Shared Futures

Whittier College

David Iyam
Associate Professor of Anthropology
diyam@whittier.edu

I am on the academic assessment committee of Whittier College, charged with developing assessment goals for our revised Liberal Education program and with designing assessment instruments for some core aspects of the Curriculum. Over the summer, I worked with a small group of faculty members to design a preliminary assessment instrument for our Cultural Perspectives courses. I also attended the January 2005 AAC&U annual meeting in San Francisco, and participated in a number of workshops on assessing General Education.

My areas of scholarship include the cultural dynamics of urban and rural economies, women in development, minority groups’ culture, social and economic conditions of post-colonial societies, and the socio-cultural aspects of film and television.

My interest in Shared Futures is based on the excitement with which our new curriculum is being received by faculty and students, and my expectation that engaging with colleagues from other institutions and sharing their ideas would help bolster what we anticipate to be a new direction in student learning. Whittier College has focused on student centered learning in developing a curriculum that promotes some of the critical outcomes identified by AAC&U at its 2005 San Francisco. I have been fortunate to be involved in discussions aimed at assessing such key outcomes as strong analytic communication, quantitative and information skills, interdisciplinary knowledge, critical thinking, and promoting a cross-cultural perspective across our curriculum. I am hoping that my participation in Shared Futures would equip me well enough to continue my participation in the on-going discussions, as our College seeks the best way to promote learning across the curriculum.

Cheryl Swift
Associate Professor of Biology
cswift@whittier.edu

I am an associate professor in the Department of Biology.  My research is focused on how plants respond to their environments, and I am particularly interested in the roles of drought and disturbance in structuring plant communities in Mediterranean Climate Ecosystems.  There are only five regions world wide that are characterized by summer drought—the cape region of South Africa, central Chile, Western Australia, Southern California, and the Mediterranean Basin.  These five regions encompass a variety of cultural practices and history, yet share similarities in landscape and native flora and fauna.  I am interested in exploring the differences and similarities between these areas from the perspective of plant ecology and cultural practice.

I agree with Donna Haraway’s idea of naturecultures—the union of nature and culture which acknowledges the place of humans in the ecological matrix that defines our world.  I teach courses in plant science, conservation biology and nature and culture.  Our air and water don’t recognize international boundaries and were “globalizing” forces before governments thought about trade agreements.  Indeed, the controversy over the US decision not to sign the Kyoto agreement because of concerns about the US economy underscores the relationship between shared resources and global practices.  I teach the importance of global citizenship in my courses, and encourage my students to study abroad in order to understand global biodiversity and to get a sense of how other cultures are embedded in their environments.

I was a member of the committee that drafted and ultimately gained approval of our new curriculum, which stresses Community, Communication, Cultural Perspective, and Connections.  These are core values of Whittier College and all of them are important to Global Learning in some way.  As we met to assign goals and outcomes for these requirements, Cultural Perspectives emerged as the most problematic.  Is this a history requirement, a requirement to expose students to multiple cultural practices, a requirement to understand self in the context of other cultures, or a requirement that seeks to change the ideas of students about other cultures?  In reality, it is all of the above, but most problematic is the way in which we define categories of culture.  As a result of my experience in drafting this new curriculum, I believe now is the time to challenge traditional categories that rely on international boundaries, and develop a new paradigm for understanding self in relation to other that builds on global learning.  I will bring the perspectives of a scientist, a scientist engaged with the relationship of nature and culture, and an academic interested in using global learning to create a better way of addressing cultural perspective in the curriculum.