TLI Common Hour Wrap-Up, Independent Learning Experiences

It's something of a truism that independent research is good for undergraduates. College students today learn much more actively than they did 20 years ago, in large part due to the self-motivated projects we foster. But these projects are fraught with their own challenges. How do different disciplines address the question of how to foster research? How do we encourage independent thinking and work throughout the curriculum, from the first-year core to senior theses? Last Wednesday, the TLI held a Common Hour dedicated to exploring this issue. Thanks to our thoughtful speakers--Lynne Edwards (Media and Communication Studies), Walter Greason (History), and Tony Lobo (Biology)-- and thanks to all of you who gave up your lunch hour to join in the discussion! A brief summary and some questions from the audience follow below:

Walt Greason is an expert on mentoring independent studies and internships,having worked with over 25 students in his six years at Ursinus. Walt began with a discussion of mentoring, especially the challenges of mentoring students at different skill levels and preparing them for longer research projects. He encouraged us to consider the range of preparation of high school and early years of college--even in a class of one, each student will need different tools to come up to speed, and the "speed" will be different for everyone. Walt laid out a structure for independent research with students that I found admirable. He suggested that one might begin with a critical assessment: 1) What do I bring to this project? 2) Develop a clear and sustained plan, with benchmarks and achievements for which students are held accountable. The third step: modeling professionalism--showing the student what you do in your field, as a scholarly practitioner. Finally, Walt noted to the strengths Ursinus faculty bring to mentoring: our map for lessons, from the 50-minute hour to the structure of the semester; our willingness to share our passions with our students; and the institutional support that helps make independent work possible (Summer Fellows, Study Abroad, internships). He also encouraged us to consider areas of improvement: why not consider the campus as classroom? Ursinus College as a lab for urban/suburban development? Walt offers a model for helping students to think critically about their locations as students at a residential college in a rapidly changing suburban landscape; how eye-opening it could be to consider the Collegeville/Montco region as an advantage, rather than an impediment!

While the disparities Walt mentions of skill level, engagement, and sense of inclusion within the college community affect the success of independent research across the board, they are particularly pertinent for students of color, economically disadvantaged students, and first-generation college students in a majority white, middle-class institution. Even the act of visiting office hours is laden with cultural capital, as is the level of agency needed to complete an independent project. As faculty members, we should be aware of the obstacles that exist to students' agency--and the self-conscious mentoring Walt discusses models how to meet students half-way.

Lynne Edwards followed with a discussion of inter- and intra-personal challenges that can occur during independent projects. Independent projects, she noted, are required, but can also be transforming, rewarding, and terrifying (to us and to them!). The mandatory nature of the ILE can become another obstacle to agency--students may see these projects as a hurdle rather than an opportunity. To make them less burdensome to us, Lynne made several recommendations: first, is the student passionate and prepared? Have you taught this student before and assessed his/her capacity for self-motivation? (She has a "top secret" assignment to help assess this--but if I described it, she might have to kill me.) Second, Lynne recommended we distinguish between teaching and mentoring--hearing students rather than simply talking to them, and moving toward a dialogic exchange. Lynne also discussed the long-term value of generating student excitement: many of the students who work with us have never imagined the academic life. Some man have never developed their own task, or learned to work from insight, intuition, or a sheer interest in something odd or unusual. Intuition is hard to teach--we've honed ours through years of experience. Yet Lynne showed that it can be modeled, and that modeling can be inspiring.

Tony Lobo wrapped up our discussion by talking about the differences that exist--or appear to exist--between mentoring in the sciences and the other disciplines. Tony considered whether the typical science model, in which students work on an existing project, constitutes an "independent study." In the science model, students are mentored from early to upper-level courses, and upper-level students assume a role in mentoring students earlier along. He then discussed the benefits and drawbacks of this model: there is a focus in this kind of research on products, teaching students to generate results, in order to write a successful grant to fund more research. Is peer mentoring beneficial? (The lab, as Tony noted, is set up like a grad school lab, in which advanced students mentor beginning ones, and the PI is off writing grants--is that a good model for an undergraduate institution?) And--as Lynne mentioned--are students conducting research because they want to, or simply because they have to? Despite Tony's critiques of the lab structure, this made me think about how humanities students, who tend to work in isolation, might benefit from such partnerships.



There were a number of excellent questions that came up, which I would love to hear your opinions about (maybe they could become a topic of a Common Hour next year):



What do you do with students who aren't self-motivated?



Internships: what might you do with them? Becky reminded us that there are all kinds of curiosity, not just academic.



How much independence is necessary to describe something as an ILE? (Projects discussed here ranged from Summer Fellows to a 2 1/2 year project.)


How do others set objectives and learning goals in independent study projects?



After the independent study/internship has taken place, how do you evaluate the student's growth, academically and personally?

There has been a significant shift in the relative importance of research and teaching over the past 2-3 decades (at least in the sciences, maybe more broadly) in undergraduate education. Are we now spending too much time and faculty resources on classroom teaching (at the expense of actual learning)?

Review of Teaching Positions by Elizabeth Ellsworth

**The following is the first of occasional book reviews on pedagogy. These books were purchased by the Mellon TLI, and if anyone would like to review a book, please contact Meredith Goldsmith.**

“How should I teach?”

Elizabeth Ellsworth poses this question in the introduction of her book, Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address. But if you’re expecting her to answer it with a rundown of pedagogical techniques, you’d be wrong. Instead, Ellsworth’s response comes in the form of a surprising paradox: “Teaching is impossible…and that opens up unprecedented possibilities” (18).

This phenomenon is approached and explained in various ways throughout the text. Decidedly against the limited thinking about education solely as a social science, Ellsworth draws on a multitude of scholarship from fields within the humanities. Her main expertise comes from the area of film studies, but she also cites literary criticism, psychoanalysis, feminisms, and cultural studies.

Ellsworth uses the paradox format as a springboard for discussion and explanation in each chapter. One of her major paradoxes deals with mode of address, a film studies term that asks “Who does this film (or, in terms of education, this curriculum, school, teacher, etc.) think that I am?” The paradox, Ellsworth writes, is that our conscious and unconscious perceptions of our students consciously and unconsciously shape the way we address them, and try as we might, we can never be fully successful in making our students “learn” what we’re trying to communicate to them. In other words, “We teach, with no knowledge or certainty about what consequences our actions as teachers will have” (17).

Ellsworth thus proposes radical revisions to the goal of Western pedagogical thought, which she believes is for students to accumulate knowledge about all there is to know. Instead of answers, she believes in posing “moving questions” and using the technique of juxtaposition to explore the power of discontinuity (13).

For example, she cites an account of an incident where a near-victim of a lynching, James Cameron, sees one of the white men who wanted to kill him happily riding a bicycle with his daughter. Cameron wonders how this carefree man could be the same person as the one he saw capable of such rage and hatred. Ellsworth suggests that this story reveals how “whiteness is always more than one thing…it is never the same thing twice,” and how it is “staged as historically situated and context specific.” She feels that Cameron’s retelling of this story “is pitched to an array of seats in the theater of U.S. race relations” and “those multiple seats are moving.” This broad mode of address “manipulate[s] readers into taking on responsibility for the meanings they make” (156). Taking on responsibility for the meanings we create is an interesting way to think about education, having less to do with traditional “learning” and more to do with acknowledging one’s own participation in creating cultural constructions.

Teaching Positions is a highly complex and theoretical book that is about uncovering the way we think about education, looking for new ways to conceive it through various disciplines in the humanities, and exploring the possibilities those new ways present. Fortunately, however, the book reads much more smoothly than might be expected. It’s clear that Ellsworth, as an educator, is familiar with the effective tactics of storytelling and using examples to demonstrate her points; for example, she contemplates the film Jurassic Park in order to explain mode of address. She also often restates her points in different words in an earnest attempt to be as clear as possible while dealing with complex abstractions.

It’s probably a bit ironic that I’m trying to summarize what I’ve learned from Ellsworth’s book, since she herself states that “any unproblematic, direct, reflective, total exchange of knowledge [is] impossible” (65). However, even if what I’ve taken from Teaching Positions cannot be exactly what Ellsworth had in mind, she is correct in concluding that the impossibility of teaching opens up new possibilities, for what I feel I’ve learned is that I have new things to think about.

Common Hour, March 24

Just a note to announce the next Common Hour sponsored by the TLI, Wednesday March 24th in Pfahler Auditorium:

The topic: Fostering Independent Research Across the Curriculum
Our speakers: Lynne Edwards (Media and Communication Studies); Walter Greason (History); Tony Lobo (Biology)

Our speakers will each discuss their experience of independent research for 5-7 minutes each, and then open the floor for questions. The February Common Hour was dynamic and generative; we hope to see you on March 24th at noon!

Building a Better Teacher (NYT Magazine, 3.2.10)

Last weekend's New York Times Magazine takes up the topic of "Building a Better Teacher," focusing on the innovations in K-12 education documented by Doug Lemov, the director of Uncommon Schools, a nonprofit that starts up and manages urban charter schools. I found several of this article's observations particularly striking:

First, the contrast between good teaching as an innate gift v good teaching practices as identifiable and reproducible techniques. Lemov's contention, as the title has it, is that inborn charisma or dynamism will not simply make one a better teacher. As journalist Elizabeth Green explains,

"There have been many quests for the one essential trait [of good teachers], and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”

When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once."

My second observation hinges on the example above: what can we, as college teachers, learn from k-12 instructors? "Standing still" and giving precise directions seem like the simplest things in the world to do, yet we know when we stand in front of the classroom how difficult these things can be. When students don't follow our instructions, is it worth considering how we might convey those instructions more clearly?

The final thing I was struck by has to do with the effort to come up with a kind of knowledge that is specific to classroom teaching, that can be classified as neither "content knowledge" "pedagogical knowledge." As Green writes of the math education specialist (also Dean of the School of Education at the U of Michigan) Deborah Loewenberg Ball:

"...Ball began to theorize that while teaching math obviously required subject knowledge, the knowledge seemed to be something distinct from what she had learned in math class. ...Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery. And they need to do this in 45 minutes or less. This was neither pure content knowledge nor what educators call pedagogical knowledge, a set of facts independent of subject matter, like Lemov’s techniques. It was a different animal altogether. Ball named it Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, or M.K.T. She theorized that it included everything from the “common” math understood by most adults to math that only teachers need to know, like which visual tools to use to represent fractions (sticks? blocks? a picture of a pizza?) or a sense of the everyday errors students tend to make when they start learning about negative numbers. At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. 'Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.'”

One might think that here's where the distinction between ourselves and K-12 instructors comes in. Yet many of us may have experienced the struggle to determine, or get past our own assumptions, about what students think and know. Is there a"knowledge for teaching" in our respective disciplines? I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this subject.

Generating Student Discussion: TLI Panel Wrap-Up

Dear colleagues,
On Wednesday at noon, the TLI sponsored its first panel, on the ever-popular question of generating student discussion. Our panelists were Stephanie Mackler (Education), Becky Jaroff (English), and April Kontostathis (Education). Thanks to many of you for spending your lunch hour with us! Below, some of the highlights:

Stephanie began by exploring the big questions: why would we ever think discussion is worth having? What would it mean to say "discussion is a way of teaching"?

Here were some potential answers:
*Discussion shifts from disseminating information to developing powers of reasoning, to democratic deliberation. Discussion helps students gain the ability to talk through ideas.
*Discussion helps students practice speaking the language of the disciplines.
*Discussion shifts the discourse for students--it helps them tolerate ambiguity, see that there are differences in perspective, makes clear that for many questions, there are no right answers.

After this introduction, Becky offered some ways to prepare students for discussion. As she noted, students (especially on the lower level) often do not realize that they are responsible for their own learning. Generating knowledge is a communal practice, and we all share responsibility. To help students get started, she recommends:
*study questions--homework; get students writing and thinking before they enter your classroom
*have students bring things in to make the material relevant for themselves (objects from their own lives relevant to your course material)
*give students their day--debates and in-class projects where we be quiet and let the students organize the discussion
*push a little bit (do not be afraid to challenge students--to call on them if a class is silent, to question silences without being humiliating)
*make students grade participation; everyone evaluates the participation habits of others twice over the course of the semester (it was noted that this takes the pressure off professors, allowing for a more productive use of faculty time

April then followed up by explaining how and why she brings discussion into the science classroom.
*as others have mentioned, it shifts pressure from dissemination of information
*connects science to real world issues, making clear to students how the technology they study is used in society.

April mentioned some projects that sounded fascinating to this nonscientist: putting popular science articles on the syllabus, making students experts on these topics in advance, emphasizing creativity (how could you write a compiler, for example?).

In the large group, we discussed some of the challenges of discussion, and everyone had their own ways of dealing with them. The first--what do you do with students who dominate discussion? There were many responses, which included:
*flatter students on their oral skills, ask them to let others speak first
*limit students to a certain number of contributions per class
*ok to ignore someone constantly raising his or her hand
*use a roulette wheel that he spins to choose the next participant (so it really is by chance!)
*both Becky and Stephanie play a game called "popcorn," in which the first participant who answers a question gets to call on the person of his or her choice

The next big question--what do you do when discussions go bad? how do you salvage a failed discussion? This is perhaps the lingering question for many of us--cultivating discussion is linked to larger questions of student engagement. As Lew put it, "What is the magic? When does it happen? How do you cultivate a culture where it is ok not to be bored?" These are big questions, speaking to general problems of generating enthusiasm for students emerging from the K-12 system. We discussed a variety of approaches: "being the magic," as Erec put it--letting our own enthusiasm bubble over the students; exercises that allow students to take a stand through adopting a role; and the barometer exercise, in which students have to move around the class to physically inhabit a position they have taken. Our discussion Wednesday began by considering the value of discussion writ large, and ended with a burst of spontaneous enthusiasm, as faculty around the room offered their methods of getting students excited. Perhaps "Generating discussion" and generating enthusiasm can be mutually constitutive, one leading to the other and back again.

Thursday Link Round-Up: Focus on Student Learning at Ursinus

So it is week 4 of the semester, and as we dig out from the snow, it might be a good time to remind ourselves why we take on this onerous task of teaching. Cultivating our own best practices improves student learning, and reflecting on our own goals can help students articulate theirs. The links you will find below are all part of national efforts to develop stated, attainable, and assessable goals for best practices in undergraduate liberal education. A bit of information follows each link.

Many people on campus know that we are currently involved in a Teagle Foundation cross-campus study on teaching and diversity. However, the Teagle does much more.
The Teagle Foundation, according to its mission statement,

"provides leadership for liberal education, marshalling the intellectual and financial resources necessary to ensure that today's students have access to challenging, wide-ranging, and enriching college educations. We believe that the benefits of such learning last for a lifetime and are best achieved when colleges develop broad and intellectually stimulating curricula, engage their students in active learning, explore questions of deep social and personal significance, set clear goals, and—crucially—systematically measure progress toward them."

The last part of that sentence is, indeed, "crucial." In browsing around the Teagle web site, I've been impressed by the movement toward action that marks all their activities--discussions move to publications, publications to campus action, campus action back to cross- and inter-campus discussion. From what I have read so far, their materials are of a high quality, well-written, stimulating, and refreshingly free of jargon. The questions they grapple with are the ones we struggle with daily: what is the purpose of a liberal arts education? how can we advance student learning so that all students can be as empowered as possible? how can we use the unique qualities of the small college environment to advance student learning, yet encourage students to make connections to the larger world?

Here are some selections from their site:
The National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education, a three-year series of workshops on (guess what?) the future of liberal education

Here's a link to the Teagle White Papers, including a new one on civic engagement.
Note: you must download these documents from the White Paper link.


You may also wish to examine the LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) blog--written by guest bloggers from educational institutions around the country. It is dedicated to a reflective discussion about "'liberal education' - how it is changing, why it is so important in today's world, and what people are saying about it around the country and the world.

There are also some forthcoming conferences you might find interesting, two of which are just down the road in Philadelphia:

Faculty Roles in High-Impact Practices, 25-27 March 2010, Philadelphia (Hyatt Regency Penn's Landing), sponsored by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. From their web site:

The conference calls attention to "high-impact practices"--including undergraduate research, service-learning, first-year and capstone projects/programs, and learning communities—that by their nature require students to be actively involved in their own learning. This conferences brings together "faculty members seeking innovative, robust, and practical designs for learning, teaching, and assessment approaches proven to deepen student engagement, and a network of engaged colleagues" and "administrators and others on campus looking to support and partner with faculty to advance the use of high-impact practices" throughout their campus communities.

Highlights include a Keynote on "Academic Excellence and Civic Engagement: Constructing a Third Space for Higher Education," and (my favorite title so far): "How Teachers Need to Deal with the Seen, the Unseen, the Improbable, and the Nearly Imponderable." Reading the AAC&U's discussion of "high-impact teaching practices," I'm struck by how nay of these we are already doing. The conference sounds like a great opportunity to learn how faculty at other institutions are engaging with similar questions, and to share what we have gleaned with the larger educational community.

Deadline for registration: March 1.

The AAC&U is also sponsoring the 20th anniversary meeting of the Institute on General Education and Assessment, 40-9 June 2010 (at U of Vermont-Burlington). The Institute focuses on helping institutions develop clear, coherent goals for general education, and includes a special emphasis on assessment. The deadline for this one is coming up soon!: February 19, 2010.

Greater Expectations Institute, 15-18 June 2010 (Vanderbilt U, Nashville TN)
aims to make teaching excellence inclusive, as colleges help "prepare far more Americans for success in a globally interdependent society." This institute underscores efforts to "make excellence inclusive," focusing particularly on underserved populations--students of color, of low-income backgrounds, of the first generation of their families to attend college. Given the changing demographic of American college students and our historic commitment to egalitarian education, Ursinus faculty might find this institute very productive. Deadline for team application submission: March 12, 2010.

Engaging Departments Institute, 7-11 July 2010, Philadelphia. The Institute "offers campus teams intensive, structured time to advance plans to foster, assess, and improve student learning within departments and acorss the institution." Bringing together teams of deans, department chairs and faculty members in collaboration, it aims to "advance integrative and engaged learning across disciplines." Deadline for team application: March 19, 2010.

Multi-tasking

Many of us have spoken to our students about their not-so-successful (and admittedly, often annoying) efforts at multi-tasking. Some of feel like we might have to multitask, all too often, ourselves. And then there's "texting-and-driving." This weekend, the Chronicle of Higher Ed took up the issue. As David Glenn writes,

"Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently—so the worry goes—students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has" ("Divided Attention," CHE 1.31.10).

Citing a study by Stanford psychologists Clifford Nass et al., Glenn worries about whether students' attentional habits have fundamentally changed. But there are opposing views. According to contemporary literature scholar N. Katherine Hayles,

"One of the basic tenets of good teaching is that you have to start where the students are....And once you find out where they are, a good teacher can lead them almost anywhere. Students today don't start in deep attention. They start in hyper attention. And our pedagogical challenge will be to combine hyper attention with deep attention and to cultivate both. And we can't do that if we start by stigmatizing hyper attention as inferior thinking" ("Divided Attention").

Read the rest of the article here. And here's a little quiz on how well we multitask, courtesy of the New York Times. What do you think? Should we attempt to stem the tide, forbidding laptops from our classrooms among other measures? How do we adapt to students who conceive of attention, work, reading, and communication in fundamentally new ways? I'd love to hear your comments, as we eat, prep, and grade our way to this morning's faculty meeting. And please don't text-and-drive...