We began the Friday session with a report from Nancy Murray on her adventures with downed trees and power outages — clearly the gods are telling Nancy to stop taking work home with her.

Citing some members’ concerns about the amount of processing that took place during days 1-4, Nancy  reassured us that we would soon be creating concrete plans to put before the faculty.

This naturally prompted a discussion about process.

Among the most notable topics discussed was the TESC budget. Jules Unsel reminded us that however brilliant our initiatives, they are emerging in a climate of severe scarcity. Julie Suchanek added some disturbing details to this reminder–though she did concede, when prompted by Laura Coghlan, that the new mechanisms for tracking institutional performance (someone might add a footnote on what these are; I’m a little fuzzy) might be a place where we could insert requests for funding new initiatives. Maybe.

Sarah Williams lifted the mood by sharing with us excerpts from 3 feet under, the award-winning geoduck documentary, along with Al Wiedemann’s graduation remarks on the mythos of said bivalve. The key moment here, for me, was Sarah’s “unpacking” of the geoduck as a visual signifier. Though its physique is ostensibly phallic, its more feminine attributes can be revealed by changing the frame with which we view it. I think there was an underlying message here about rethinking problems that appear intractable — and perhaps a warning against our tendency to view everything that has come before us as suspect and potentially regressive. Sarah also suggested that we can use the clam’s remarkable filtration abilities as a metaphor for the unification of knowledge.

Heartened, we returned to the question of how we would proceed with implementation. We decided on three overlapping categories: curriculum, transcripts, and advising. All are shorthand for issues that have come up repeatedly throughout the institute. Despite Jeanne Hahn’s urging, we scrapped the question of calendrical reform, in part because Jules reminded us that it would require an enormous initial financial outlay (and, as I later learned, a massive headache for student support staff). We thought that perhaps  our discussions of curriculum, transcripts, and advising might lead us to the conclusion that we would support a move to semesters, but I’m not quite sure how we as a College would make that move, especially now. We also vowed to take into consideration during our small group discussions the issues of student responsibility, the history of TESC policies and policy debates, the nature of interdisciplinary learning at other institutions, the need for a greater sense of community, and the six expectations–we also agreed to articulate both short and long term goals surrounding each of our three topics.

There was a brief, friendly mutiny from Rita Pougiales’s side of the room. She suggested that we may not be ready to talk about implementation, given that we’ve really only taken a glancing look at some of our assumptions about issues such as “student responsibility”. It was informally decided that we could continue those values-oriented discussions in the small groups. Joe Tougas also put in a plug for holding on to the complexity of what we’re doing, in part by allowing our discussions to be informed by our own disciplinary methodologies. I’m probably misrepresenting him again, but he’s supposed to blog about this session, too, so hopefully he’ll correct me.

Krishna Chowdary provided us with a manifesto of sorts, suggesting that the goal which would be driving his work in the weeks to come was to help students achieve success at TESC by giving them more opportunities to unify knowledge, using the six expectations as a guideline. This is a significant bastardization of Krishna’s original wording, which made Kathleen Eamon weep (a little).

I am intrigued, personally, by this question of what it means to “unify knowledge” — it seems to be one of the most important additions to the conversation begun at the transcript review.

I also want to express my gratitude to Krishna and to Lara Evans (see her “manifesto”) for making strong, highly personal statements that have helped to clarify the stakes of our discussions. In addition to collective problem solving, I think one of the best ways for us to move forward is to articulate what we, as individuals, are willing to stand up and commit to–as well as what is in danger of getting lost in the group decision making process.

After lunch, we broken into small groups, and returned only to state that we as group are quite fond of our current process and will continue with it on Monday the 24th.

In solidarity,

Elizabeth