we want to create experiences that involve multiple disciplines. And so there have been multiple initiatives in my division, Liberal Arts and Social Sciences recently, that have been trying to reach across into these other divisions and work with these other divisions on projects and curriculum. One of those has been the themed course Initiative, where we see in our division, Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, which you'll hear me refer to as last from here on out. And last, we have a lot of high enrollment courses that are commonly required for Heartland degrees and certificate programs. So English 101, English 102, comm 101, whatever certificate or associate or applied associate you're coming here for, it's very likely that you're going to have to come through our door at some point to take one of these high enrollment course, to finish the program. So we had the idea, we have students coming from all these different areas, they're coming here for different interests, they all have to take these courses that we offer. So let's create themed versions of these courses that speak more directly to the interests of the students. So at their core, these courses are the same and that they have the same broader learning outcomes, as I said, problem solving, critical thinking, communication, things like that. But the difference is with the themed courses, so for instance, a theme like the environment, all the examples that the instructor chooses and gives to the students. All the research that the students do in the class is going to be centered on this theme of the environment, health care, all the examples that the professor provides, all the research that students do will be under the theme of health care. So in that way, we're adding another layer of learning to those broader outcomes by coloring and flavoring everything in the course with that theme, so that those broader outcomes speak more directly to the individual, professional or personal interests of the students.
You mentioned. to healthcare, and you mentioned the environment, are there other themed courses that were built up in this initiative?
Yes. So the themes that we eventually came up with were healthcare. That's two words. That was a learn something that we learned the difference between one word healthcare and two words out, do you know the difference between,
I probably get it wrong when we have to use it here in college? What is the difference?
Well, I didn't know the difference either. I would have been surprised if you did, because none of us knew the difference. The difference is health care. One word refers to the industry, whereas health care two words refers to anything that someone might do that contributes to their health exercise. So the larger two word term encompasses the smaller one word term. So that was one health care that we picked a theme, business and economy was another one that we chose agriculture in the natural world. So that's resonating with the agriculture complex that we have going up on the west end of campus, environmental technology, that's coupled with the electric vehicle energy storage facility that's going up on the north end of campus, and then the environment. So those were the five themes that we settled on. And all of those were intended to resonate with other initiatives at the college because we know students are going to be coming here for the ag program for the electric vehicle program. And I said that at the beginning about health care, because we intentionally wanted to make these themes, very broad, so that they would speak to not just students who are going into healthcare, one word, but for students maybe who weren't healthcare majors. But we're interested in talking about the issue that we have, and the affordability of health care here in America, or ethical issues about health care, or even something like alternative medicine that fits under that larger theme healthcare. So the themes really were intended to be very broad, to reach a large audience.
Is there any struggle? And maybe this is why it took sort of a focused effort to do this, to find faculty to kind of specialize their course in that way. Because I would imagine that any of the regular faculty teaching these core courses could do so yeah. But sometimes you have a plan, you go with that plan. It works from semester, semester semester, and then you deal with individual student needs. Yeah. So was it a struggle to find people say, I'm going to change my class, or I'm going to develop a new class? Or I can teach with a focus on the environment? Or yes and
no, yes, in that it took a long time for us to come up with these themes. But that's the back end of things. But in terms of finding faculty who are willing to do something innovative and new, as long as it is in the service of Heartland students. My division has a lot of really dynamite instructors. And so we got some really dynamite instructors to pilot this initiative to the instructors that are on the Steam course initiative, Josh Fitzgerald in communication and Jeremy Scott in English, or just named Outstanding Faculty of the Year. And they are just two of the nine instructors that we that stepped forward that said, you know, yeah, we'd love to run something like this. In fact, there were a few of the other professors who were in conversations with me, Richard C, who's Jennifer pug, and they had been in conversation with me about doing something like this years back, Sue fish in calm, she had actually proposed something like this a year or two ago. And she was one of the ones that kind of tricked us into action, like we need to be able to do something like this. So I say yes, and that it was very difficult to get to the theme. So we didn't know what we were going to tell faculty, we were just telling them that something was coming. But then when it actually came, and it hit the ground. And we said, look, this is what we're doing. And this is what we're looking for. We had a number of excellent faculty stepped forward. And that's one of the things I'm very excited about with this initiative, because I know the students that go into these courses are going to have a very transformative experience, because we really did get some dynamite faculty, the pilot is going up this coming semester, or you're getting ready to launch it, we're getting ready to launch it. Yes. And up to this point has just been a monument of effort on the part of lots of folks in my division, just trying to put this together. It has been a very big lift, just to get us to this point. And it's a long story of how we got here and what the challenges were, what the hurdles were but in the end, we put it together and we're very excited about it.
I know that this came forth from an initiative to offer opportunity in the form of grants, internal grants. Yes. For faculty, specifically in Liberal Arts and Social Sciences that wanted to do some innovative thing. Yes. How beneficial was that? And was that the thing that finally got over the hurdle? You've been talking about it for years. Lots of faculty were interested in But this just like this is if you apply for this and get this, it's happening. Yes,
absolutely. That is absolutely what made the difference. And that money came as a result of the collective wisdom of our president Keith corneal, and our Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Rick Pierce, their collective wisdom, the advocacy of our last administration, Linda, think of it and Carol Hahn, who have been champions of our division to the upper administration, and we're so grateful to them and having those resources available is absolutely what made the difference. There's no doubt about it, because I remember very clearly when Carol Hahn and I realized that this steam course initiative could actually happen. It was in a meeting in her office and we were we had just talked to Lisa slaver who knows anything and everything about scheduling here at Heartland. I think Lisa sleeper knows anything and everything about everything here Artland. But she's a great one to ask for questions like this, like logistical questions. And we just gotten out of a meeting with her, where she said, yeah, we can list courses as themed on the schedule, we can actually have English one on one, and then we can have a theme after it. And this was, I mean, our heads exploded Carol and I our heads exploded, because we've been for years, we've been looking at how can we do something like this. And I remember I went straight into her office, and she and I had this immediate realization of a, you know, this could actually happen, we could actually do this, but be, this is going to be a huge, huge lift, this is going to be a lot of work, because we're going to have to figure out what themes we can actually run, we're going to have to talk to all the different deans of the division to figure out look at their numbers and see how many people are there out there that are actually coming here to take business and how many of them have actually taken English one on one already, and there's a lot of that data distort, three, we're gonna have to talk to advising to figure out how we can get this out to the students, we're gonna have to talk to marketing to see how they can be involved. And so we were just staring down the barrel of a lot of work. And so what she and I did was, we put together a an application for a last Innovation Grant, that gave me time in the form of release from one course for one semester, fall 2022. And I didn't have to go to class, I didn't have to grade papers, I could just focus on this. And that's what the money went to. And so fall 2022 was a whirlwind of meetings with Dean's with advising with marketing, trying to find faculty. And it absolutely would not have happened if it was not for those grant funds. Because the grant funds are kind of what put you in a position of looking out there and saying, Okay, what could I actually do if I had the support in the form of something like time that I could actually put my time into it? And that's absolutely how this came about was through those grants.
So what's the next step? You're going to try it out in the 2023 2024? academic year? Yeah. See how how it goes, see what can be adjusted? Is this something that assuming it goes, Well, assuming the students react to it, it's going to be part of the curriculum going forward,
fingers crossed. I mean, I really feel that if it does not remain part of the curriculum going forward, you know, it has an impact on the students that went through the pilot. But if we actually want to transform the culture, but that's what our mission says, that's what the mission, we have this strategic plan, that's the North Star of everything that we do. And it's you know, vision and mission and values and priorities and goals. And if you look at the very first value is learners were learner centered, creating an individual, unique, personalized pathway for every student that comes through. So this initiative speaks directly to the mission. So I hope it does move forward. But what that's going to require his number one, the students that come in are going to have to have a transformative experience, we need for them to have a good experience in the courses, I'm very confident they will because of the instructors that we got, as I said, and also the way the courses are laid out, I think it's just designed that it's going to be unique and different than the kind of courses that they normally take. So what we're going to have to do after that is, once we see the impact that it has, and we have measures like surveys, try to get to try to get at least qualitative data to find out what the student experience was like to take that to my administration within the division, and so that they can take it to the you know, they're the ones that are that are managing them to say, this needs to be built into our systems somehow. So if it's built into the system, it's not going to go away. But these things don't propagate themselves. So what lies in the future Number one, first thing is just to build courses that transform students lives. That's priority number one. To is to measure the effect that those had. And then if we can demonstrate that it had a big effect to take that back to the administration and say we need to figure out some way to build this into our system so that these themed courses are recurring. And so that faculty have the opportunity to step forward and say, I want to teach one of these themes courses.
Wayne, thank you for talking to us about this. It's an idea. That seems in one way, very innovative another way kind of very obvious. You know, I agree. I agree. It's strange to me, that it kind of took this long and that I haven't heard of it being a common practice. Yeah, more often. For others. Well,
it's there was a lot of problem solving involved in it, because you have to, it's easy to conceive of, but anything is easy to conceive of, but then how does what it is that you're thinking about and what to do? How does it fit into the systems of this particular school? Every school is similar in that they register students for classes and market their classes and stuff, but they all have their little idiosyncrasies, and they're all their own individual ways of doing things. And there are a lot of avenues that we went down years ago that were related to this, that it was clear that oh, we can't do it this way. Okay, back to the drawing board. But this is how it ultimately came up. But I agree. We want learning to be transformative. The way that you make it transformative is by personalizing it and making it individual to each student. So I agree it's just intuitive. It's an intuitive direction to go
away. Thanks for coming in chatting with us. Yeah,
thanks for having me.
Dr. Wayne bass teaches humanities courses at Heartland Community College. He spoke about the project to develop integrated humanities courses at Heartland using resources from a college Innovation Grant. If you're interested in other interviews about education, innovation, or other topics, subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you found this one. Thanks for listening
