It might be a heck of a scary time out in the real world, but here in the Ivory Tower the roller coaster ride on Wall Street and the antics of a presidential election provide valuable fodder to generate class debate and provide vivid examples of theory in practice.

While faculty are inwardly freaking out over the tumble our 401K plans have taken in the past weeks and adjusting retirement dreams to match the reality of the market, we are also capitalizing on current events to illustrate what could have been dry lectures.

As an academic adviser, I encouraged my students to take a political science course this semester. What better way to learn about American politics than to observe a tight presidential race from the vantage point of an expert in the field? Our dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Joe Marbach, is often tapped by local television stations to comment on elections. I’ve also seen articles in recent Star Ledger editions by Prof. Catherine Zizik, a speech professor who also coaches the SHU Brownson Speech and Debate Team, whose expertise was tapped to comment on the recent presidential and vice presidential debates.

The goal is to make the curriculum come alive. That’s especially important for our first-year students who could be having difficulty making the transition from the active-teaching model of K-12 schools to the active-learning model of a college campus. What do I mean by that?

Well, in K-12, students are taught by people who felt such a passion to be educators that they went to college to learn HOW to be a teacher. Part of what they learned was about how to keep the attention of children and how to entertain, for want to a better word. These teachers pull out all the bells and whistles (and power points and movies and group activities and field trips) to keep students engaged and involved in the curriculum.

Then, students graduate from high school and come to college where the only people who have been taught HOW to teach can be found in the College of Education. Everyone else gravitated to college teaching as they became experts in their field. Math professors love sines and cosines, but don’t give a hoot about pedagogy. English professors love literary criticism. Journalism professors (that’s me) love news leads and nut grafs. Although none of us has taken courses on teaching, we know more about our particular field of doctoral study than 99.9 percent of the rest of the world.

But students are sometimes confounded by the transition from the active-teaching model, where the onus falls on the teachers to teach, to the active-learning model, where the burden falls squarely on the student to become a learner. Students sometimes complain that a professor is boring, or the ultimate insult, “That professor doesn’t know how to teach.”

“You are so right,” I proclaim. The students are startled that I have validated their complaint and off-guard when I add, “But that is your problem, not his. What are you going to do about it?”

That is the challenge to our students: how do you use active-learning skills to learn as much as you can about a field of study from someone who is an acknowledged EXPERT in this field?

For professors, oftentimes the best way to meet the students where they are is to bring the world into the classroom. As a journalism professor, I used to assign my students to “cover” the debates – to take notes as if they were professional journalists. Then, I would have them write up their stories in class. It would give us the opportunity to talk about the election from a media perspective, to hash out the concept of objectivity of news reports and to also give students a real life journalistic experience.

The best synergy is achieved when a dynamic professor who doesn’t know a bit about the science of teaching but has an innate sense of theatrics draws from the tremendous world stage to illustrate theories and give students concrete examples that make dry textbooks come alive.

This can also spill over into family life and reap benefits for us parents. I have found that current events can raise the level of dinner conversation. If I ask what they are learning in their classes, they say, “Nothing.” But if I draw them out to apply the book learning they are mastering in the classroom to the havoc that is swirling around us, it usually works. It does my heart good when a family dinner centers around whether and how the stock market can right itself or whether the major candidates’ positions on Iraq should be the determining factor for casting a vote. So much more valuable than fighting over who hid the TV remote in the sofa cushions or who ate the last Ring Ding. Makes college worth all the sacrifices!

By Tracy Gottlieb, Ph.D.

Dean of Freshman Studies and Special Academic Programs