Advising at Brown is under the microscope following the release of a University-led report investigating open curriculum programs at several colleges.
The report - a working group white paper titled "The Values of the Open Curriculum: An Alternative Tradition in Liberal Education" - critically examines open curriculum programs, including Brown's New Curriculum, at eight colleges to better define the concept and the future goals of such programs.
The study was funded by a $100,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation, an organization that funds liberal education initiatives, and surveyed programs from Amherst, Antioch, Hampshire, New, Sarah Lawrence and Smith colleges and Wesleyan University in addition to Brown.
"We didn't do a numerical thing. It was really more philosophical," said Robert Shaw, executive associate dean of the College and one of the four members of the administration involved in the report's production. He added that the report sets a path for "what it is we should be doing next."
While discussing critical components of an open curriculum, "what kept coming up over and over in our discussion with students and faculty and each other was advising," Shaw said.
According to Shaw, what came next was a study of the College's advising programs to discover "best practices." The study should culminate by the end of the semester.
"I think it's not so much the white paper, but the discussions around it," Shaw said of the impact of the Teagle report.
"There have been a lot of different complaints about the weaknesses of those different (advising) models and also about the ratio of students to faculty in those programs," said Sara Damiano '08, chair of the Undergraduate Council of Students academic and administrative affairs committee and a history concentrator.
In surveys organized for the best-practices paper, Shaw said one major weakness in the advising program stood out: "Sophomore advising is not as strong as it should be."
Shaw said Brown's performance in advising "depends on who you compare us to. Small colleges - that's a no-brainer." But "if you compare us to other Ivy League schools, we do pretty well," Shaw said.
"What we find is that in the first-year advising, we actually tend to do better than most of the other schools that we like to compare ourselves to," Shaw said.
Parents and friends are also new targets for the advising program at Brown, as a survey within the University found that students are most likely to turn to these groups for advice, Shaw said.
"We're trying to spend more time talking to parents ... to help them help their students," Shaw said.
UCS is also undertaking its own efforts to improve advising, Damiano said.
"I think the most direct thing that UCS is doing is trying to support departmental undergraduate groups," she said. "They consist of concentrators who are committed to their concentration and knowledgeable about their concentration. This year we really encouraged (these groups) to help sophomores who're declaring concentrations to plan out (their course of study)."
"My adviser's been really helpful with me in terms of picking courses I might be interested in," said Michael Li '10. "But I'm a bio person, and she's a bio person, so we sort of fit."
Another outcome of the Teagle-funded study, Shaw said, was the possibility of a study comparing open curriculum programs to other approaches to undergraduate education. But the investigation was scrapped because of the inherent difficulty in comparing different approaches with different goals.
According to Shaw, the study will serve as a clarification tool for faculty and has been circulated among University committees, including the College Curriculum Council.
The report's release has led other schools participating in the program to also initiate their own self-studies and review their own practices. "What the schools are trying to do is look at the white paper, look at the goals we defined and see how to implement that on campus," Shaw said.
Representatives from all of the schools that participated in the study will meet at Brown on April 23 to discuss the report's findings.
