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David Helfand, a professor of astronomy at Columbia University, speaks on a panel with Middlebury Associate Professor of Political Science Jessica Teets during the Fund for Innovation Festival on April 7 at Wilson Hall.

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – The benefits being derived from Middlebury’s Fund for Innovation were evident for all to see (and experience) during a two-day festival, April 6–7, that showcased the work of students and faculty and welcomed ideas from David Helfand, a visionary educational leader and professor of astronomy at Columbia University.

Helfand, who helped create the experimental Quest University in British Columbia and served as its president and vice chancellor from 2008 to 2015, opened the festival with a keynote address titled “QUESTions Instead of Answers: A Process-Based Curriculum for the 21st Century.”

Helfand said he believes that higher education should focus on “the formulation of good questions and the processes by which one attempts to address them, rather than focusing instruction on the delivery of information.” Quest University has no academic departments or majors, and it was founded in 2002 to offer “inquiry-based education in a personalized, interdisciplinary setting that provides exceptional opportunities for those who choose their own path.”

The following morning, April 7, students and faculty met Helfand for breakfast to continue the conversation about educational innovation. The guest speaker then joined Associate Professor Jessica Teets on a “mini panel” in Wilson Hall to explore the topic as it more specifically applies to Middlebury.

Students from the club Oratory Now led a public-speaking exercise with the audience at the Fund for Innovation Festival April 7.

The Fund for Innovation supported undergraduates from the College and graduate students from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, along with Teets and other faculty, on a China Field Research Course last summer.

During the panel, Teets said, “In China [the faculty] were not in charge of the learning process. We were all in it together, and we were in the city [Hangzhou] that was hosting the G20 summit. So our project wasn’t about government repression and it wasn’t about the way Chinese government works in society, all because were in a place that was prepping for a major summit of world leaders, including President Obama.

“We ended up having all these learning opportunities that just sort of came up in the process of life in China. In a classroom you would never take a detour like that, but the preparations for the summit actually created much more of a context for learning, and the roles changed a lot,” Teets explained. “I found out that sometimes I wasn’t teaching or leading. Instead I became someone who was learning too, especially from our master’s students and our students from China.”

Helfand responded: “The lessons from that are clear! And the first lesson is to free yourself from the tyranny of a content-based syllabus–the belief that a course has to cover specific material. That immediately constrains you and also generates this answer-based process instead of a question-based process.”

Helfand also expressed his belief that students need to learn how to collaborate with one another, calling it “one of the things most sorely lacking from our educational system today.”

“Students don’t know how to collaborate with people from different backgrounds, different ages, and different sets of experiences. And it’s not surprising when you set up a classroom as a competitive situation where the point is to come out on top, and not to learn to collaborate with people from different backgrounds or skill sets.

“Only when you put students in those situations”–like doing field research in China–“do they rise to it and recognize, maybe for the first time, that their colleagues have certain strengths, and they can put them all together in a productive way. But unless students have those experiences over and over again, they are not going to recognize a key attribute that most organizations need today, and that’s to have people who are effective at collaboration.”

Helfand and Teets continued the conversation for another 10 minutes before taking questions from the audience on a variety of topics, including reliance on the syllabus, experiential learning, the connection between failure and resilience, and the benefits of team-teaching.

The audience then was asked to stand up and visit stations in the back of the hall that showcased projects supported by the Fund for Innovation. In addition to Field Research in China, there were: Computational Linguistics Summer Research Program (“PopMuse”); Prison Education Program; Paleography, Book, and Manuscript Seminar; Heritage Language Program Collective; Arts in the World: Student Trek to Los Angeles; and Oratory Now.

For the final 30 minutes of the program, undergrads from the student organization Oratory Now (assisted by their advisor, Assistant Professor Dana Yeaton) led the group in a series of exercises designed to build stage presence and strengthen public-speaking abilities.

The Ron and Jessica Liebowitz Fund for Innovation (FFI) was established in honor of Middlebury’s 16th president and his wife in March 2015 by a group of donors who believe that a distinctive culture of creative thinking is essential to the Middlebury community. The FFI is committed to the idea that creative work should serve the institution’s needs. In order to remain relevant and timely in meeting those needs, the president has the discretion to define the fund’s annual scope and focus.