Every spring, universities host a certain type of luncheon, complete with pins, certificates, and courteous applause, and most of them blend together. The University of New England’s March 27 event didn’t, primarily due to the actual celebration. Twenty-four faculty members and professional staff members received the school’s Innovation in Education Award, and it’s difficult not to believe that other universities ought to take note of what they’ve actually accomplished in their classrooms.
The award itself is not new; it is a collaborative effort between UNE’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and its Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. However, it appeared that this year’s group of honorees captured something a bit bigger than normal. The university’s provost, Gwendolyn Mahon, put it this way: each of the 24 had a quantifiable, observable impact on students, whether that meant improved results, increased engagement, or simply a classroom that felt less like a chore.
Reading the list made it clear how unglamorous the majority of the innovations themselves were. In Organic Chemistry, two chemistry professors, Joe Simard and Sam Touchette, replaced partial-credit grading with a system known as specifications grading, which essentially rewards mastery over guesswork. For the professors, it requires a lot of work. In any case, it seems that students are doing better. Before students came around to it, two nursing professors completely changed their Medical Surgical Nursing course, substituting escape rooms and game-show drills for lectures. They encountered significant resistance.
That type of teaching change has an almost unyielding quality. Redesigning a course is not done by faculty because it is simple. The tension that underlies most of these stories is that they do it because the previous version stopped working.
Sophia Crockett-Current, who oversees UNE’s Makerspace, provided one of the more memorable moments. It may seem insignificant, but consider how many students never enter a lab because they believe it’s not for them. She mentioned that she wanted the area to feel equally welcoming to a student making friendship bracelets and one working through serious engineering design. She said, “There is someone to catch them if they fail,” which is both odd and encouraging coming from someone in charge of an expensive equipment-filled space.
Then there is the history class taught by Arthur Anderson and Eric Zuelow, where students literally dug into the ground in front of Decary Hall to find the remnants of a building that once stood there. They then pieced together the story using oral histories and old photos before creating a podcast. On paper, the project seems gimmicky, but it doesn’t seem to have been.
On its own, none of this seems to have much bearing outside of UNE’s two campuses in Maine. However, it does highlight a broader trend in higher education at the moment, where institutions are being forced to defend the classroom experience rather than just the degree due to enrollment pressure and doubts about the worth of a college education. Similar remarks were made by CETL director Marc Ebenfield, who noted that every time he observes a class, he notices subtle modifications to conventional instruction intended to encourage students to stick with it.
It’s important to consider whether these awards serve primarily as a pat on the back or if they ultimately have a significant impact on people other than the recipients. Rather than treating this as a once-a-year event, UNE appears to be aware of that risk because it accepts nominations throughout the year. It’s unclear if other universities will notice what’s going on here. However, the components—small, ongoing, faculty-driven experiments rather than top-down directives—seem like something that the rest of higher education could truly benefit from at this time.
