The shift to an information economy has heightened demands on the state’s colleges and universities and has helped redefine the nature of education, experts say.
“Technology has made the world smaller,” said John Nazarian, president of Rhode Island College.
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That includes the world of education.
“People want an instantaneous response on issues,” he said. “We had to gear up for technology and globalize our study program.”
That includes revamped curricula to better address world issues, the addition of technology labs on campus and electronic classrooms.
“It’s very, very costly,” Nazarian said. “Even though we have made an investment in it, the technology we have now will eventually be replaced with something else and that’s going to take big dollars.”
Nazarian said that in the 1980s there was a decline in the interest in teaching. Today, 30 percent of Rhode Island College’s undergraduates are pursuing degrees in education. Nazarian estimated that over the next 10 years, the country will need two million new teachers. Today, RIC offers a four-year Ph.D. in Education, a joint venture with the University of Rhode Island.
In today’s information-based economy, “learning is much more important to the nation than it has been in the past,” said University of Rhode Island President Robert L. Carothers.
“There has been a resurgence in teacher education,” Nazarian said. “The teachers that we are preparing today are much better prepared than I was when I graduated.”
Even so, “being a teacher is one profession that doesn’t get the respect it did long ago,” he said. “Maybe that pendulum will swing back once again. Who knows?”
Carothers said there is “a fundamental change in the way in which learning itself is addressed at the University. We’re moving away from a model that is teacher and teaching-centered and moving toward one that is learning and learning-centered . . .It’s a more active rather than passive process than it was before.”
Today’s students have higher expectations because of a marketplace that demands “creative responses to constant challenges,” Carothers said. “It means that we have to be more flexible and more imaginativeIt’s not a one-size-fits-all environment.”
“One of the big changes that has happened at the college is demographics,” Nazarian said. “Many of these people don’t have English as their first language, but they are good students. They need additional support. That has created changes.”
Carothers agreed that URI’s student body, too, is much more diverse today, having doubled the university’s minority population over the past 10 years.
Also, the consolidation of academic departments, for example RIC’s Department of Music, Theatre and Dance, and interdisciplinary collaboration have become more commonplace, Nazarian said.
“On campus, departments will get together,” he said. “Things aren’t in their own little columns anymore – it’s interdepartmental.”
In recent years URI has refined its mission, identifying focus areas like the marine and environmental sciences and behavioral health.
“We came to acknowledge that we couldn’t be all things to all people,” said Carothers.
Both schools, as well as others in the state, have undergone significant renovations and additions over the past 15 years. Thanks to the passage of the Higher Education Technology Initiative bond issue in 1996, both campuses are Internet-ready.
URI and RIC have seen major campus expansions in the last 15 years, including the construction of the Ocean Technology Center on URI’s Narragansett Bay Campus and the John Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts on the RIC campus, among many others.
Carothers said he’s noticed changes in the students themselves – both for the better and the worse.
“Students are more serious,” he said. “They are more career-oriented. They have less social-consciousness. They are much more comfortable with technology than they were at the beginning of the decadeThey tend to be more isolated. They spend more time in their dorm rooms in front of their computer screens than at outside events.”
Overall, Carothers said he feels there is “less racism, less homophobia, women have a much more powerful role in the community. People are more willing to come to terms with those issues than in the past.”
The evolution of elementary and secondary education began in 1983 with the publication of the educational report A Nation at Risk, said Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Peter McWalters.
“A Nation at Risk said that all systems – not just urban systems – were underperforming,” he said. “We had high grades, but not high performers.”
The book was a “call to action,” McWalters said, and set in motion changes to the state’s education system.
“We went from voluntary to required half-day kindergarten,” he said. “There were stricter graduation requirements. We put into law and regulation the length of the school day, number of periods, things like that.”
The early 1990s brought the standards movement and a shift from input to output. The passage of the Rhode Island Student Investment Initiative – also known as Article 31 – in 1997. Article 31 put into law the Comprehensive Education Strategy, an agenda of high educational standards, student assessments and accountability for school improvement that serves as a guide for all of the state’s education efforts.
McWalters credited business and industry with the philosophy behind standards-based learning.
Business “focuses on output,” McWalters said.
The foundation of standards-based education will be professional development and an investment in the improvement of teacher salaries.
“To show up and say ‘You’re low-performing’ is not news,” McWalters said. “Until we have a system with accountability for adults, we are hesitant to have that for kids. If we do not pay competitive salaries with Connecticut and Massachusetts, our teachers will go to Connecticut and Massachusetts.”
