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"(Re)visioning the Sociology/Anthropology Curriculum in the 21st Century"

Department of Sociology/Anthropology Retreat
August 23, 2000 Camp Cotuit

GOALS

The Department sought and received funding from LTLC to hold a retreat devoted to a discussion of the place that technology plays in the curricula of our two disciplines. We proposed to address the following questions, in the context of a broader discussion about the mission of the department and our respective majors: (1)What kinds of skills and knowledge related to computer technology do department members think that students in their majors should acquire in the process of getting a liberal arts education at Wheaton College?; (2) To what extent and in what ways do departmental majors seem to currently acquire such skills and knowledge?; and (3) In what ways can department members collaborate in providing opportunities and setting requirements such that graduating majors will have acquired these skills and knowledge?

DISCUSSION

I. Review of range of our technology projects and faculty-faculty collaborations, as well as our web-based resources.
Several of us have archival databases on our departmental web page and others are under construction. Our department has a librarian-faculty partnership with Kathleen Sheehan and a standard set of workshops for FYS and the Senior Seminars. These include the use of our web-site evaluation form (developed by Kersti Yllo and Donna Kerner) and other methods of evaluating the utility of on-line bibliographies and search engines. Additional workshops for advanced quantitative (e.g., SPSS,EXCEL) and qualitative (text manipulation databases, e.g., Ethnograph) research tools are offered by department faculty in consultation with KACC staff.

II. Sequencing, standards, skills in our departmental curriculum
Discussion focused on the current sequencing of courses and the standards of workload and skill acquisition we expect at each level. Class size and composition was a related issue here (can we expect students to acquire certain types of skills in very large classes; should we restrict 100-level courses to first year and sophomore students; how can we service both majors and non-majors in our 200-level classes)? We contemplated appropriate skill set for each of our disciplines. For example, in sociology this set might include: familiarity with photoshop scanning, database construction, filemaker pro, statistical software. In anthropology this set might include: text manipulation databases, indexing, categorizing, and analyzing field notes. We also discussed the different implications of requiring students to attain "literacy" vs. "fluency" in these skill sets. At the moment we felt we could all agree on the concepts of exposure and familiarity and the idea that students would be expected to demonstrate a basic competence in these skills, with the final goal of improving the quality of research, analysis, and presentation of the results of our capstone senior theses. We acknowledge that this will involve both coordinated planning and assessment of how students are actually using the computing technology they have been introduced to (e.g., analyzing field notes, making use of bibliographic software). We proposed the following model of gradiated levels of skills acquisition:

Keeping in mind the department requirement that seniors produce a thesis based on original primary research, these levels were conceived in general terms as progressing from developing students' capacities to acquire information through electronic means at the 100 level; enhancing their critical capacities to assess the information that they acquire in this manner in the 100 and 200 levels; enabling them to use technology as a tool for primary research at the 300 level; and at the 400 level empowering them to deploy electronic technology to disseminate their knowledge most effectively. More specifically,

• 100-level: Introduce students to the use of image archives and databases to acquire information and ensure that they attain basic skills in gaining access to library resources through electronic means. Basic word processing skills would be required for written assignments.
• 200-level: Develop critical website evaluation skills by making use of the departmental electronic website evaluation form and through other means.
• 300-level: For sociology, develop skills in using software for statistical analysis and coding. For anthropology, develop skills in using software for fieldnote organization and analysis. For both sociology and anthropology, develop more sophisticated mastery of electronic tools for secondary research (e.g., bibliographic search engines, web search engines, accessing remote libraries, accessing electronic journals). Advanced word processing skills would be required for preparation of research papers involving bibliographies, footnotes, and compliance with format standards.
• 400-level: Students should achieve a broad familiarity with the various possibilities that digital technology affords them with respect to their presentation of the results of their own research, and develop competency in using the particular technology that suits their own purposes. This could include website design, digital image projection, digital slide presentation (such as power point), or electronic publishing.

While we have emphasized the acquisition of skills necessary for basic fluency in certain computer technologies, the underlying objectives are not skill-acquisition driven alone, but are motivated by the ultimate goal of producing students who are capable of formulating, designing, and engaging in sociological or anthropological primary and secondary research and effectively sharing their findings with others. Though specific software is occasionally cited by way of example, the department agreed that the objectives regarding software familiarity should be defined primarily in terms of its function, and that any deployment of technology should be justified primarily on the basis of the ultimate goal noted above.

III. Skills acquisition Outside the Classroom:
Here we concluded that our students possess a very broad range of technological skills from (at the low end) the use of antiquated word processing programs to (at the high end) the creation and management of their own home pages. We acknowledged that many of the skills they pick up come from experiences outside the classroom. Aside from incorporating the gradiated model within our classes, we wondered how to initiate the process of technological skills acquisition through experiential opportunities. We explored a possible collaboration with a local university, such as Boston College. The Department of Sociology at BC has already informally approached us with the possibility of developing a program that would enable its graduate students to work with members of our department faculty in a "shadow mentor" capacity. BC has a strong program to prepare graduates for undergraduate teaching. Most of BC graduate students have little idea of what scholarly work at a liberal arts college entails. We explored the possibility that such a program might: (a) benefit BC by providing an initiative for graduate students to pursue undergraduate teaching skills (either as assistants, graders, or adjuncts), while (b) benefiting our majors by bringing in graduate students with expertise in computing technology who could serve as tutors and resource personnel; and (c) benefit our upper-level majors by exposing them to graduate student lifestyles. In developing such a pilot program, we would hope to attract a grant from an external donor to further expand a permanent program of this sort. Finally, we noted with pleasure the expansion of opportunities for faculty-student research collaboration and vigorously supported applications of our faculty for these student research assistant positions as another means to support the acquisition of computing skills outside the classroom (NB: Rob Albro, John Grady, Donna Kerner, and Bruce Owens all advertised at the Research Fair and are currently working with student assistants in a range of projects that involve mastery of computer technology).

CONCLUSION

We agreed to:

• monitor and try to more accurately assess the skills sets of our juniors (the research methods courses) and our seniors (in senior seminar) with an eye to implementing the gradiated model beginning next year
• evaluate the outcome of our faculty-student collaborations
• begin to pursue the development of a Wheaton/University undergraduate/graduate/faculty collaboration in teaching and research.

Submitted by Donna O. Kerner, Chair for the Department

Last updated on 12/06/00;
Send questions about this page to: Donna Kerner
or contact Wheaton College.