Greetings colleagues! I am writing this post from Albuquerque, NM, where I’ve been up to my elbows at the Southwest Popular American Culture Association conference this week. I presented my paper yesterday, and that’s the only excuse I can come up with for missing the Friday deadline for this blog post. It’s 0634 in the morning, and I’ve been up since 0430 catching up on overdue grading, but hunting makes me an early riser, so I don’t mind. The sun is just starting to grumble its way up the Albuquerque skyline, and the sky is pale grayish-blue. I grew up in this state, so coming to SWPACA always makes me nostalgic, particularly when it comes to polishing off a bowl of green chile stew.
Sorry: I just had to share.
I concur heartily with our adamsden, who spoke of how easy it is, at some point in the term, to backslide into some and even all of the bad habits mentioned St. Germain’s article. But then again, screwing stuff up is the price of going off the map, and taking chances is what makes teaching exciting. After doing this for 16 years (and I know some of you have been doing it far longer), that’s one thing I can say for certain. Anyone who teaches something the same way for decades is doing something wrong. The recipe can always be improved.
Of the five pitfalls St. Germain wags her pedagogical finger at, I found myself most smitten with Pitfall #5: Ignore the ways students learn from each other. Over the years, in every class I teach, I have always been impressed (and even spiritually clubbed over the head) by how thirsty our students are to relate to each other on a personal level. Some of this thirst may be impelled by the harsh realities of attempting to teach meta-lecture classes in excess of 150+ students, where participants feel like so many faceless faces in a crowd.
Maybe it’s the fact that, since birth, millennials have been trained and nurtured to work in pods, like orcas, and there is a certain reassurance in sticking with the herd.
But I think the answer is far different. I think our students are thirsty to work with each other because it is stimulating, plain and simple. While they might, in a best case scenario, honor and cherish their educational relationships with us old teacherly types (I speak for myself, obviously), they find own interpersonal relationships incredibly exciting, as they agree, disagree, admire and/or square off with each other in the Arena of the Intellect.
And can I fault them? Look at where I am right now: at a conference in Albuquerque, arguing and reveling in adaptation theory with my colleagues, finding inspiration and motivation to bring back home to my classrooms. Making new connections and eating green chile cheeseburgers for lunch.
So reflecting on St. Germain’s nice, punchy article (I love it when pedagogical theory gets to, and sticks with, the point), I solemnly pledge to stay alert, to not remain content with mere discussion board exchanges, but to bust my hump to figure out more interactive ways my students can make contact with–and gain inspiration from–each other. There are untapped wells of energy in that process, and it is my aim in the coming terms to tap this wellspring of energy and channel it to make a more exciting classroom. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt the students learn as much (even more) from each other than they would if I try to cram my agenda of “knowledge” into their heads.
One of the most inspirational texts I have stumbled on in my career is titled “The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation,” by the French political theorist, Jacques Ranciere. I will close this missive with one of my favorite quotes, in which Ranciere critiques the megalomaniacal master-driven style of learning:
“The master always keeps a piece of learning–that is to say, a piece of the student’s ignorance–up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You think so, corrects the master. in fact, there’s a difficulty here that I’ve been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. What does this mean? asks the curious student. I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature: you wouldn’t understand at all. It will be explained to you next year. The master is always a length ahead of the student, who always feels that in order to go farther he must have another master, supplementary explications. Thus does the triumphant Achilles drag Hector’s corpse, attached to his chariot, around the city of Troy.”
Great post and your conference sounds really interesting!
“I think our students are thirsty to work with each other because it is stimulating, plain and simple.” This is so true and made me realize that I still find myself surprised by this observation.
There was a study published in the academic journal Memory & Cognition which concluded that students who taught others performed better on tests than those who were told they would be tested. Essentially, students learn more if they have to teach others. I need to think about how to integrate this more into my classes and hybrid seems like a great opportunity for such.
https://www.futurity.org/learning-students-teaching-741342/
Great post and your conference sounds really interesting!
“I think our students are thirsty to work with each other because it is stimulating, plain and simple.” This is so true and made me realize that I still find myself surprised by this observation.
There was a study published in the academic journal Memory & Cognition which concluded that students who taught others performed better on tests than those who were told they would be tested. Essentially, students learn more if they have to teach others. I need to think about how to integrate this more into my classes and hybrid seems like a great opportunity for such.
https://www.futurity.org/learning-students-teaching-741342/
Thanks Alina! Especially for that link. I think it is an exciting question: having students “teach it.” Because it is not the same as having students do presentations on a book chapter or something, not the same thing at all — a lesson I learned the hard way when I used to form student teams to deliver presentations on selected readings or whatevs. Because those could sometimes be really lame (50 percent) and half-baked, just students recapitulating information. But to have them actually TEACH something — a concept, an ideal, anything — then they really have to immerse themselves in the topic and how it works. Love it!
“I think our students are thirsty to work with each other because it is stimulating, plain and simple.” This is so true and made me realize that I still find myself surprised by this observation. A study in the academic journal Memory & Cognition which concluded that students who taught others performed better on tests and in class.
I have less teaching experience than most. I’d love to hear some examples of students’ “thirst” to learn from each other. I suspect hearing about such circumstances will help me envision how to create them.
Thanks for the response, Dennis. These days I am always breaking students out in teams or forming in-class discussion roundtables because the students love interacting with each other; the reality of 150+ classrooms often precludes them actually engaging with each other on a personal, interactive basis. They love to barter with each other, flirt with each other, evaluate each other, discuss and debate things among themselves — have ideas, show off, stuff like that. The student’s need to relate to [and differentiate from] each other is a deep wellspring that we ignore at our own peril!