Reviewing my teaching (read “teaching”) this semester is depressing. That’s the thesis of this piece.
My first-year students are not accessible via the normal commonplaces of the classroom which would include:
Read this text, what was interesting about it to you?
What do you think about this piece?
What stands out to you as interesting here?
What does this make you think about from your other courses?
This is insane that students do not come prepared for such basic tropes of classroom rhetoric. Instead, they have been taught through their experiences (perhaps even direct instruction) that college is about figuring out what the professor wants and doing it. The way you do that is look at the points, look at the rubric, and do exactly that – no questions needed.
It’s the most cynical approach to education that I think you could possibly have. Yet, there is hope.
Students seem mesmerized that I can construct arguments out of the shared reading for the class. When I noticed this lack of ability to create any sort of discourse around the reading, I asked them what they would prefer to talk about and gave them options. The response was: “We’d like to hear you talk about what you think.”
This seems like a lazy dodge at first, however I think this is more them being shocked, or impressed, that this is possible. Imagine having never been asked to construct anything other than the required meanings/responses to a text – Common Core instruction. Now you are in a situation where someone can riff off of a text using their own ideas, experiences, and other stories to craft a way of looking at the text that isn’t obvious, or on the approved list of meanings.
This would seem like magic to you, and yes, someone who is very good at rhetoric would present magical vibes – we would respond by saying “they are so right, they are so good – that was really inspirational” – all forms of a kind of language-magic that one can practice and become quite good at.
Professors should start to think about the classroom less as a holy place and more of a place of exchange and performance where they are the director and writer of what happens. Such a conception can be pulled from a powerful metaphor in the programming/computer science world: The Cathedral and the Bazaar
“The Cathedral and The Bazaar” is an essay written by Eric S. Raymond to describe philosophical approaches to writing and developing software. Raymond argues that there are two major approaches to creating software: One looks more like the historical institution of the Cathedral, where high priests control access to everything and the users must depend on them for any updates, interpretations, or solutions to novel problems. This is a classical, old-world church where even the language and access to the source – the holy text – is secured and made inaccessible to the common person.
The bazaar is the opposite. In that place the common person is in charge, moving from shop to shop to see what is available, what they need, and what they can use. Everything is open and available to them. In this model one gets access to finding what they want, if available, and if not they can figure out how to combine elements from different shops to make it in a tactical, de Certeau sort of manner. This is a distributed system – you have what you’d like to do and you spread it among different people who all have different reasons for being interested. Nobody has to wait for one shop to come up with the total package.
What would this look like in teaching? Well most teachers probably have some form of the bazaar already functioning: Parts of other people’s courses that worked for them in the past, scanned chapters from out of print books here and there, and documents or decks created years ago and tweaked by student reaction or changes in the field. I think that this is still somewhat cathedral thinking, as it relies on the teacher to make things happen. How could we have students moving through the course in a way to where they do not have to rely on the teacher as a gatekeeper of the systems or information they would like?
Online education such as LMS and programs like GoReact and Discord might open up the classroom in this way, but for me it’s still a tough question. How do I step out of the way and let the students serve as resources for one another in building our “software,” i.e. the course and the educational goals within? I’m always “pointing at the moon” as the ancient Buddhist koan identifies as the inevitable poverty of teaching. By pointing out something – even that they should be resources for one another in the study of a subject – I have inexorably linked myself to the experience, taking away some of the pedagogy of the realization of the encounter. On the other side, they wouldn’t have any of the experience at all if I had not said “look at this.”
Why don’t you talk about the book? Maybe this question is the solution to the problem it sparked in my mind. Perhaps I should just say this at the start of the class and see what happens. At first they will think it’s a trick, a way to find out who didn’t read or who just read a little to pass as “having read.” But over time maybe they will find what they say to one another as more valuable than anything I could say. Maybe some modeling is necessary to cut through all the poor teaching they’ve experienced. Not sure what I’ll try in the spring term of 2024 just yet. I have to finish constructing the Big Finger – the syllabus – an ancient artifact we might be better without, but since we are all addicts, it could be fatal to just stop using it cold. Where’s the pedagogical methadone?