External Faculty Development Opportunities (National and Regional)
Pedagogical and Course Development

Boundaries and Borderlands:
The Search for Recognition and Community in America

Building on previous institutes sponsored by the Association of American Colleges & Universities and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1994 and 1995, the 2000 faculty development summer institute, supported by the Hewlett Foundation offered a series of eight thematic seminars, afternoon workshops, and cultural activities for 200 faculty and administrators.

Overview

Boundaries and Borderlands: The Search for Recognition and Community in America"
An American Commitments Project

The richness of diversity and the problem of difference characterized the United States before it became a nation and continue today to be both a source of strength and of contention. America's formative pluralism was codified as a value when the United States began its experiment in democracy. For those excluded or marginalized, the system has been more notable for its failures, even its treacheries, than for its successes. Flawed and limited in their determination of who constituted a citizen in this new republic, the founders nonetheless left us a legacy that philosophically embraces the notion that some forms of diversity could and should be honored within the shared civic covenants of a pluralist republic. Since that time, and indeed even in the formation of the concept of democratic pluralism, various groups have influenced and reshaped our nation's dominant intellectual, economic, and cultural paradigms in light of commitments to diverse communities.

Today such challenges have a special urgency about them and a particular relevance to higher education. As America experiences dramatic demographic changes, changes analogous to other flash points in U.S. history, and as tensions between different groups arise on and off campuses, new questions emerge. How do we reconcile the rights of individuals with the commitment to the common good? How do communities and ethnic cultures provide meaning for people? As we honor the richness of diversity, what binds us together as a nation?

AAC&U's American Commitments
The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has been wrestling with these compelling educational and societal questions through its signature initiative, "American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy, and Liberal Learning," launched in December 1993. An ambitious initiative, American Commitments calls attention to fundamental questions about education in a diverse democracy and provides resources for colleges and universities willing to address those questions as dimensions of institutional mission, campus community, and curricular focus.

American Commitments is a family of projects. It includes curriculum and faculty development networks, opportunities for institutional leadership, and a host of publications. It has also spawned the most comprehensive web site on campus diversity, www.diversityweb.org. In addition to AAC&U's biannual fall conference, "Diversity and Learning," AAC&U regularly sponsors conferences, institutes, and resources for campuses. Diversity Digest, our quarterly, captures some of the best practices from the field to offer as a national resource.

In defining diversity as a central educational mission of the academy, AAC&U has been able to seize upon an historic moment of profound re-examination of the meaning, purposes, and quality of higher education in the United States. It is a moment characterized by stunning intellectual creativity, contentious debates, and periodic confusion. Fueling this dynamic self-reflection is the insistent demand from disparate and self-defined communities that they be recognized, attended to, and given space in the academy. A parallel driving force is the search for meaningful community.

Diversity and Democracy
As Renato Rosaldo says, "Conflicts over diversity and multiculturalism in higher education are localized symptoms of a broader renegotiation of full citizenship in the United States." What distinguishes AAC&U's national leadership on diversity is our conviction that democracy cannot fulfill its aspirations without attending to diversity which tests democracy's moral commitments; and likewise, diversity itself is liberated from fragmentation by attending to democracy, for without democratic principles, diversity has no moral compass. By pairing the two, we can, in fact, achieve a deeper unity in our nation, not in spite of but through diversity.

By turning to the multiple and distinctive communities which democratic society offers, we fully acknowledge the significance of communities in anchoring citizens in a particular identity. We also recognize that one's identity is fluid over time and typically includes multiple identities, both inherited and chosen. However, we also stress the importance of reciprocal commitments, shared histories, and owned obligations as important both to the quality of human experience and to democratic vitality.

As emerging democracies around the globe turn to the United States as the oldest democracy, what have we learned from our own past? How can democracy and diversity as integral notions be linked in a productive, generative, mutually ennobling partnership? That is the challenge before us as we immerse ourselves in what Ron Takaki calls, "stories [that] contain memories of different communities" even as they together "inscribe a larger narrative," a more nuanced story about U. S. democratic pluralism.

Boundaries and Borderlands
Because the curriculum is a key site for engaging the meaning of democratic pluralism, the classroom a laboratory for deliberating difference, and faculty members a source for integrating critical new ideas, AAC&U has invested in creating a national curriculum and faculty development network. The first generation, funded by the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, included 62 institutions; the second, supported by the same funders, included another 27 schools. The current network, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is the third generation of institutions, with 40 colleges and universities.

This time, however, we are expanding the network beyond faculty and academic administrators and reaching out to student affairs personnel as well. We realize that student learning occurs in many forums on our campuses which has led AAC&U to collaborate with those in student affairs repeatedly over the past several years, especially in our diversity work. We are excited about the integration of student and academic affairs in this year's Boundaries and Borderlands institute.

The academy as a collective community can help students acquire intercultural competencies to participate as active citizens in this reconstituting kaleidoscope called the United States of America. What multiple and comparative perspectives are needed in our courses? What new pedagogies in the classroom and on the campus promote deliberative dialogue and teach students how to work through conflict? What co-curricular activities allow students with strong cultural identities to work across and through differences to new understandings of common commitments?

The intellectual heart of each of the three generations of curriculum and faculty development networks is our ten-day summer institute, "Boundaries and Borderlands: The Search for Recognition and Community in America." It was held at Williams College in 1994 and 1995 and now in 2000 will be held at Brown University.

The institute's title delineates twin concepts that are at the core of the dilemma of a diverse democracy. Boundaries suggest limits chosen and imposed, necessary and falsely constructed, that nonetheless are the terrain in which democratic pluralism is enacted. Borderlands suggest those spaces between or at the edges of intersecting boundaries, a kind of liminal space where we often discover intersections and interdependencies. It is a site where we can learn relational or dialogic pluralism.

Keying off these twin concepts is another set of paired ideas: recognition and community. Recognition most dramatically captures the insistence that all people in our country be seen, attended to, and understood in their full complexity. Community speaks both to the origins of identity and the longing for places where we centrally and vitally belong and don't have to explain each aspect of our selves, our histories, our standpoints.

Morning Seminars
The institute offers colloquia with nationally known speakers, afternoon workshops on pedagogy and course development, and cultural events. You will also have time to meet as a team and meet with a consultant. However, the experience that influences participants most profoundly--both intellectually and personally--is participation in eight three-hour morning seminars. In a classroom setting where everyone becomes a student again, participants immerse themselves in new scholarship, traverse disciplines that are not their own, make sense of competing and conflicting stances, have normative assumptions disrupted, and take a risk that learning how to deliberate differences among the group is worth it.

Key Questions
The educational spine of AAC&U's curriculum and faculty development project has been a set of questions AAC&U believes suggests should undergird the new diversity courses evolving from the American Commitments project. These questions include:

What must we know and understand about the multiplicity of groups and people that have been unequally acknowledged in our nation?

What democratic concepts can we draw on from our own U.S. history to guide us in forging new civic covenants among our citizens?

How are we to understand the contradictory interconnections between democratic aspiration and structural injustice?

What kinds of knowledge and capabilities are required for full participation in a pluralist democracy? What kind of values?

What are the crucial distinctions between recognizing/acknowledging difference and learning to take grounded stands in the face of difference? If both are goals for liberal learning, how can students develop both kinds of capabilities over time?

AAC&U's staff, with the help of many others, has constructed a curriculum for Boundaries and Borderlands for the third time. Each time we have completed one, we see it as unfinished and evolving. Even after seven years, pairing democracy and diversity remains more of an idea than an integrated reality, either in the scholarship or in the formulations of most courses. We are seeking to forge intellectual relationships that continue to remain largely separate. We hope you will help us understand how the two can illuminate one another. In the process, we hope the linkage will revitalize our curriculum, our passion for democratic justice, and civic engagements in our communities.

The readings that follow are not a blueprint, but rather several sets of footprints. We see them as suggestive, not definitive. Instead of a finished curriculum, they merely give a glimpse of the provocative scholarship at our disposal today. We invite you to peruse them, debate them, and consider how they might kindle new possibilities in the classroom and in campus life.

Through its American Commitments initiative, AAC&U has challenged colleges and universities to assume societal leadership in preparing students to thrive in a diverse nation and in an interdependent world. Each campus is, in fact, a laboratory which could become what Maxine Greene calls "a space of dialogue and possibilities." By drawing from the powerful traditions of democracy and diversity, it is within our power to provide students with the experience and vision of what Frank Wong described as "a level ground on which to meet, a meeting ground on which to speak, a fertile ground on which to plant and reap." We invite you to join in that daunting, exhilarating effort.

AAC&U Boundaries and Borderlands Staff
Caryn McTighe Musil
Debra Humphreys
Alma Clayton-Pedersen
Diana Alvarado
Daniel Teraguchi
Maria Figueroa
Charmion Gustke
Kevin Hovland