Hello,
For my post this week, I have decided to weigh in on an ethos I perceive to be developing in the class, one that has, quite frankly, left a bad taste in my mouth. While recognizing that the confidentiality we share is not ensured under HIPPA, I do hope that things I write here can stay among us. (The public nature of the blog, of course, stifles this hope….)
Anyway, I begin, briefly, with my experience as a teaching assistant last semester. Leaving aside the *fact* that I was vastly overworked and underpaid – such material conditions, of course, affect my own attitude toward pedagogy as well as the quality of my instruction – I wish to focus on the performance of students as indicated by their grades. Each TA for this class had to grade about 70 papers (3 sets…) according to a fixed rubric. For my first set, slightly over half failed the assignment. Such a staggering number indicates, in my view, only one thing: a failure on the part of the instructor to adequately convey the information or teach the skills necessary to fulfill the most basic assignment requirements. In a situation like this – or structurally comparably ones, where statements can be made about the majority of students – it strikes me as irresponsible and unfair to shift culpability to the students, blaming their purported lack of intelligence, or absence of prior adequate training, or whatever. Indeed, after having spoken with a countless number (again, we we overworked, a point I cannot resist belaboring and following with an ellipsis…) of these students, I can say that most were pretty good – and some were really, really intelligent, certainly much more than I (a mere ‘v’ away from an anvil) at that age. I won’t break the blog’s cardinal rule by boring you all with the details of what precisely went wrong so as to result in this unacceptable number of failing grades. But I hope my point is clear. Cast in slightly different terms, here’s what I’m getting at: Any sort of critical pedagogy worthy of the appellation would seem to be premised on respecting one’s students as capable interlocutors.
Again, this was not meant to be some sort of diaphanously veiled critique but rather an expression of some concerns coming from someone who would someday like to be a good teacher.
I think in graduate school, as Robin has of course pointed out, we tend to have a fair amount of anxiety about how smart we are (I know I do). On the other side of things, as instructors we're supposedly in the business (...ain't it booming) of expanding or nurturing students' intelligence. To a point it's probably natural to react flabbergasted when students misinterpret (or don't interpret) directions, or to start chortling when they make hilarious mistakes (okay, not everyone does this, but I do). The burdensome question lurking in the background is of how much responsibility we, as the students' instructors for one semester, have for their success or failure. Since we didn't raise them, we may want to say "not a lot." But we are supposed to be providing SOME kind of learning opportunity, and it would be nice to that it "produced" something of value.
ReplyDeletePerhaps as a result of my years as a high school special ed aide, I haven't really found it particularly useful to think of students as lacking in intelligence (especially since, while students might have poor skills in some areas, they might be strong in others). Rather it has seemed to me that the task is to meet them where they're at. Admittedly, this is more easily done in one-on-one situations, which can be something of a luxury in our position. I do like the idea of a mandatory one-on-one meeting with students early in the semester for whatever purpose; for my part, I think something like a meeting after the first assignment in which I would talk to the student about how s/he approached the assignment and how it and the course resembled or differed from past schooling would be useful.
Of course, in the end you do have to assign grades, and these have to be based on something. On some level it's about whether you can check off all the boxes, but on another it's about demonstrating abilities of particular, if difficult to articulate, degrees. The hope tends to be that the abilities are there for most if not all students, it's just a case of removing the blocks between them and their expression. Our ability to do so may have something to do with the labor structure, both for the students (part-time jobs, full or excessive course loads) and for us (do we really have the time to respond adequately to all the students, to figure out what they will understand?).
"respecting one’s students as capable interlocutors."
ReplyDelete^I think this is so key, and the degree to which it is put into practice determines in part the function (or dysfunction) of the classroom. Looking forward to discussing this in class.
I am not sure if I have enough experience to make big claims about teaching, but I certainly do think that to dismiss the students as wanting in intelligence would only prove self-defeating for our pedagogic endeavor. Writing competence and understanding are mostly not quite the same thing. Last semester, for example, people who did not impress us with their written assignments, often left us impressed with their clarity of understanding in a face-to-face conversation. The solution to this is not in over simplifying. Nor is it in throwing technical terms at them, that only shows our academic arrogance. Speaking to other 'overworked and underpaid' graduate instructors, I get a feeling that striking the mean (between the instructor and the students) can be quite challenging but is itself quite rewarding. I think face-to-face meetings before the big assignment comes in quite handy for this purpose. It will give us an idea of who and where they are and that is fundamentally important if we are to make any difference at all.
ReplyDeleteI would like to offer a boisterous welcome of these posts to my heart and soul. If they were on Facebook, I would SUPERLIKE each of them.
ReplyDeleteSo, first of all, thank you, Anil, for getting this string started.
My favorite part of the blog was the conclusion (you'd get an A for that in my public speaking class as an excellent clincher):
"Any sort of critical pedagogy worthy of the appellation would seem to be premised on respecting one’s students as capable interlocutors."
I believe that it is vital for instructors first and foremost to respect the potential of our students. This is particularly true in an 8000-level critical pedagogy class, which seems by its very title and prerequisites (of years of advanced scholarly work) to assume as a starting point that our students are, indeed, "capable interlocutors." Our job is to figure out how to make that happen to the best of our ability--and theirs. I absolutely LOVE talking about and thinking about the best possible ways to guide students to new ways of thinking and, if we're lucky, new ways of being in the world. But as both a student and an instructor, it makes me shut down almost entirely to hear other students insulted, maligned, or simply talked about as inferior. I know that Robin has suggested the place for such talk is in the bar, not the classroom. I sincerely hope that as so many of us in the class would prefer to focus on ways to improve our pedagogy and incorporate critical thought into our work that we will move forward in that tenor.
Thanks again, Anil, for getting the ball rolling.
I keep a quote in my wallet from my CMU days. It was engraved on a bench I liked to sit at in front of the English Department:
ReplyDelete“Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.”
-- Herbert Simon (Herb)
I'm committed (especially in light of this class) to influence what my students do to learn. Part of this is through getting them involved with broader communities with opportunities such as service learning. But part of this is also making sure I respect them in, and out of, the classroom. While entertaining, I don't think it's productive in a critical pedagogy setting to talk about how bad--or good--our students are. It would be more productive to talk about methods we can use to influence what the student does to learn.
Good post, Anil. This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately.