The Common Experience?
Our homes and our schools are “less and less defined by the experiences we share en masse,” but resemble more of a loose collage of multiple (and often competing) interests. This situation does provide us virtually unlimited choices, which we rightly celebrate as “individuality,” but the flip side is that it can lead to a fractured community, to a sense of “living in silos.” Even at the university level, professors teaching advanced courses and senior seminars can assume little regarding prior exposure of students to particular courses, texts or intellectual themes. In some cases, instructors report that they are unable to identify even one text (classic or otherwise) that every student in a senior course has read, even when those students hail from the same academic discipline.
Whatever intellectual experiences students may be having, then, they often seem to be of an isolated sort—varying by academic major, choices of courses taken as general education courses, advanced placement or transfer credit hours, concentrations within the major, electives within the major, and on the list goes. The critical question is this one: Does this lack of commonality really matter?
In What Matters in College (1993; as quoted by Joe Cuseo), Alexander Astin argues that it may well be that the particular general education courses required do not per se define the likelihood of a significant educational outcome. Instead, the curricular variable found to have a “positive effect on educational outcomes was a ‘true-core’ curriculum, whereby students took exactly the same courses.” In other words, what mattered most was whether “content had been commonly experienced by all students” (italics added). In citing this finding, Cuseo quotes philosopher George Santayana, who “when asked about what ‘great books’ young people should read . . . replied: ‘It doesn’t matter, as long as they read the same ones’” (cited in Atlas, 1988). Obviously, the books selected do matter, but the point here remains: the need for some common reference point, a common foundation or context within which to carry on an intelligent conversation.
More to the point of our Common Experience model, Cuseo argues that “the impact of a common reading experience… may be magnified by multiple conversations students have, [whether] through formal faculty- or staff-led discussions and spontaneous student-student conversations that may ‘spill over’ to informal settings anywhere on campus." Imagine then, a scenario wherein students, faculty, staff, and community members engage in an ongoing conversation, bounded by a common theme, that occurs both within and outside of the classroom, that extends beyond the boundaries of the campus and into the community, and that endures for months (in an age of 30-second sound bites).
A primary, overarching goal of the San Diego State University Common Experience, the KPBS One Book One San Diego initiative, and the San Diego Public Library is to embody that scenario, that is: to promote sustained, multiple conversations, on a common theme, both in and out of the classroom, in such a manner as to connect students, faculty, staff, and the broader community.
Please, join the conversation.