I’ll only add a few clarifying details to Elizabeth’s excellent summary of Friday’s work.

The key task we accomplished, of course, was the formation of three working groups: Advising, Curriculum, and Transcripts. That structural division was framed to reflect many of the ideas and perspectives we had been seeing together earlier in the week:
-The Six Expectations will be a touchstone for the work of all three groups.
-Each group will do original and focused thinking about its particular topic, but will keep an eye out for how its proposals might impact on the work of the other two groups (and communicate those to the other groups).
-We decided that several topics that had been proposed for separate working groups (History/context, Community, Culture/policy, Action now, Academic Calendar) actually cut across all three of our working groups, providing a kind of analytical toolbox that should be used by all three groups.

When we meet for week two, this structure will shape a significant part of our agenda, helping us to strike a balance between focused, detailed development of proposals and a broader viewing of how all the pieces might fit together.

It’s very interesting to see how our conversations about fragmentation and unification in the curriculum also apply to some of the internal dynamics of this institute. It is clearly true that, in these five days, we have cycled between clarity and confusion, between feelings of getting it all together and of things falling apart. The reading of transcripts provided a vivid sense of shared experience, a vocabulary of examples, concerns, and opportunities, and a common sense of urgency and mission. But when we started looking for ways to carry out that mission, our diverse histories and priorities made themselves known, and easy consensus on concrete steps seemed further away. This back-and-forth process, though frustrating in the moment, is, I think, a healthy aspect of our process.

Elizabeth was right in the way she characterize my personal desire to hold on to the complexity of our situation (while still making progress with our mission) by making space of each of us (and various small groups of us) to say “Hmmmm, I’ve been thinking about what we said before and it doesn’t seem quite right anymore.” Lara’s “non-manifesto” is a nice example of that.  Another similar moment on Friday was when Jay reminded us of the vital importance of student voices and involvement in this work.  Taking that seriously adds a new wrinkle to almost all parts of our work. There are also a number of key concepts (e.g. autonomy/responsibility, both of students and faculty; breadth vs. depth; advanced vs. gen.ed. work; what unification/fragmentation of knowledge looks like, and whether we should care about it; etc.) that seem to mean different things to different people. We should not—can not—wait until we have finished those conversations about such concepts before we move forward with new initiatives, for the simple reason that those conversations just won’t end. Yet they are really important conversations to continue, and our current work provides a perfect context for them.

One piece of work from the Transcript Working Group that I would like to recommend to all of you: The Narrative Evaluation DTF Report/Guide from 2004. Nancy M. attached it to an email earlier in the week.  It’s a beautiful document which answers many of the questions we raised after our transcript reading, and it prompts a crucial new one: Five years later, why has so little changed in the way transcripts actually look?

See you all on Mon.  —  Joe