2/24/2017
Is today’s educational structure truly functioning to its full potential, or is there room for improvement? Vice Provost and Professor, Randall Bass wrote “Disrupting Ourselves: The Problem Learning in Higher Education,” in 2012, where he argues that there is growing disconnect between traditional education structure and the new age. Bass begins building his credibility with reputable sources and concise information, citing convincing facts and studies, and successfully employing informative appeals. He adopts a philosophical tone in order to raise awareness and enlighten his scholarly audience.
Bass’s rhetorical purpose is to inform his audience and convey his theories on how to innovate the structure of formal curriculum. His target audience seems to be a combination of other professor’s/educational instructors, students, and general readers who are interested in the educational system.
In his article, Bass first sets the stage by addressing how traditional curriculum is being pressured by the growing body of data about the power of experimental learning and the increasing availability of knowledge offered on the internet, he then argues that traditional course work is antiquated, that the most effective learning occurs outside the bounds of standard courses. Bass supports his theory by discussing how high impact practices, such as extracurricular activities, play a large role on students learning outcomes in higher education. Possible solutions to the problem, Bass suggests, are tailoring formal curriculum to include more high impact learning; such team-based instruction, participatory groups, and E-portfolio’s.
Throughout his piece, Bass uses strong sources that strengthen his credibility and appeal to Ethos, partially because he is Vice Provost and English Professor at Georgetown University where he leads the Designing the Future initiative and the Red House incubator 
for curricular transformation. Also, for 13 years he was the Founding Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. This authority and experience grows through his concise, logical way he conveys information, including several studies and surveys to support his claim. Bass included several sources; “Greater Expectations” by The Association of American Colleges and Universities, “National Survey of Student Engagement”, “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture,” by Henry Jenkins, and “Agile Learning” by Derek Bruff. He also uses personal examples from his interactions with students, as well as his workshop “The Bottlenecks and Threshold Initiative,” which helped faculty analyze their teaching by identifying what tools students need to succeed. He starts out his article by explaining his reasoning, and continues on to prompt his audience to examine formal curriculum; “Can we continue to operate on the assumption that the formal curriculum is the center of the undergraduate experience?” This sets the stage for his key points that follow.
Adding to his ethos appeals, Bass uses strong appeals to logos by including many facts, studies, and logical progressions of ideas. He includes his observation; “Indeed, in my experience of holding focus groups and informal conversations with students, if you ask them where they think their deepest learning has taken place, they will sometimes point to one or two courses that had a meaningful impact on them. But they almost always point enthusiastically to the co-curricular experiences which they invested their time and energy.” This observation supports the idea that the curriculum is not centered on learning that has the most beneficial effect on students. Bass mentions John Seely Brown, who claims that in typical school curriculum, students are first packed with knowledge, and if they stick with something long enough, they may eventually get to the point of engaging this practice. Brown argues that people instead learn best by “practicing the content.” He then ties Brown’s argument back to the growing body of inductive and inquiry-based learning research that convincingly demonstrated increased learning gains. This really substantiates Bass’s argument.
His effectiveness remains steady throughout the article, continuing on to speak about expanding the conception of teaching. An example he uses is a version of “team-based design” that Patricia Iannuzzi implemented at the University of Nevada; unlike the traditional model of course design where the instructor is the center focus, Iannuzzi’s team-based design made the course and student learning the center, surrounded by all other support, design, and management. He includes visuals of the traditional support model, and the team-based design model to help his audience visualize where the focus is, and where he believes it should be.
Bass suggests that e-portfolios can be a powerful environment that can facilitate or intensify the effect of high-impact practices, helping students make connections and think about how to present themselves. He then presents The Connect of Learning project, a network of colleges studying e-portfolios. One hypothesis being that for e-portfolios to thrive, it needs to address four levels: institutional needs, programmatic connections, faculty and staff, and of course student success. If all four levels are operative, e-portfolios will enable students to weave back and forth between formal and experimental curricula.
He finishes up his article with his theory on how to connect ourselves. First is acknowledging that the center of significant learning has shifted to a new, re-centered core. Second, it is imperative that we move beyond our old assumptions that it is primarily the student’s responsibility to integrate all parts of the undergraduate experience. Lastly, we need to think about how to move beyond the individualistic faculty change model.
By the end of his article, he has presented solid evidence that change is pertinent to the success of college students. To a typical college student like me, his theories really resonated with the way I learn; being that real life experiences offer more than being loaded with information that I may or may not use. Bass’s success in this piece illustrates how effective an argument can be when you present facts, credibility, offering solutions to the issue at hand and speaking directly to the interests of the audience. It would be very hard to argue that Bass’s ideology is not valid.
Work cited
Randall Bass, “Disrupting Ourselves; The Problem of Learning in Higher Education,” Educause March 21, 2012
publications such as The Guardian, City Life and Time Out. He has made several BBC Television documentary films and two documentary series for Channel 4. He has several bestselling books, including, Them: Adventures With Extremists, The Men Who Stare at Goats, the Psychopath Test, and Lost At Sea. He is known for his informal investigations of controversial fringe politics and science. He has been described as a “gonzo journalist,” which the reporter writes in first person, including themselves as a part of the story.
“Cyborg Anthropologist,” but the more she explained the developments and how we rely
learning outcome. Technology can play a key role in learning; E-portfolios allow students to organize their learning, and expand their focus from individual courses to broader educational spectrum.
reading his article, I had a similar theory based off of my personal experience’s with learning. So when reviewing his article, he provided studies, experiments, and his opinion, I have no objection to his stand point. I believe everything he wrote about was valid and raised some progressive idea’s I believe would be very beneficial in the educational system. I do believe everyone learns differently, and it’s proven that traditional course work is not beneficial for every student.Through out his article, he provided concise information, strategically placed charts and graphs, and had a logical argument.
Generally, I find metaphors and simile’s helpful when reading; but several of the ones in this speech felt unfamiliar to me, which made grasping his intention’s behind the text difficult. This made me stop and really analyze the meaning behind each metaphor/simile. While I found this to be a bit out of my comfort zone, I believe the amount of engagement he required from me to truly understand and contextualize, was beneficial, pushing me to grow as a writer and deepen my engagement when reading.
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