Overview of The Bellows Institute, a Division of The Bellows Foundation

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AN EMERGING PREMISE IN AMERCAN EDUCATION:

Our next generation is being socialized in a way profoundly different from their parents. Accordingly, their thinking and learning processes are profoundly different.

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(The Bellows Institute founders in the Institute’s new Mobile Development Simulator (left to right): Dr. Orlando Blake, Ph.D.; Irma Federico, M.B.A.; Annette Brink, M.B.A.; Netzin Steklis, M.A.; Steve Boyle, M.S., M.A.(standing); and Dr. Dieter Steklis, Ph.D.

The perspective of the founders of The Bellows Institute (“Bellows”) is as follows:

1. Our next generation is being socialized in a way vastly different from their parents, owing to many unique circumstances, including, but not limited to, their unprecedented living environment marked by media saturation, computer advances, the Internet, and ever-advancing electronic communications and entertainment devices. Consequently, research findings are showing that their thinking and learning processes are also remarkably different from their parents.

2. There is evidence of a yawning gap between the thinking and learning processes of our next generation and the traditional classroom learning environment of most high schools, colleges and universities, today, that still cling, unrelentingly, to a 17th century model offered by America’s first institution of higher learning, Harvard College (1636) and America’s first public school in Dedham, Massachusetts (1642).  The trademark of this 17th century model of American education has been the specialization of knowledge—dividing knowledge into unconnected academic disciplines that rarely bring students from academic theory to applications in real-world environments—thereby limiting its potential to provide the kind of integrative learning that develops creativity, productivity and responsibility in its students. There are fewer faculty members left who know, or are inclined to learn, how to deliver knowledge in this integrative manner.

3. Coincident with this gap between our next generation’s evolved thinking and learning processes and the traditional classroom learning environment is an ominous and unacceptable student dropout rate; 59.5% in public institutions of higher education and 42.7% for private institutions of higher education (2007 American College Testing Report on Student Retention). For the nation’s public high schools, The Gates Foundation published The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts in 2006 which stated: “Each year, almost one third of all public high school students—and nearly one half of all blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans—fail to graduate from public high school with their class. Many of these students abandon school with less than two years to complete their high school education.”

It is in this context that Bellows has been formed to undertake the following tasks:

• To engage in research focused on the thinking and learning processes of our next generation.

• To construct research-guided, integrative and practicum-based learning environments, in semester, summer and winter intersession terms, which will be more aligned with their thinking and learning processes, engage their attention and interest, deepen their understanding of their academic studies, and broaden their perspectives.

• To evaluate and modify these new learning environments to achieve student learning outcomes that will prepare our high school and college students for creative, productive and responsible participation in the emerging global society.

• To connect tested and proven integrative, practicum-based learning environments to high school and college classroom instruction as a natural evolutionary advance in American education.