One of the classes I teach is the Big Introduction to the Discipline course (BID). The BID covers roughly 2500 years, several emphasis areas, myriad topics, and countless methods. Though there are several competing canons and disciplinary narratives, the department I teach in is rather roguish about fitting into any of the standard narratives (proponents would call us eclectic, detractors would call us irresponsible). So, right off the bat, presenting the discipline as reflected in my department poses a challenge to teaching the BID. But the bigger challenges are the teaching context and adapting to the particular student body (and student bodies) filling the lecture hall, (or lecture stadium as it sometimes feels).
The teaching context is a lecture hall that holds about 400 students. The cap on the course is 300, and I'll let in latecomers over the cap. As we all know, one cannot teach a class of 300 students in exactly the same way one teaches 35 students (which is the size of my "small" classes). I tend to be more successful in the smaller settings where I can speak in a more conversational style and tone, where discussion can be fostered, where unforeseen lines of thought can be followed (i.e., what in larger settings are disparagingly described as "going off on tangents" or "loving to hear himself talk"), and where I can have awareness of the actual individuals in the room with me. Another part of the teaching context is that every student getting a major in our department has to take this course and pass it with a C- or better. Making this situation much more sticky is that the undergraduate committee just this past semester created prerequisite requirements for about 75% of our course offerings requiring the previous passing of the BID course with a grade of C (not C-) or better. Making this situation even stickier still is that, until very recently, passing the BID course was never a prerequisite for anything except graduating, which meant that people could take the Introduction their last semester. I still feel this pinch as most of my students in the BID are upperclassmen (or is it upperclasspeople?). As a result, the class has a recent history of being packed with people who, rather than taking the BID to see if this is the right major for them, are simply trying to get an annoying hurdle out of the way at the very last minute.
I should mention at this point that this course is almost always taught as a once-a-week, 3-hour night class.
Most of us are aware of the steady decrease in attention spans of American youth. Most of us are also aware that this decrease in attention span coexists with an increase in mediated, fragmented, truncated, branded, and packaged information, if not also styles of communication. Part of me wants to do anything I can to adapt to the learning styles created by the mediated information age; but another part of me wants to create traditional learning styles in my students, wrought from the era of the book and the crumbling medium of writing. From both parts, I feel like I have to do something. I was shocked last semester when nearly 200 students failed the midterm—a midterm that was rudimentary multiple choice of the first level of Bloom's taxonomy of learning variety. Yet the point that I needed to change something was driven home as I read the written feedback on the course evaluations and found that the only significant complaint was an inability to follow my lectures because they consisted mainly of speaking about their readings and about themes and trends in the discipline. They will get lost early in the class period and switch their attention to their sidekicks and text messaging devices. If there isn't a power point slide, they don't know what to write down (so they write down nothing). If there isn't a multimedia presentation, or the screening of a video, there is simultaneously not enough internal stimulation to keep their attention and too many external distractions to keep their focus. The way I'm going to try to manage all of this, in order to maintain rigor with the material and adjust to the student's communicative needs, is by podcasting the lecture material.
I'm not going to podcast lectures qua lectures, though. That would only be a mediated version of the very thing that doesn't work already. You see, what doesn't work for students is listening to an average professor (not some super-eloquent and animated professor like Cornel West) talk to 300 people. What most of these 300 people want is someone to talk to them in an interpersonal and conversational way. And, given the technology and the equipment I have, I can do just that by speaking into a microphone and imagining that I am speaking directly to an individual student. You see, what else doesn't work for students is listening to one person talk for 3 hours, or one hour, or even 30 minutes straight. So, I'm going to break down my lecture material into specific points and issues, trying to create pedagogical units (we can call them lecturemes if we want) that can fit into 10 minute segments. And they will be able to listen at their own pace, in their own place, with controls (pause, rewind, volume control), and hopefully in the less distracting sonic world of headphones. This way I can talk students through texts (even telling them to pause the file and read a passage or revisit something else), explain ideas in manageable chunks, include audio examples, and even interview specialists in specific areas of study for variety (and ethos).
Several of you have already been shaking your head and saying, "but now no one will come to class." I thought about this possibility quite a bit. My knee-jerk response is that coming to class didn't do any good for two-thirds of the class last semester, so at least they have a chance to learn something from the audio files. But I'm just being facetious here, and don't want to envision this class as a kind of correspondence course. All that time students spend engaging instruction outside of class does lead me to some important questions about what to do with my three hours one night a week. Since they will have (or at least have the responsibility to have) experienced the lecture material on their own time, what will I do in place of the time I used to lecture? First, I will have a question and discussion period to give students a chance to take up the responsibility of their own learning (and to smooth over real confusions that may arise in readings and podcasts). Second, I will have graded in-class activity that make students engage the material in some new context or scenario. If these activities add up to a significant enough portion of the grade, then the students will have a practical reason to attend class. Third, I (or one of the TAs) will present a few more relevant examples or thought issues to further extend the learning process. Fourth, sometimes the time could be used to present a more detailed media example (like a film) because I won't need to devote the period to lecture.
All in all, the shift will be away from me as the source of teaching to the students as the source of learning (the learning paradigm that education specialists have been discussing for at least 15 years). If students fail to listen to the podcasts, their learning will suffer, but they won't be able to (reasonably) blame me. I still wonder, though, if I should keep them in the classroom the entire three hours if I've assigned them to listen to audio lectures (in addition to assigned readings) outside of class time. Given last semester's grades, I feel like they need to spend more time with the course material, but I;m not sure what's fair here.
Since I have already taught the course a few times, I won't need to come up with all new material for the podcasts, though I will have to be diligent about being efficient with the "studio time" preparations. I'm confident that I can pull it off. I am hopeful that it will increase learning.
Let me add that I would not want to do this for other courses, especially the smaller ones.
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6 comments:
That's such an interesting solution to this dilemma - I especially like what you've decided to do with the time you do have in class; seems great.
The larger issue here - having taught a required first year introduction myself - is that students don't know how to listen and take notes when someone is lecturing. How has this changed so fast? I don't remember hearing that my peers didn't know how to take notes when I was a first-year student, which was a mere 15 years ago. I find this so distressing, frankly. My inclination is to feel frustrated at a high school curriculum that teaches them...what? How to put together 5-paragraph essays? Ugh. Hell in a handbasket, I tell you.
Thanks for this thought-provoking description of your new course.
Right, Hilaire, the listening skills have eroded. But so has reading for content. I have noticed that the only things that stick from the readings are examples, but not what they are examples of. What I mnean is that when I ask a student what an essay is about, they will readily relay the examples and narratives from the reading, but not the concepts the examples illustrate or any of the connections to deeper phenomena or structures. This makes me think that the structure of thier consciousnesses are different from how they were a mere 15 years ago.
I started college exactly 20 years ago. At that time lecture was the one and only game in town--and it was pure sink or swim. And it took me several years to get beyond the dog-paddling stage.
This is so true, too - about students not being skilled in working at a conceptual level. Last year, my first year as a professor, I had students coming up to me sometimes saying "I just don't get what the course is about...". Because the course would be about concepts. I didn't really know what to do about this...This is part of why I like your idea of podcast combined with what sounds like a kind of "applied" actvity - it will really exercise their conceptual skills...
And please know that I didn't mean to suggest that people "back in the day" were somehow innately superior...I'm sure I also didn't get the note-taking thing for a while. Thinking about it more now, I find the difference is largely in expectation...ya just expected to take notes in a univeristy class, 15-20 years ago, and to stumble through until you figured it out. I think students don't expect that anymore. And where I am, I think this can really be tied to a particular political moment, a party, even, who degraded the high school curriculum in this province, replacing the opportunity to learn about critical analysis with the need to learn by rote for standardized testing. I truly believe that many of the challenges that we face in teaching university in this province stem from that back-to-basics move (which didn't count critical analysis as a basic).
I will shut up now, and stop hijacking your comments. It's just that I'm really interested in this discussion. Thanks again.
While I like the way you plan to transform your class, I wonder if your students won't come to resent you for this. Had I tried this at the university where I taught last year, I would have had multiple complaints that I wasn't using the class time to "teach"–and that I was, in effect, doubling their contact hours.
I don't think it's a valid complaint, but that's the first thing that came to mind when I saw your scheme.
I agree with the comment made above that the t wasstudents have, in effect, lowered the expectations for their own behavior and performance…or, better said, had lower expectations thrust upon them. But few of them, in any case, seem willing to seize upon the opportunity that is presented to them in college.
My experience is perhaps colored by the fact that I teach core courses that students largely take out of obligation, not out of any sense of interest in the material. Still, I found out that a fair amount of my students not only did not know how to learn the material we covered in class, but were also not interested in learning how to learn. They were not invested in their coursework, and no amount of pedagogical pryotechnics was going to change that.
I've got a new position, so we'll see if a change of environment helps…but color me cynical about today's youth.
Ooh…garble in the middle of my post. Drat. "that students have" is the way the phrase should have read.
I'm with you on all the concerns, and this is part of the difficulty of switching from a teaching to a learning paradigm. My recent experience shows that lecture (i.e., teaching qua teaching) isn't producing learning. Certainly I'm being pie in the sky here, but it is maximum learning that I am after. I am holding my breath with hope that the students will not simply complain out of a deep refusal of learning, too.
This kind of intro class should be one that convinces a student with no interest in the material to not, under any circumstances, choose this major.
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