I recently had a conversation with an advisee about a project called SkillTag. SkillTag was the winner of last year’s Hackathon, a brainstorming event sponsored by the Provost’s Office. Hackathon invited students to think up ideas for defining the skills that undergraduates obtain from a Georgetown education, and SkillTag involves “tagging” current courses with skills that students can hope to gain from them.
I challenged my advisee to think of the most formative Georgetown course she’s taken and to take a stab at SkillTag-ing it. She chose Problem of God and tagged it with “critical thinking” and “humility.” I loved her response — but it got me thinking about SkillTag’s potential limitations.
Is humility a taggable skill? Probably not, but it is nevertheless an admirable (not to mention employable) quality that Georgetown strives to foster. If Georgetown is truly about educating the whole person, how do we recognize values as well as skills, such as the integrity students develop as members of the Honor Council? Or the respect for others they demonstrate in classroom discussion? Where do we tag the skills and values developed through extracurricular activities?
How will SkillTag account for two students who experience a course differently, or for courses in which a professor’s objectives don’t line up with a student’s lived experience? Teamwork could be a problematic example. Throughout my educational career, I’ve been involved in more group projects than I care to remember. The experience of that group work has run the gamut from intensely collaborative and iterative to mostly individual work hastily pasted together at the last minute. I’d consider the former a tag-worthy experience; the latter, not so much.
My primary concern is SkillTag’s attempt to encapsulate what should be a formative, layered, semester-long experience into a few words. In the world of Facebook and Twitter, it is so tempting to want to (hash)tag things, to make them easily searchable or findable and to reach an audience with an ever-shortening attention span. But at Georgetown, our current challenge should be to re-engage that attention span and encourage students to dig deep.
Superior General of the Society of Jesus Fr. Adolfo Nicolas warns us about a “globalization of superficiality” that threatens the depth and nature of human interaction. Relationships are defined by friend requests rather than a set of shared values or experiences. Author Nicolas Carr echoes these concerns when he writes, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.” Carr’s writings on the effects of the Internet on human cognition draw disturbing conclusions about our diminishing capacity for close reading and deep thinking, as my colleague Jessica Ciani-Dausch will discuss later in this series.
Students should reach their own conclusions about how a course has transformed them or sharpened their skills, rather than relying on a tag to tell them what they’ve gained. This should occur at a very personal level, through deep reflection and a critical evaluation of each one’s own experience.
That conversation with my advisee was so refreshing because it offered such a clear example of deep and personal reflection. My student eloquently articulated how Problem of God had expanded her worldview and challenged long-standing assumptions she held about faith and spirituality. By remaining open to and engaged in course readings, and the exchange of ideas among her peers, she allowed herself to be transformed. By paying attention to her interior thoughts and feelings throughout the course, she developed a greater sense of awe at the notion of God and a deeper sense of humility as part of His creation.
To reap the full value of our Jesuit heritage, Georgetown should continue to encourage this kind of discernment, which encourages good decision making and vocational choices over the course of our students’ lives. By pushing my students to see beyond resume skills, I hope they can avoid selling themselves and their Georgetown experience short.
I hope students recognize that the spirit of experimentation and innovation common in our research labs fosters pioneering scientists and fearless problem-solvers. A sense of fairness honed in courses like Intro to Justice and Peace cultivates thoughtful professionals and better parents. The value of tolerance underpinning heated debates and inter-religious dialogue facilitates success as both partners and politicians. These may not be “taggable” skills, but they certainly deserve a place in this learning community, where we educate the entire person.
Marlene Canlas is an assistant dean at Georgetown College. She is one of the alternating writers for The Dean’s Desk, which will appear throughout 2015.
