One of the lovely and somewhat daunting aspects of a new job is all the new “first times” in what is inescapably a rookie year. Thank goodness for beginner’s luck, which I certainly had when Steve Davis, winner of Baylor’s 2008 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, invited me to visit his seminar in science education. This group of undergraduates and graduate students is spending the semester thinking about improving science education in higher ed. and in K-12. They’re also thinking about the exciting possibilities opened up by undergraduate research, an area in which Steve has accomplished great results at his home university, Pepperdine. I saw Steve’s presentation on his SURB (Summer Undergraduate Research in Biology program earlier this month, roughly ten days into my new job, and I was deeply impressed by the program and by Steve’s wise and passionate presentation. (More on both of those in a future post.) So I was excited and honored by the chance to be in his class and lead a discussion among his students.
The primary purpose of my visit was to tell the students about the new Baylor Academy for Teaching and Learning that I’m directing, and to field their questions and lead a discussion. As I often do, I decided to start with a provocative prompt and proceed from there. The prompt was Mike Wesch’s “A Vision of Students Today.” A couple of the students had seen the video before, but most hadn’t, and even the ones who’d seen it before seemed to find its energy and vision compelling. When the video was finished, I asked them to take out a piece of paper and spend just a few minutes jotting down what they would like their teachers to know about them as learners. You can see the results, just as they wrote them, here.
I found the class and the discussion very stimulating, very thought-provoking. I loved the students’ energy and openness. (Can you tell I’m pining for the classroom? Next term!) We spent a little time talking about the Academy directly, but most of the time we talked about the Academy by talking about their experience as learners (and for the grad students, as teachers) in higher education. I articulated the connection as best I could by explaining that my vision for the Academy was of a place that brought together many stories: from students, from faculty, from staff, all of us learners, all of us in some sense teachers as well. I told them I would tell their story on my blog. (I would have done this anyway, but the theme of telling the story has been much on my mind lately as I finish Orson Scott Card’s truly remarkable Speaker For The Dead.) I told them that I hoped their story would be only the first of a long series of stories that we would tell each other at Baylor, thereby knitting ourselves together into an ever closer, ever more effective learning community.
For the record, I think that if we get that part right at the Academy, the rest will follow–though that’s not to say there’s not a lot of work involved in getting “the rest” up and running, for there surely is.
A few highlights from the session:
One student had Googled me and found my blog. Another told me about how cell phones had become education tools in India. Another student talked passionately and knowledgeably about the need for authentic assessment. And these were only three of many memorable moments–memorable moments to follow up.
We spent a good while discussing the price, role, and effectiveness of textbooks–no surprise, given how central they are to science education. In the Wesch video, one student holds up a sign about an expensive textbook that she’s never read, and her statement resonated with the group in a big way. Their questions spilled out. Why do we have textbooks? Why do we need textbooks? What kind of textbook is best? Can teachers not assign textbooks if they don’t want to? (One student noted that teachers at Central Michigan are required to assign textbooks.) Why are they so expensive? Why does one get so little money on buyback? And so forth. I tried to talk about textbooks as a technology, one embedded with a curricular, financial, and teaching system, and one that embodied a great many assumptions about all of those systems that might well be challenged, or at least rethought. I was also mindful of the fascinating conversation on K-12 textbooks Mike Wesch had recently opened up on his blog.
The textbook discussion was merely one aspect of our larger discussion, however. That larger discussion was of course about learning: what constitutes real learning? how do we know when it’s happened? how do we foster understanding and insight and what Steve Davis so forcefully calls “transformative ideas” instead of concentrating almost all our efforts on “coverage” and factual memorization? Not that facts are unimportant–far from it. These are scientists, after all. But facts alone do not lead to transformative ideas. Steve Davis insists that other qualities matter as much or more than the ability to memorize facts: careful observation, fresh perspectives, “the eyes of an 18-year-old.” Steve also insists that data aren’t real unless they’re shared, presented, even published. He tells them that if the data aren’t shared, it’s as if the research never happened. Hence the writing assignment for the term is a grant proposal. He tells his students that some of those proposals could well be funded. In other words, he asks his students to write for a real audience, to work hard, and (this is the truly inspiring part) to prepare themselves for results far beyond their expectations.
I’ll be following the class’s progress for the rest of the semester. I am convinced that their energy and insights will lead to some of those transformative ideas, and I’ll be cheering for them when that day comes. I have a stake in their success. Actually, we all do–but my visit made my investment more visible to me, as I hope this brief report has done for you.
My heartfelt thanks to Steve for inviting me, and to the class for making my first time in the classroom at Baylor so rewarding.
My heartfelt thanks to you for sharing the story of this class–and for the responses of the students to your opening exercises. Using the students’ own words to capture their desires for authenticity, involvement, meaning–even passion–is powerful. I’ve heard many of these same stories from my own students and they never fail to move me. They teach and learn because it defines them as human beings, and yet they fully aware of the limits of their own skills and abilities in learning and the demands of life beyond this current class. They want to be appreciated as whole people–not just as cognitive containers for facts and materials.
The discussion of textbooks is a cogent example of what happens in transformative learning as you helped them to understand many of the implicit assumptions about the educational process that shape even the most familiar components of their school.
I’m looking forward to future chapters.
Of course this business of learning can’t help but turn my thoughts back to Walker Percy and “The Loss of the Creature.” When the student wrote he “would like to be able to learn where and when I want to learn,” I recognized echoes of Percy’s dogfish in an English class and Shakespeare in a biology lab. The non-traditional students I teach (some of whom are every bit as young as traditional ones) often come to class with even more pre-conceived ideas than their traditional counterparts about how learning should take place. Their expectation is that I will fill their heads with necessary facts and feed them the information that they consider “learning.” Assigning them the Percy essay this semester pushed back at their idea of instructor-based “learning.†I simply tell them to keep poking at the words and trying to see them from a different perspective. I hope they can. I hope they understand the importance of perspective. I think they do or are beginning to, each in their own ways. Some do it better than others, but they all make the attempt, and that alone is good. Maybe part of this idea of “learning” is hampered through standard educational practices such as grading: students have come to expect a reward (a grade) for having their heads filled rather than finding satisfaction through the discovery of figuring things out themselves. I also thought that the student’s question about why they had to buy textbooks was interesting. This semester, I worked hard to get my coordinator to accept that my students would purchase only one textbook rather than the two she wanted them to buy. Why should they buy an extra book if I was not going to assign readings or use it? The information she wanted them to have was available in the other text, and it seemed wasteful and redundant to ask them to purchase a second book. What I’m saying here is that what you said resonates with me. In fact, I suspect it will resonate with lots of folks who, like me, will want to hear more about what you learned from the students at Baylor and how you think we can all foster more true learning.
I am always a tad overwhelmed when I read the variety of responses your question “What I’d like my professor to know about me as a learner” elicits. It is so daunting to try and think of ways to teach to all those different needs and not be condescending about it.
I was talking about learning styles with a friend of mine who is an excellent teacher and has won awards locally and nationally for his teaching. His comment to me was “Did I really think knowing what his or her learning style was actually helped a student?” The idea being that it was unreasonable to expect a teacher to modify his/her teaching style to meet the needs of each individual in a class (and we were both at institutions where class size averaged about 30 students). My response was that it would be helpful to the student to recognize that his learning style might be very different from the teacher’s teaching style. But how do we teach differently to try and cast as wide a net as possible?