About Higher Education

Learning is a matter of making connections, striking up new kinds of conversations, and raising the level of your conversational skills. The first thing to point out here is that Higher Education exists in the context of Ways of Knowing (refer again to the cascading-contexts diagram on the right). The preferred WOKs in higher education are the scientific and intellectual. The aesthetic WOK is usually included but is almost always marginalized or ghettoized in Art departments. The same is true of the spiritual WOK. It is included, often in Religious Studies department, but the treatment is strictly content-based. In other words the actual methods or "ways" of the spiritual way of knowing (prayer, ritual observance, meditation, yoga and related, and contemplation) are rarely if ever actually used as part of the knowledge-gaining process. We might want to then note that the term university is somewhat misleadingly applied to institutions of higher education, in that 'universe' suggests that everything under the sun, so to speak, is included, but in fact this is not the case. Certain methods are left out --at least in public institutions. I really do not know what happens inside private religiously affiliated college, whether spiritual ways of knowing are part of the substantive knowledge-gaining processes or not. Certainly it's the case that religiously affiliated colleges encourage belief, but this is different from encouraging the use of the spiritual methods, if you will, in the learning process.We can then consider Richard Rorty's notion of pictures again: "It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, that determine most of our philosophical convictions." Then, if we picture higher education as a culture --with particular customs, mores, taboos, and so forth-- we may be well on the way to understanding how it works and what it means to be living or visiting here. Linda Brodkey writes "The academic community is literally a community of readers who write and writers who read." (this quote is from Brodkey's book Academic Writing as s Social Practice). The image below is a social network diagram, and this may be one way to visualize higher education in cultural terms: we become part of a new social network, a new culture, and we also expand our own social network in terms of the theorists, practitioners, peers, and so forth that we meet.The overall educational system in the U.S. is organized into three basic categories: Primary, Secondary (otherwise known as high school), and Post-secondary (otherwise known as college --a category which can include undergraduate and graduate as well as professional degree programs). Any formal education beyond high school can also be referred to as Higher education.

But what unique values and skills does the culture of Higher education preserve and defend? What ways of knowing does it include? What combinations? Does it leave anything out? How is it different from its terminological cousin High school? Should higher education maybe just be called "Harder education"? Or perhaps "More of the same education"? Or maybe "Better education"? What differentiates it? What is its identity? And more importantly what do we expect from it?

We often have a clear idea of what higher education it is supposed to do for us (i.e., enable us to get better jobs and that kind of thing) but few of us know what it actually is. I certainly didn't when I started college. I only knew it was supposed to get me out of my hometown. Then later, when I was a MFA student at UCLA I was among a group of grad students who were hired to counsel incoming freshmen, and part of what we were to tell them at orientation was what a college education would do for them. At the time the main buzz phrase we were told to give them was that a college education would help them get their second job --meaning, in part, if an organization hired them and saw that they were smart and capable of handling greater responsibility, they would get promoted and continue to build a career on the basis of their abilities). But we were not instructed to say anything to incoming freshmen about what college or Higher Education actually is. This strikes me as a problem, so I'm writing this to at least get you started thinking about it.

I think the 'higher' in the phrase Higher education is a helpful starting point because it calls attention to the vertical or Y axis rather than the horizontal or X axis. (This is perhaps accidental, but even if it is, I will go ahead and enjoy it as a happy-accident --or as a fortuitous accident if you like Higher terms :) In Primary and Secondary education I think we are mainly directed as students to build-out the horizontal or X axis of knowledge and learning. We acquire basic tools and are exposed to a fairly standardized array of subjects across the board (again, we move horizontally). In Post-secondary or higher education, the focus begins to shift to building-out the vertical axis of knowledge and learning. In this regard, Higher education might just as well be called "Deeper education", or (perhaps to capture both) "Vertical education". I guess it could also be called "Y education" --which kind of works well phonetically since higher education can also be thought of as addressing "why" questions. In any case, Higher education as a term has potential. We rightly expect to develop deeper, foundational or structural understandings of how things work, and why. And we rightly expect that this deeper understanding will as a result broaden our horizon (so the horizontal or X axis is also extended even though the focus in on the Y axis). So we might say that the culture of higher education values and defends in-depth analysis and synthesis.

I also like the phrase Higher education because it alludes to different levels (in this context levels-of-understanding). It's important to emphasize this notion of levels because we might, for example, study History in high school, and again History in college --but we rightly expect the topic to be approached to be at a different level or in a different way. For example, a History course in higher education will (or should anyway) introduce a level of instruction that helps us understand the history of History itself --i.e., how the writing or telling of history has unfolded and changed through time. (This kind of reflexive or meta aspect --the history of History-- is captured in a sub-discipline of History called Historiography).

To bring this all back home, Digital Media for the Artist is a course in Higher education. You should expect the approach to be different from a Primary education computer-skills course or a Secondary education media-literacy or media-awareness course. You should expect that the course will focus more on the Y or vertical aspect of learning than on the X or horizontal aspect. We will be working to develop deep understanding of the relationship of humans to technology, to media-technology more specifically, and digital-media technology most specifically. We will be working towards expert-status in the skills of the Liberal Arts (the skills of thinking, reading, writing, and talking). We'll be honing our abilities to read (interpret) and write (produce) content in a variety of media, all aimed at in-depth analysis and synthesis. Because our particular kind of higher education is arts-focused, we will be honing our abilities to work with the creative process as well as the intellectual process as we do our reading and writing.