{"id":44,"date":"2013-07-15T18:21:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-15T18:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ccvhistory.wordpress.com\/?p=44"},"modified":"2013-07-15T18:21:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-15T18:21:00","slug":"roger-cranse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/2013\/07\/15\/roger-cranse\/","title":{"rendered":"Roger Cranse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dimensions of Learning at CCV \u2013 the Early Days<\/strong><\/p>\n

Organizational growth runs an arc from chaos to consolidation to Concretization.\u00a0 Innovation, whether good or bad, is most possible in the span between chaos and consolidation.\u00a0 After that, organizational change will be slow, incremental, usually modest, and will take place within the hard confines of ornate regulation, rote practice, and vigilantly guarded turfdoms.<\/p>\n

\"roger2\"<\/p>\n

In this brief essay I\u2019ll describe the beginning of the special services program, Dimensions of Learning.\u00a0 This essay supplements a longer paper,<\/p>\n

\u201cDimensions of Learning at Community College of Vermont,\u201d delivered at Johnson State College, April 24, 1982.<\/p>\n

I came on board CCV in 1980, ten years after its founding.\u00a0 The needle was perhaps a third of the way from chaos to consolidation.\u00a0 There were three regions, eight storefront sites, fewer than 2,000 students, and a full time staff you could fit comfortably into several VW buses.\u00a0 Each site created its own courses and had its own catalogue.\u00a0 The frontline staff members at a site were called coordinators of instruction and advisement, \u201cCIAs,\u201d an odd acronym for an institution founded in the full anti-establishment ethos of the 1960\u2019s.\u00a0 Our president, Myrna Miller, in heels and rustling silks, moved among us like a monarch.<\/p>\n

Myrna temperamentally understood the potentials of chaos; she also understood the need to move toward consolidation, thus deftly joining the two.\u00a0 Myrna\u2019s instincts were to decide and to act; she had limited patience for prolonged deliberation.\u00a0 She once said, after hiring me as the first director of special services, \u201cRoger, if you come to me for advice about something, I\u2019ll make a decision.\u00a0 Just so you\u2019re aware.\u201d\u00a0 A month or two later I went to Myrna to brief her on the development of our new program.\u00a0 She listened carefully for ten minutes while I told her about a multi-dimensional learning and support program for \u201cdisadvantaged\u201d students.\u00a0 \u201cWhat are you going to call it?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot sure yet,\u201d I replied.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Dimensions of Learning,\u2019 that\u2019s its name,\u201d she said, her eyebrows arching in a so-shall-it-be-written, so-shall-it-be-done kind of way.<\/p>\n

That was small potatoes.\u00a0 The potential I think Myrna saw in an organization not far from baseline chaos was that a chief executive, with little to hold her back, could make big dramatic decisions all on her own.\u00a0 One came at a college retreat in the early 1980\u2019s.\u00a0 In the evening, after dinner, Myrna stood before the entire college and announced \u2013 proclaimed \u2013 that we would have centrally-approved college-wide courses, with course numbers, in a single college-wide course catalogue.\u00a0 No more freelance courses at individual sites, no more let\u2019s-make-it-up-as-we-go experiments, no more wouldn\u2019t-it-be-cool-if offerings.<\/p>\n

As far as I know, Myrna hadn\u2019t shopped this idea around, hadn\u2019t consulted important constituencies and \u201cstakeholders\u201d (why does this word always make me see vampire slayers in a forest at midnight?), hadn\u2019t worked behind the scenes to disarm opponents.\u00a0 None of that.<\/p>\n

I was pretty new and the reaction in the crowd floored me.\u00a0 People leapt from their seats.\u00a0 \u201cNo!\u00a0 No!\u201d they hooted.\u00a0 \u201cYou can\u2019t do that!\u201d\u00a0 People threatened to resign.\u00a0 (Several actually did.)\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019re destroying the college!\u201d\u00a0 \u201cMyrna, you should quit!\u201d<\/p>\n

Myrna appeared unfazed.\u00a0 She understood, I think, the true nature of power.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to be afraid.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to get angry.\u00a0 You have the power.\u00a0 What you say will<\/i> happen.<\/p>\n

And it did.\u00a0 The college swerved onto the road of legitimacy \u2013 and convention.<\/p>\n

Another big Myrna decision was to imprint a particular theory of learning on the entire college.\u00a0 Most of our students were \u201cadult\u201d learners, twenty-five and older.\u00a0 Most were women.\u00a0 Myrna believed the findings and theories of adult development were especially relevant to the work of the college and she therefore arranged for all the full time staff to take a three-credit course in the subject.\u00a0 Joanna Noel and Larry Daloz taught the course.\u00a0 The centerpiece was William Perry\u2019s scheme of intellectual and ethical development.\u00a0 Perry\u2019s idea, based on research with Harvard undergraduates, is that students move from a simplistic, black and white, right vs. wrong understanding of the world, a position Perry calls Dualism, through the confusions of Multiplicity, an intellectual and ethical region where everyone\u2019s right, no one wrong, to Contextual Relativism where evidence, logic, and analysis within specific contexts can sort out sound conclusions and make reasoned ethical choices.<\/p>\n

For Perry, the progress along this continuum was impelled by challenge, and took place in the context of a residential college: \u201cThe first challenge often comes from peers, and especially in the dorm,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

The question that Myrna put to us was: how can we pose this challenge in a non-residential college to adult students?\u00a0 In developing Dimensions, our original team of special services coordinators \u2013 Joan Kaye, Leonard Foote, and Elliot Kaplan (Elliot moved on after a year and was replaced by Bill Callahan) \u2013 took up this challenge.<\/p>\n

The Dimensions program was funded by a federal TRIO grant.\u00a0 Dick Eisele wrote the original grant.\u00a0 The program Dick devised centered around \u201ccluster groups\u201d of students; it was unclear what these \u201ccluster groups\u201d would do.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have much tolerance (or understanding) of \u201cprocess,\u201d of T-groups and D-groups yakking away about inward-looking concerns.\u00a0 I\u2019m much more confident with content, substantial content.\u00a0 So early on I decided the \u201ccluster groups\u201d would be a sequence of three credit courses with diverse content.<\/p>\n

One of the first places I visited after being hired was the Dartmouth College bookstore.\u00a0 I asked to see the reading list for Freshman English.\u00a0 (This was way before such information was posted on-line.)\u00a0 The list included a collection of American short stories; Diaries of Women<\/i>, edited by Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter; and Orwell\u2019s Nineteen Eighty-four<\/i>.\u00a0 We added Plato\u2019s \u201cAllegory of the Cave\u201d and these became Dimensions\u2019 texts.<\/p>\n

I was a child of the 1960\u2019s. \u00a0Like the rest of the special services team, I was an egalitarian; I believed people were differentiated from one another by social and economic class, and by race, not by inherent intelligence.\u00a0 In high school I hung out with the few kids who didn\u2019t go to college, the ones who worked on cars and went in the Marines, whose parents were called \u201clow income.\u201d\u00a0 I knew<\/i> these kids were as smart as the sons and daughters of our town\u2019s lawyers and ad men and docs and execs.\u00a0 Then at Rutgers I fell in with a leftie crowd, red diaper babies, and they articulated the reasons and theories behind my feelings about my high school friends.<\/p>\n

So yes, our disadvantaged students would read the same stuff Dartmouth students read.<\/p>\n

I learned a lesson from Myrna early on.\u00a0 I could decide more or less on my own what overall shape Dimensions would take; my team played the invaluable role of bringing these ideas to life.\u00a0 That\u2019s the reason for this brief excursion into biography.<\/p>\n

If our students read what Dartmouth freshman read, we would have to teach differently because, despite our egalitarian sentiments, CCV students were not, by and large, as well prepared for college as Dartmouth undergraduates.\u00a0 The techniques we devised and used are detailed in \u201cDimensions of Learning at Community College of Vermont.\u201d\u00a0 In brief, we proceeded very carefully through a text, making sure our students understood what they were reading, how and if the material applied to them and their world, if there were larger metaphoric meanings in the text, and the like.\u00a0 These careful, close reading excursions into challenging materials were designed to achieve several results.\u00a0 First, by learning to understand and interact with \u201ccollege-level\u201d materials, students, many of whom told us they were \u201cnot that smart\u201d (a heartbreaking phrase we heard often) developed a sense of academic self-worth<\/i>.\u00a0 Second, the study of these materials was also meant to challenge students in a Perry-like way, to impel intellectual growth.<\/i><\/p>\n

I was also determined that Dimensions would award college credit, that is, it would not be stigmatized as a remedial \u201cbonehead\u201d course.\u00a0 Myrna agreed and made that decision \u2013 again, as far as I know, entirely on her own authority.<\/p>\n

The special services team spent the fall of 1980 developing Dimensions, and in the spring launched it statewide.\u00a0 The special services coordinators taught three or four sections each (I can\u2019t remember which); I taught two.\u00a0 We were also advisors to our students.\u00a0 For each class I prepared a detailed, minute-by-minute lesson plan, and mailed copies to the coordinators. \u00a0I recall Nancy Chard, southern regional director, snorting contemptuously at these plans.\u00a0 Yes, I was a control freak; the point, of course, was that we were teaching in a new way, thus the detailed plans.<\/p>\n

As we developed Dimensions in the fall, I visited each site to brief CIA\u2019s on the program and to solicit their feedback.\u00a0 A few seemed skeptical but nearly all welcomed the new program.\u00a0 There was almost no resistance to its implementation.\u00a0 Again, I attribute this welcoming attitude and lack of resistance to the very fluid state of the College at the time \u2013 a third of the way from chaos to consolidation.\u00a0 The great organizational irony, of course, is that the programs we added and the decisions we made with such ease moved the College toward a place where it was no longer easy to do new things.\u00a0 For good or ill.<\/p>\n

The grant required we collect data on student progress, persistence, and dropout rates.\u00a0 Was Dimensions working?\u00a0 We did collect this data and tabulated it, all by hand.\u00a0 Our research was continued in more sophisticated and accurate ways over the years and decades.\u00a0 It\u2019s now clear that students who take Dimensions persist in their college educations at significantly higher rates than students who don\u2019t.\u00a0 I think you can say, therefore, that the assumptions we made initially \u2013 those wild, idealistic notions that flourished in the 1960\u2019s \u2013 were true.<\/p>\n

After Dick, I wrote two more special services grants incorporating our ideas and Dimensions.\u00a0 Both were successful.\u00a0 I then moved on to direct the Adult Degree Program at Norwich University.\u00a0 Over the years, truthfully, I\u2019ve had a lot of second and third thoughts about leaving CCV.\u00a0 I now teach part-time at the College and feel really at home, once again.<\/p>\n

During my seven years at the College I had four offices: over the Howard Bank (now TDBank) in Montpelier, over Lash Furniture and under Pro\u2019s Gym in Barre, at 5 State Street in Montpelier, and finally over Montpelier\u2019s Lobster Pot.\u00a0 You were either over or under something in those storefront days. \u00a0In Barre, Lash Furniture had an antique rug-cutting machine that growled and shook while up above at Pro\u2019s Gym weightlifters groaned and grunted in an almost sexual way before dropping three hundred pound barbells on your classroom ceiling.\u00a0 When the Lobster Pot closed for two weeks in the summer the cockroaches deserted the kitchen and came up in crowds after our brown bag lunches but, like a lot of other obstacles in the early days, we beat them back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dimensions of Learning at CCV \u2013 the Early Days Organizational growth runs an arc from chaos to consolidation to Concretization.\u00a0 Innovation, whether good or bad, is most possible in the span between chaos and consolidation.\u00a0 After that, organizational change will be slow, incremental, usually modest, and will take place within the hard confines of ornate … Continue reading “Roger Cranse”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[12,14,16,19],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-staff-stories","tag-community-college-of-vermont","tag-higher-education","tag-montpelier","tag-vermont-state-colleges"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}