ANY TEACHER who has ever come home exhausted from a long day or week of teaching has probably wondered, at some point, what on earth they are doing in a classroom. Does any learning actually go on? Middle-aged professors can no longer recall what it was like to be eighteen years old and students are mysteries. What is the point of telling a group of people to sit in a room together, when students act as though they only want to be somewhere else?
This fall I've been teaching research writing to undergraduate design and advertising majors and I have been thinking about teaching in general. No one ever taught me how to be a teacher. Since my education has been in graphic design and history, not education itself, I have only my experience as a student to guide me, as well as advice from the long-time college professor I live with. As a novice adjunct, I am an outsider in my department and to the teaching life in general, so questioning common teaching methods might seem naive. However, from the number of articles I have seen about teaching lately, many other people are also analyzing teaching and are asking how teaching, social media, and technology mix, and whether lectures are old-fashioned.
Because I have been teaching research writing to students in three-hour-long classes in design studios, I have had several reasons to wonder about the role of technology in teaching. How do you talk about writing - a solitary activity - for three hours, to a group, and keep the students' eyes off of some kind of screen? Also, how do you motivate them to do research beyond the web, or should you? Much of what I need to say about writing in class is available online and can be found in links that I distributed early in the semester, so any motivated student could work from their dorm room instead of come to class. The benefit of class attendance is supposed to be the discussions that happen there, but students may not be engaged enough to discuss anything while they are in class.
A professor's knowledge was once an important source of his or her power. Online blogs, videos, images, and commentary have diminished that power. For example, art history professors once spent years collecting images, shooting slides, and building their libraries of images and texts. Online images and data now eclipse all such personal collections and determined, interested students can see and collect (if not understand) more than any teacher. Brick-and-mortar libraries have always held more than any one mind, but they weren't as accessible and visual as the internet. Now, even textbooks seem limited and limiting and bored students ignore them. Online versions of information bring into question the role of libraries and e-publishing is changing the way we read and cite books. Books can now be re-imagined as nuggets in one enormous text chain of knowledge, countless chapters in a Google project to catalog everything we know.
In a recent article about teaching in Discover magazine (December, 2011), David H. Freedman, who calls himself the "Impatient Futurist," questions the usefulness of the classroom lecture. Freedman writes about Carl Wieman, a scientist who knows a lot about teaching science to young Americans. Wieman's research on teaching science concludes that "the college lecture is to a large extent a waste of time." From my experience this semester, I would agree, at least when it comes to teaching writing, not a subject that lends itself to learning by lecture anyway.
To be fair, my college did not require me to lecture to students for three hours every week. However, my students and I had to talk about something and I found they had limited patience or generosity for discussions on other students' topics. About three class meetings during the semester would have been sufficient, combined with weekly one-on-one meetings with students. When I did meet with students alone during this past semester, they were more sincere, revealed more about themselves, and even told me they preferred meeting alone.
I can think of two ways of teaching writing: set an example that students admire and want to emulate; and spend a lot of time nurturing and prodding students to take themselves seriously, be curious, and communicate clearly. If class members are supportive of each other, perhaps the nurturing can take place as a group. This semester, nurturing was more effective when I could focus on one student and adapt to that person's level of maturity, talent, and self-knowledge. The most valuable thing I could offer my students was not a lecture on how to footnote, but concentrated concern for their progress and advice based on my personal experience.
My conclusions this semester are supported by a recent interview with Richard A. DeMillo in The New York Times entitled "The Evolution of Higher Education." DeMillo describes M.I.T.'s OpenCourseWare, which put all courses online for free, thus making the point that the contents of university courses are "being rapidly commoditized by technology. If you can easily access a lecture in quantum mechanics from the best lecturer on quantum mechanics, how many other quantum mechanics lectures do you need?" DeMillo then states that today's professors add value in how they lead discussions on issues. Does this mean that teaching is being redefined as the moderation of discussions? Should professors be hired for their curiosity, enthusiasm, open-mindedness, and general skill at inspiring others to interact and do things? I think the answer may be "yes."