October 2003
Volume 16, Number 10
An Education in Action Research
Finding and accepting my current position as director of assessment and testing at California State University, Hayward was a deliberate attempt to get re-centered on the action agenda and related basic and applied research questions that defined my career mission thirty-five years ago - not originally as a psychologist, but as an undergraduate philosophy major.
As a philosophy student, my burning questions were about the intersection of epistemology and axiology, the interdependence of knowledge and values. I found the discourse on these questions most compelling in the philosophical and historical literature, as well as the contemporary public policy arena, concerning liberal and general education. My action agenda became, and remains, democratizing liberal education. Democratizing liberal education requires us to operationalize the aims of liberal education in the context of universal higher education; that means bringing learning sciences and technologies to bear on both education policy and teaching.
This is actually my second time appearing in the Observer to talk about my "non-traditional" career path. The first was an interview entitled, "A Conversation with Michael Strait," (March 1990). At the time of the interview, I was "riding high" in my new position as project officer for research and evaluation for the Annenberg/CPB Project in Washington, D.C. The original mission of the project was to make it possible for more people to pursue a high quality baccalaureate-level education through innovative applications of television, radio and interactive technologies. From a curricular perspective, the focus was on the general education portion, or first two years, of the baccalaureate degree. The idea was to provide subject matter and learning objectives that could be most widely adapted and adopted by all types of institutions, from community colleges to major research universities. My concluding statement in that interview about my new position was, "This job is me, in a way I always hoped I would be able to say. It's the perfect meeting point of my interests in education, psychology, and technology, and I couldn't be happier." Yet two months before that interview went to press, my dream job of less than one year's duration had already started to disappear, as our project's namesake and his advisors began to refocus their philanthropy on K-12 math and science education reform.
Between then and now, I spent five very productive years with the Annenberg/CPB Projects, and then two years with WETA TV/FM, helping public broadcasting program producers understand and embrace "cyberspace," for community and educational outreach purposes. But in the process, I found myself getting more distant from my action and research interests in higher learning.
I actually began to find my way back to academe and my original career plan by venturing into the "private enterprise" side of research and education as a senior research scientist with a small company called Intelligent Automation, Inc. There I worked on several R&D projects, which helped me get up to speed on both the research base and the interesting technological advancements in the learning sciences that I needed to reignite my earlier ambitions. I also got to experience one of the hard realities of private enterprise - the pink slip.
And then there was Hayward. My third "dream job." Cal State, Hayward is part of the 23-campus, 370,000 student California State University System that, together with the 10-campus, 188,000 student, University of California System and the 108-campus, 2.9 million student California Community College System, is bringing higher education to California today. Its size, diversity, and comprehensiveness make this the place to be to figure out the meaning, method, and measure of democratizing liberal education in our twenty-first century global society.
What do I do? The phrase du jour is "assessment of student learning outcomes," for all majors as well as for general education. I get to work with faculty, staff, and students from every discipline, to help them figure out what every student is supposed to gain through their general education, and as a result of earning a bachelor's (or master's) degree in a particular discipline or major program area. Articulating the desired learning outcomes in measurable terms is no picnic, but it is, relatively speaking, easier than the next steps of creating and implementing a plan of assessment, evaluation, and program improvement that is going to continually challenge us to get clearer about our goals, and closer to achieving them. As a strong believer in action research, I couldn't be happier. Uh-oh.
