Coming to you live from Adelphi, Maryland, while the student panel is talking about their experience of information technologies in their learning. Whitney Roberts from UMW is on the panel and doing us proud. A couple of things strike me right away. “Students” is a necessary, useful, unwieldy, and misleading category. These students are young, and they’re pursuing degrees, and there are of course powerful commonalities. On the other hand, their experiences and habits of mind, along with their own disciplinary “scaffolding,” diverge pretty widely.
I can’t get all this together on the fly, but I need to blurt it out anyway: we are all students. There are factors unique to various stages of student development; but at a deep level that for me, at least, provides a more useful paradigm, we are all students. Teachers are students advanced enough to be able to shape, guide, and inform students at an earlier place in their learning. Teachers are also students advanced and accomplished enough (accomplished means “peer-reviewed” in the largest sense) to be able fairly and usefully to assess the work of younger students.
I’m feeling as if greater awareness of continuities in life-long learning is necessary for us to make sense of this activity we call “school.” It seems to be hiding in plain sight. Whitney just talked about how engaged learners don’t mind being surrounded by learning inputs all the time; she said that technology is another way of talking about philosophy on campus walk.
I wonder: have we designed school so that it–“it” meaning the challenge of constant intellectual activity–is compartmentalized and segmented (Whitney’s word) into toothless, leave-me-alone blanditude? Get your skills, punch the clock, move on to “real life.” We’ve made school into a job, not a calling, and that quite deliberately. Jobs are jobs. Vocations–callings–are always.
I think that we as professors need to be more explicit about this notion that we are learners (students) too. I’m actively engaged in this process in two of my classes this semester (and hopefully passively passing such a sentiment along in the others).
In my historical methods class I’m constantly bringing in pieces of my work (primary sources, literature reviews, writing in progress) to demonstrate my own attempts to engage with a larger world of research and writing. In doing so, I demonstrate that I don’t have all the answers and I struggle with many of the same issues of analysis, thesis-creation, and writing as they do.
I’m also involved in a team-taught class with a colleague from ELS. From the very start of the semester, we’ve made much of our collaboration transparent to the students in the class. We explain that we are there to learn from each other (and hopefully from the class as well). We are explicitly students too, and they see us learning from each other every time the class meets.
I think if we are to break the limiting definition of school and learning you note above, then we’re going to have to start with us and the way we portray ourselves to our students.
Amen, brother. You’ve nailed it.
The team-teaching I did for several years in ENGL381, Brit. Lit. to 1800, was an exhilarating experience of shared expertise and teachers-as-learners, and I was constantly aware of the value of our community as a model for the students. It was a great ride. I miss it horribly. Given the ideological rifts and plain hostility within literary studies, I wonder if I’ll ever have the experience again. We must have the greater good in sight. We must demonstrate that greater good to the public as a public good.
Can we get there from here? I think IT opens a window of opportunity because it’s so powerful and so disruptive–and so potentially constructive.