Past as Prologue for the Twenty-First Century 477meetings about the very nature of the discipline, not just stu-
dents’ demographic characteristics. In their article “The
Diversification of Psychology: A Multicultural Revolution,”
Sue, Bingham, Porche-Burke, and Vasquez (1999) identified
four major approaches to teaching about multiculturalism
and diversity: “the separate course model,thearea of con-
centration model, the interdisciplinary model, and the
integration model” (p. 1066), ultimately advocating the inte-
gration model as the one best suited for the depth and breadth
of learning they hope students will achieve. Puente et al.
(1993) used the metaphor of teaching a “psychology of vari-
ance” as the means to change the epistemology of students,
departments, the curriculum, and the discipline. Enns (1994)
advocated a similar approach to challenge the cultural rela-
tivism of psychological constructs. What is consistent across
reports from academia and from the external community is
that attention to diversity issues is no longer a matter of indi-
vidual faculty sensitivity but a utilitarian requirement for em-
ployment advancement in a changing workplace. The script
for how institutions and departments will address this expec-
tation will be written in the global twenty-first century.
For the first half of the twentieth century, psychology fac-
ultieswere required to be excellent teachers. “The teacher is
everything” (Seashore, 1910, p. 91). Then, as we documented
in the first section of this chapter, research became more im-
portant in academic life after World War II.
“Teaching is not a prestigeful occupation in psychol-
ogy these days. The research man is the status figure”
(McKeachie & Milholland, 1961, p. 6). Ideally, these two ac-
tivities could be synergistic and rewarded accordingly,
whether the faculty member was affiliated with a liberal arts
college or a research university. However, as the century
ended, external forces demanded that the values and time
apportioned to teaching, research, and service activities be
reconsidered. Halpern et al. (1998) concluded that a new
definition of scholarship was required, one that would main-
tain traditional benchmarks for excellence (e.g., high level of
discipline-specific expertise and peer review), but one
that would integrate teaching and scholarly activities more.
Drawing on Boyer’s (1990) treatise, the authors proposed a
five-part, expansive definition for future scholarship in psy-
chology: original research, integration of knowledge, applica-
tion of knowledge, scholarship of pedagogy, and scholarship
of teaching in psychology. In a collection of essays in response
to the report from this STP Task Force on Defining Scholar-
ship in Psychology, Girgus (1999) and Korn (1999) advised
that institutional mission should be seen as an absolutely
essential context for definitions and standards. Korn echoed
the historical trends that we discovered in our analyses in
his critical response to the “new definitions”: “I contend,
however, that the activities of teaching can and should be dis-
tinguished from research, in order to give teaching the respect
it deserves” (p. 362). Like the complex responses necessary to
meet the needs of changingstudents,changing demands on
facultycommitments will be debated into this century as well.
Teaching methodsthroughout the century included the lec-
ture, seminar or small-group discussion section, laboratory,
fieldwork and practica, and independent or supervised re-
search projects. Technological advances modestly influenced
each of these methods—better microphones, better audio-
visual systems, better textbooks and auxiliary materials, and
better observation and data-collection equipment. Then, in
the last 20 years of the twentieth century, information tech-
nology revolutionized how we conceptualize, deliver, and
evaluate teaching and learning in American higher education.
Although we characterized the 1904 Wisconsin Idea of ex-
tended education as an early example of “distance learning,”
the dairy farmers of the Midwest who gathered with faculty
members from their state’s land-grant universities’ colleges
of agriculture probably did not envision twenty-first-century
models of “asynchronous learning” accomplished on laptop
computers in their living rooms. Despite such advances, how-
ever, we are confident in returning to a timeless formula: All
teaching is mediated learning. Regardless of the nature of
what is to be learned and how, a teacher first must listen to a
student, and then together they must construct the most effec-
tive mediation so that the student learns how to learn and to
become self-motivated and self-evaluating in that effort.
Calkins (1910) had it right: “Teach psychology primarily as
you would if it were an end in itself ” (p. 53).
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the new science
of psychology emerged from its philosophical roots and
began to develop a disciplinary identity. Curriculumdevel-
opment was the means by which this identity was repeatedly
communicated and modified. As we have tried to demon-
strate in our historical review of American higher education
in general, and of psychology in particular, a driving force in-
side and outside the academy was how best to define the lib-
eral arts. Although the triviumand the quadriviumno longer
define the essence of a university education, in what ways do
the goals of that medieval curriculum differ from those
proposed for a liberal arts psychology curriculum by Brewer
et al. (1993), Halpern et al. (1993), or McGovern et al.
(1991)? There were two special issues of the journal Teach-
ing of Psychologyin the 1990s; one was devoted to the teach-
ing of writing across the curriculum (Nodine, 1990) and the
other to teaching critical thinking across the curriculum
(Halpern & Nummedal, 1995). We believe that higher educa-
tion’s and psychology’s responses to defining the liberal arts
not only will shape the curriculum but should guide all of our