Take responsibility for student-led scholarship

So much of an undergraduate education is paraphrasing a
professor’s lecture into notes. Rarely do we have input on
the curriculum; rarely is our insight given any significance beyond
a letter grade; rarely are discussions with our peers perceived for
their academic merit.

But this spring, 20 students will lead seminars for other
undergraduates to inaugurate a new program called Undergraduate
Student Initiated Education, or USIE. The seminars are in a trial
period, in which the administration plans to evaluate the success
of the program and decide on its future.

Faculty and administrators are in no hurry to create
opportunities for students to facilitate classes. If students hope
to prove that we have an important voice in the content of our
education, then we need to take responsibility for helping the
program succeed. This means more than just enrolling in the
seminars spring quarter. We must also help to maintain a voice that
shows those in charge of our education that we deserve the
opportunity, as a student body, to define the scholarship of our
generation, to push the boundaries of conventional higher education
and tread neglected ground.

Berkeley’s Decal program, which inspired UCLA’s
USIE, has been around for 25 years, and currently offers 120
different classes, with over 250 facilitators and 4,000 students
enrolled each year. The idea of student-facilitated classes is far
from new, and Decal’s success and popularity did not pop up
overnight. Establishing a program similar to Decal at UCLA has not
been a priority for those in charge of designing undergraduate
education. This means it’s up to us. We not only have to
support it by joining the discourse in the seminars, but also
actively define the program itself, the goals and problems, its
future and its place in the larger curriculum.

For USAC Academic Affairs Commissioner Michelle Sassounian, who
started the campaign for student-facilitated classes two years ago,
it’s clear that students must do the legwork to make the
classes a staple of undergraduate education. “When we were
lobbying for the program a main concern for some professors and
administrators was that units should be awarded only by qualified
educators with a Ph.D. or other teaching degree,” she
said.

I imagine the argument is that undergraduates have much less
knowledge than professors, and therefore their classes will not
meet certain standards of quality. Since undergraduates are not
seasoned in critical academia, their courses have the potential to
veer off track, to rely on false information or subjective opinions
rather than critical study. This line of argument, however, misses
the point of student-facilitated seminars. They are not designed to
stand in for a professor’s lecture, but to allow students to
take the tools gathered from professors and apply them to new
issues and topics that departments have yet to address.

Students pioneering USIE imagine student-facilitated classes
filling a niche that does not exist in the current undergraduate
degree. “Oftentimes at UCLA, students find themselves
isolated in a class of hundreds. The large class sizes and
lecture-based structure of courses don’t allow for much
interaction between students, missing the valuable insights of peer
to peer learning,” Sassounian said.

Student-facilitated classes encourage student response in a way
that large lecture classes and even professor”“led seminars
can’t. The idea is that student”“facilitated classes
focus on issues that academia has neglected, but which reverberate
in the minds of students and beg for further exploration.

Combiz Abdolrahimi, who will facilitate a class on
U.S.”“Iran relations next quarter, says that the place of
student facilitators is “not to lecture, but to provide the
resources and tools necessary to further interest on the
topic.” Students learn to find ways to access knowledge,
rather than constantly relying on a professor to spoon-feed it to
them. These efforts pave the way for a new era of scholarship, in
which the issues of today and tomorrow take root.

These are the principles that Sassounian, Abdolrahimi and others
have used to establish the USIE and student-facilitated classes. As
a result, next quarter the seminars will be in various departments,
all with the class number 88S. But the success of the program is
far from certain. In order for USIE to really get off the ground,
undergraduate students must organize to continue defining and
championing its place in the larger curriculum.

To Abdolrahimi, getting faculty to acknowledge the possibilities
of student-facilitated classes isn’t easy.

“I contacted ten to fifteen professors, and … the minute
I told them I was an undergraduate (facilitating a class) the
conversation ended,” he said.

USIE and student-facilitated seminars can empower students in
the academic community. But first, a larger and collective voice
must address faculty and administrators, who may be reluctant to go
along.

Want to design a class? Tell Macdonald at
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