Photo: ©Ruth Farmer

Individualized Studies at Goddard College

Many disciplines are seen as forms of inquiry, a means to further ends. Creative writing is too often seen as the point, when it is a means to many ends.

BY MAGAZINE EDITOR SUSAN MAIER-MOUL

Conversation: Ruth Farmer, Part Two

Practices: Josh Pollock, Goddard College IMA scholar

Practices: Tiffany Beard, Goddard College IMA scholar

Practices: Bridgette P. La Victoire, Goddard College IMA scholar

Practices: Joanna Tebbs Young, Goddard College IMA scholar

Practices: Eric Dalke, Goddard College IMA scholar

Practices: Sed Dickerson, Goddard College IMA scholar

Website: Goddard’s IMA Worlds of Change Blog

We often encounter alarming headlines, these days, about the quality and cost of education in our country.

Given the number of readers who teach and administrate in many kinds of education institutions, as well as those who are currently students, we invited Ruth Farmer, Program Director of the Individualized Master of Arts program at Vermont’s renowned Goddard College, to talk with us about her career in founding, participating in and leading programs of study in progressive education.

In our Conversation, we found ourselves discussing why skepticism is essential to success, how programs that foster creative writing differ from those that homogenize writers, and how individualized studies provide students with critical skills for lifelong learning.

Susan Maier-Moul As an individualized masters studies graduate, I’m enthusiastic about progressive education. This chance to talk with you about education, about self empowerment, and about Goddard is really a gift.

You’ve supported and directed some pretty wonderful programs, including a unique degree program which you co-founded. Where did this vocation begin?

Ruth Farmer Throughout my entire adult life I’ve been involved in education, either as a teacher or as an administrator, and I wove in and out of that work. I grew up in North Carolina, and lived in Brooklyn, New York for several years.

I worked in universities – I was the associate director of the Center for Research on Women at Barnard College and I taught at the University of Vermont – but I’ve also been an admissions officer and a teacher in secondary schools, and at the Community College of Vermont, where, by the way, I still teach.

Finding voice as a founder: the BFA in creative writing

Ruth I was hired as a faculty member in the Individualized BA program at Goddard in 2004. In 2006, Lucinda Garthwaite (the co-director of IBA) asked me to develop a proposal for a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program with her and Prageeta Sharma, an IBA faculty member.

Susan Those are your cofounders.

Ruth Yes. We got together and we drafted up a proposal for a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Goddard. After a year-long process that included garnering feedback from the Goddard College community, the program enrolled its first students in Fall 2007.

In 2008 I was invited to serve as the interim director of the Individualized MA program, and subsequently offered the position.

Susan Wow, that’s an impressive pace – it must seem like yesterday!

Ruth It does. I really am surprised – it feels like last year. It was in fact almost 3 years ago that I became director of the Individualized MA Program!

Susan You bring a personal perspective to what makes education worthwhile, and you went through the hard work of implementing something you believed would be useful and effective for young writers.

We’ve seen MFA writing programs, but I’d love to know what inspired you to design the BFACW. What hopes did you have? It was ambitious and the concept is pretty intriguing.

Ruth I thought it was an interesting idea. But, I actually didn’t think that it was the best idea.

Susan (laughing) Why is that?

Ruth A lot of times people come into these creative writing programs and think that they’re going to get the resources to help them become published authors. They think all they are going to do is come in and just write their poetry or their fiction, or whatever it is, and actually, we were thinking of it in a different light.

We were thinking of BFAW as a program in which students already have achieved most of the foundations of a liberal arts education, either from coursework, or individualized study plans if they were Goddard students. They’d have to have studied social sciences, natural sciences, math.

So if they came in and were doing this creative writing – it was almost beside the point – or more precisely, in addition to the point – we saw them as advanced BA students.

Designing tools of inquiry

Susan It was based on designing tools for inquiry. You were creating a program where a practice – a writing practice in this case – was integrated with an awareness of and competence with cultural constructs.

Ruth Yes, you phrase it well: tools for inquiry. Interestingly, many disciplines are seen as forms of inquiry, a means to further ends. Creative writing is too often seen as the point, when it is a means to many ends. But a lot of students came to us, wanting to be in the program and thinking “this all I’m going to do.” “I’m just going to be a creative writer and I don’t need this foundational stuff, cause it’s not relevant to what I’m doing.”

And I would say at the beginning of the program, that was something that students really were stunned by, when they realized, “Oh – in order to graduate, I really do have to have taken math!” Or, “I have to have done a study plan in which I have some math in it.” They also realized that they had to reach beyond their comfort zone as poets or prose writers. That they had to examine their assumptions about writing, including their own writing.

So that was a shock for some of them.

The program is successful and is now three years old, so the director and faculty seem to have found a way of conveying the prerequisites and requirements.

Susan It really is this valuable early integration of the habits, and discipline of the writing life with a personal methodology for lifelong learning.

Feeling skeptical doesn’t mean don’t do it

Susan I like that you were skeptical – I wish you would say more about that, because, you know, we’re really taught to imagine that good ideas will identify themselves by making us feel enthusiastic.

Ruth I was not really that keen on having a BFA creative writing program because I believed that students would think that it wasn’t important to have this other foundational coursework, or understanding of liberal arts education before they came in.

And I thought that students would expect a certain level of resources that Goddard was not able to offer at the time.

Susan See, that’s really valuable. Because I think there’s a message out there, that if we feel skeptical of our ideas we don’t see the gift of that, and we abandon what it really would interest us to do.

Ruth You know how it is in MFA programs, and in writing programs. You’re coming there because you want to work with particular people, because it has a particular reputation, and what does a BFA have to offer?

I was really very skeptical! (laughter) I have to say, I was very skeptical. But I really, really enjoyed thinking about it, and writing about it, and thinking about how it could work.

And it worked! That was the piece that I really liked. I wasn’t so enamored of the idea that I lost my skepticism. I was the skeptic in the group.

So I could step back from the proposal draft and look at it and say: well you know why would anybody do this when they could do something else? When they could get an MFA? I asked those questions. Not that Lucinda and Prageeta didn’t ask those kinds of questions. It’s just that I was more inclined to wonder about this main question, of what a BFAW degree could offer.

That’s part of my way of working with people; it’s something I’ve always done: Viewed ideas with skepticism. Perhaps it’s because I’m such an idealist in so many ways. It’s a remarkable tension – idealism and skepticism.

The notion of being responsible for your education, but also knowing what resources you think you need, what resources you have at your fingertips, and what questions you have when you enter – it was very important to me that the BFA in creative writing retained those things.

Defending creativity from the writing mill

Ruth Writing is greater than publishing, though you wouldn’t know it from the attitudes perpetuated in some writing programs.

I don’t mean to sound snarky. This is where my idealism emerges: People who want to write should be able to explore that creativity rather than become squashed into an expected mode of thought or expression, something that often happens in writing programs.

That program was not intended to create a – how should I say it? – a BFA in creative writing clone.

And I think that sometimes, there are those programs that are: MFA in creative writing clones. That you could actually sometimes see, by reading someone’s work, you could sort of feel like that person graduated from a creative writing program.

Like you know it, you know?

Susan Oh yeah, oh absolutely. One of the heartbreaking things about reading some of the creative writing quarterlies, for those of us who love reading, is this terrible sense that everything is starting to have a certain pre-sized taste to it. There’s just a kind of feeling of great loss.

Ruth I wanted to be sure that that didn’t happen with – we’re not going to start people off at a bachelors level with that clone feeling. And I think that the program, at least my understanding of where it is now is, that, it has retained some integrity and really been not trying to create the BFACW clone.

But it was also exciting trying to develop a program that didn’t really exist. I mean that there was no other low-residency BFA in Creative Writing program anywhere.

Susan Yes, that’s part of what impresses me so much. That you brought a new thing into existence, and you really cared about its success in its design, and about its potential to give something substantial to the people investing in it.

A strong collaboration with different points of view

Susan What I heard you say is, an important question that comes from you is “Why would someone do this?” And to ask that question as a strategic question. As in, if I understand what are the motivations of the people I am designing the program for, then I’m going to do a better job of it. And I’m also going to think about what not to do.

Ruth And that was the question – why would someone want a BFAW. You know, why?

That was really good, and just to think about, well how do you stake a claim and not also, appear so radical that people feel like your claim, your idea is invalid.

So, yeah, that was a fun piece, I thought.

Susan I also really love to see not abstract talk, but actual cultural products emerge from collaborations where people value each other’s differences in the way they actually take a problem apart. It’s an example of, what does a collaboration that involves different points of view really look like?

Ruth I believe in people stepping out. I think that sometimes I am kind of cautious. So I really admire people that step out and do their thing.

I think the three of us working together on that project was great, because we had different sensibilities, different relationships to the project. It was really wonderful for me to work with people who had vision, and my vision was sort of parallel on some level, and on some levels perpendicular to theirs … It was that tension that made it work.

Advanced education: individualized master of arts

Ruth It was also keeping in mind the question, Why would anyone want to earn this particular degree? It is the same question often asked of people who enroll in the Individualized MA program. Why did you decide to enroll in IMA, Susan?

Susan I focused in embodiment studies at Goddard. There was never a moment I considered doing my graduate work anywhere else. For me, the individualized degree meant I could literally get a decade ahead of a so-called “traditional” courses of study, and it effectively prepared me for my life’s work.

I feel just huge sympathy for colleagues who got a graduate degree without getting an education. They paid tens of thousands of dollars to compromise their desire to build capacity to whatever requirements put the edges on a piece of paper and a pile of debt.

Let’s talk a little bit more about the IMA. To pick up a phrase you used a moment ago, let’s talk about being responsible for your own education.

Ruth Most of the time when folks come to IMA they have a pretty clear idea what they don’t want, and they may even have an idea of what they want.

Most applicants have explored traditional avenues of education, and they have these questions about either their own lives or other people’s lives, and they’ve looked around and sort of thought “Where can I go through the process of answering these questions, in my own way?”

Susan I remember when I was very young, watching my father build a motherboard and then the computer that housed it. He understood everything about it. I felt the opportunity to design a meaningful investigative methodology allowed me to take responsibility for how all of it worked together, to understand right to the details the relationship of how and why and what I was doing.

Ruth In looking at IMA’s literature, “individualized” stands out. We did a survey of current students to find out what attracted them to IMA. The one word that attracted all the students was “individualized.”

That notion of “Wait, I can think about how I want to shape my learning.” It attracts a lot of people, that idea, as opposed to going to a college where their literature says that they are individualized. At Goddard, we really mean that you have to design your course of study. That’s individualized. It’s not like some other colleges that have individualized approaches in the courses you are required to take.

You know, it’s a real thing at Goddard, individualized.

Susan There is such life long value in understanding what drives you, and frankly, it teaches you to observe and deconstruct other people’s agendas. It might be that until you are actually engaged in doing that, designing a course of study, you don’t get how radical it really is.

Ruth The point is that you have to figure out what it is that you think you want to learn, how it is you think you might want to go about learning it, how would you assess it, what would you study? I mean, it’s the whole gamut.

But also, how would you use your resources? The resources that are available to you? What resources are going to be available to you? And that means people as well as material things.

A muscle made by four semesters of work

Ruth Students come into the program and they realize they can explore the areas of interest to them. This is a school and there are degree criteria. Students have a lot of leeway as to how to meet those degree criteria.

So, students are attracted by the individualized piece, and, also on some level kind of frightened by it too.

Susan How does that show up?

Ruth I talk to applicants a lot. There are two extremes to their applications. One has a proposed study plan of three sentences, and you’re wondering, well, clearly this person doesn’t know what the program is about. Which is fine. Maybe we’re not doing our job from the public relations point of view… (smile)

Then you have the other extreme of people who have pages of stuff they’re thinking about and so both of those conversations are really enlightening for me.

Because the person who really has all this stuff that they want to accomplish – one of the first things I say to them is “Well, this is so interesting. This is stuff that I would want to do.” Because a lot of times, it really is. “How might you have a sense of success, since you’re only going to be with us for four semesters?”

Rather than saying, “You can’t do this in four semesters” – which is sort of like throwing cold water on somebody – I say, “There’s a lot going on here that would take you a very long time. This shows that you are a lifelong learner. This proposed study plan can take you beyond the MA degree.

What can you do that would make you feel as though you’ve succeeded at the end of these four semesters, rather than that you didn’t get everything done that you wanted?”

There is just a different approach to it. When I say this to applicants, they usually laugh and agree. Then we have a conversation about how the program works. At that point, they become comfortable exploring the complexities of their ideas, knowing that they could still accomplish meaningful work and not achieve everything they’ve listed on their application.

And the other conversation, where people haven’t drawn out anything, is that the student really hasn’t thought about what it means to be an individualized studies student.

I mean, they really haven’t thought about it. They think they are going to come to the program and their advisors are going to tell them what to do. This is not a criticism of them. It is more of an observation of what I believe they are expecting.

I talk with them about teasing out what it is they think they want to accomplish in four semesters, knowing that advisors, peers, and other faculty members in the community will help them flesh out their ideas.

And their ideas will change. They won’t change drastically, maybe – though some people’s study plans or degree plans do change drastically – but they will change. But, students have to have foundations that is theirs. That’s the individualized piece.

We are not going to tell students what they’re passionate about. They gotta tell us.

This is what I’m passionate about

Susan One of the things I think is so great about the way you handle this question, it’s just terrific stuff, you kind of hand that parenting thing back to them. When they show with ok here’s a hundred pages, tell me what is good. Reward me for some part of it.

You come around to their side of the table and sit and look at it with them and invite them to integrate that question, and ask themselves, what can I commit to in this? Where would I tease a thread out to begin and how do I want to bound it?

I think that when we as peers, and adults, and educators express faith in the student’s – and really in each other’s – ability to do that task, instead of answering it for them. I know that for me that always threw open doors, at the time that I was at Goddard. It let the light in, in my own thinking process. Like, I’m sound. I can do this. And that’s not something people get, I believe, from many other course-defined programs.

Ruth Well some students don’t get it and also aren’t necessarily reinforced to think about things. Because In IMA, we’re not teaching people what to think, we’re talking about how they think.

You know, how do you approach an issue, why do you approach it in that way, what are other ways that people have approached the question or issue?

When you and I were talking the other day, I started thinking about how the individualized piece also throws people off because they think they can push against theories that they haven’t even studied.

Not every applicant is like this, and I would say there’s a low percentage of people who do it, but it is very significant that someone might say, oh I want to talk about how psychologists don’t know how to treat people with eating disorders. And I’ll say, well, who are you talking about? and they’ll tell me, and I’ll say well, have you read their stuff?

And they may have (laughter).
But they haven’t made it clear that they have.

The way the world works

Ruth You want to be sure that if you’re going to push against something, that you know what it is that you’re pushing against, and why. You’re not going to subvert somebody’s theory if you don’t even know what that theory is.

Susan Yes – that is really key. It’s the key to unlocking a lot about how the world works. And when you understand how you are constructing knowledge, because I felt the process involved in the managing the vitality of my study plan taught me so much about that, how you are constituting it among other people who are also constituting knowledge, it shifts things.

Ruth That’s another interesting conversation I have with applicants. Because it’s individualized, and because there are so many possibilities, sometimes students’ applications include stuff that I have not even heard of much less know a lot about. So that’s a way for me to get them to tell me what they’re thinking. When a person writes a really good application, you see exactly what they’re talking about.

But it’s also true some people are really better at talking about what they’re doing. So these conversations are essential to the application process.

Having those conversations I get a sense of the individualized piece, the questions they might have. The need that they have for the program.

I mean there are some people who are just autodidacts. If you are an autodidact and you come to IMA you’re going to be fighting us the whole way. There’s no point in you coming. You don’t really need a graduate school. (laughter)

You’re not going to do crap the way we’re doing it. You don’t want to have anything to do with degree criteria and theses and final products and the processes of attaining a degree. So why are you spending your money going to school? There’s a small contingent of people who are like that.

Most people are sort of like this: I’m sort of struggling with this question, I really like having mentors, I really want to think in community, or at least one-on-one with somebody about what it is I’m doing and I want somebody to challenge me, so that I have somebody to push against.

Those kinds of learners want peers, advisors, guides, and they are interested in earning a degree. They want individualized. Their lives, their professional lives, or their personal lives make it such that they prefer low residency, but they don’t want to be alone.

Tomorrow, in part two of our Conversation with Ruth Farmer, we talk about identifying resources, owning your decisions, and reclaiming your life from snares of other people’s opinions – and your own projections:

“I think a lot of times people don’t do something not because they don’t have the capacity to do it, but because they’re wondering “What will people think if I abandon other aspects of my life?””

© 2011, The Magazine of Yoga, LLC.