Published Monday, April 12, 2004
School Prepares Three Areas to Dissolve
Administrators Hope for Increased Efficiency and Collaboration
By Courtney Young
APPIAN STAFF WRITER

Under the current administrative system at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), it’s possible for one course with 60 students to receive one Teaching Fellow – and another course with 20 students to receive two TFs, depending on the “area” in which the course is offered and overall enrollment numbers in each area.

By dissolving the three “areas” – Human Development and Psychology, Learning and Teaching, and Administration, Planning and Social Policy – and centralizing TF allocations, the school will be more responsive to enrollment needs while cutting costs, officials say.

As HGSE prepares for a major administrative shift – the largest in a generation – the number of assistants per course is one small example of changes in store for the school next year. Administrators hope that eliminating the areas will foster new connections across disciplines and among faculty members and students, creating a richer curriculum and educational experience.

“The hope is for this [change] to be transparent for students,” said Professor Daniel Koretz, former chair of the Curriculum Committee.

Because the areas have been largely autonomous with massive variations in requirements, it has been difficult to create standards or communicate core ideas, administrators said.

“There is little intellectual interaction between areas,” said Eliot Professor of Education John Willett. “Individuals forged connections, but there [was] no departmental cohesion. There was a notion that we needed to think again about organization to produce better quality training and reduce duplication of effort.”

There will no longer be chairs for the areas, meaning that administrators will work for the entire school. A series of centralized faculty committees will make school-wide decisions, and individual masters programs will make decisions about course requirements for their own students.

“The hope is that administrative decisions will gravitate to the center and substantive decisions on curriculum will gravitate to programs,” Koretz said.

This new organization also aims to encourage dialogue among faculty and exploration among students.

“The rationale behind the curriculum changes is to encourage students to take advantage of the full range of what is offered at HGSE,” Koretz said. “Rather than a student saying, ‘APSP area is my home, and I do this,’ we want them to expand their course selections.”

“Programs will be encouraged to draw on faculty school-wide to benefit students,” Koretz said. “One particular course may be on the radar screen for lots of programs. It’s the job of programs to make the options available clear to students.”

However, this broad approach may be more effective for educating doctoral students than for the one-year masters students who are predominantly in programs with required courses.

The push for exploration “is somewhat inconsistent with pushing people into programs rather than the individualized program,” Koretz conceded. “The tension is present because the school wants coherent programs and also want individual faculty to be seen as school-wide resources.”

Doctoral students, who will be grouped into a handful of concentrations, will be encouraged to seek connections with faculty from all areas, he said. “Students will apply and find six or so faculty of similar interest, but will be encouraged to take advantage of and learn from others.”

Fostering intellectual interaction among students and faculty members is a positive goal, said doctoral student Phitsamay Sychitkokhong, but she is not convinced that faculty from all parts of the school will be accessible as mentors or able to form strong connections with a large number of students.

“I am concerned that the lack of areas will create a lack of personal support for doctoral students,” she said. “At least with areas, we knew who to turn to for questions and support. Now everything will go to committees. There is a strong likelihood that the committee members could be people that we have not had a class with nor have developed a relationship with. Thus, they could be making decisions that affect us without knowing who we are or where our research interests lie.”

Sychitkokhong also voiced concern about the senior faculty who have made these decisions.

“I am also concerned that there was a lack of senior faculty of color in these discussions this year,” she said. “I personally think that the more diverse the perspectives and voices are, the richer the discourse can be, especially in addressing issues of change.”

While Sychitkokhong is not sure if this plan will be successfully implemented, Pforzheimer Professor of Teaching and Learning Susan Moore Johnson is confident of the outcome.

“Because we will maintain the concentrations and provide for some school-wide courses, for example, in methods, the students will have the best of both worlds,” Johnson said. “They'll get specialized training in their particular field, but benefit from learning more about the concepts and knowledge in other fields. We hope that there will be more exchange across the boundaries of the areas under this new arrangement, which will benefit faculty and students alike.”

Courtney Young, a student in the Higher Education Program, is a staff writer of The Appian.

For related coverage of the reorganization of HGSE, please see:
Individualized Programs Vanish (3.22.04)