|
||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"You Shall See the Connection
if it Kills You": Barbara Walvoord, from Notre Dame's Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning, recently said to a group of us at Georgetown, "The academy is a community in which conversations about student learning are always dead on arrival. The immediate always overwhelms the present." Time, tenure, publishing will always get in the way. Despite the temptation to focus on my literature research interests or on the technology because it is fun and new fangled, as a teacher it is critical for me, as Randy Bass suggests, to every now and then step back and ask some simple questions about my teaching: Bass recommends asking the following questions: What am I doing now that I'd like
to do better? Like Bass, I ask these questions because above all else I want to heighten student engagement. I want my students to develop their own interrogative stances toward materials and I want them to develop the ability to express their thoughts about the materials in ways that are transferable from one problem to the next. My thoughts on engagement address my desire for students to move beyond what McClymer and Knoles call "coping mechanisms," which they define as the set of "acritical techniques" that students develop over the life of their schooling and that they too call upon use as a substitute for "genuine learning." In the classes I teach, my goal is to move students from fact finding, i.e. coping (that is telling me the surface details such as plot, which for many of them while in high school was all they needed to know about a text), or re-telling me what I have recently told them, to understanding. In my class, the goal is not mastery of the assigned written material (I really could substitute any book for any other) but attempts at strengthening the learning processes that help us make sense of the unknown. To accomplish this, I work to strengthen in my students the "Ten Rational Powers of Individuals." These powers, put forth in 1961 by the National Education Association's Educational Policies Commission, are: 1. recalling The way I get there is through a conscientious use of Chickering and Gamson's "Seven Principles of Good Practice." Good practice: 1. encourages contact between students
and faculty; While each practice can stand alone, when all are present their effects multiply. Together they are six powerful forces in education: activity, expectations, cooperation, interaction, diversity, and responsibility. Again, I ask myself a question: "What tools can I use to help my students achieve this understanding?" Well, it will come as no surprise that I think technology can help. I believe that when course content is rich and interesting, technology can have a highly positive effect on learning, can lead to constructive and participatory classroom experiences, and can increase students' skills of observation, analysis, and synthesis. In The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible-and Other Journeys through Knowledge, James Burke writes that in the near future
Here Burke states that using one's rational powers to make connections is most important, in much the same way that in Howards End, Margaret Schlegel, fearful of modernity and of England losing its way, demands of Henry Wilcox, who disapproves of nostalgia and inaction, "You shall see the connection if it kills you…!" My students, they are learning to see the connections. This is how it works: I'll be referring to different websites here, but if we were in class, we'd explore these sites in detail as I project them onto a large screen using an LCD projector. First the content: In a recent seminar, I tried to explain what I think the difference is between knowing and understanding. We were talking and writing about Toni Morrison's Sula, tracing the lives of two African American girls growing up in Ohio after WWI, after Jude has left Nel and Ajax has left Sula. For both women, the only remnants of their relationships are a necktie and a driver's license the men left behind. Go to: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ohshtml/aaeohome.html. Upon finding Jude's necktie, Nel asks herself,
For Sula, all that remains of Ajax is his driver's license, from which she learns his real name. She says, I didn't even know his name. And if I didn't know his name, than there is nothing I did know and I have known nothing ever at all since the one thing I wanted was to know his name so how could he help but leave me since he was making love to a woman who didn't even know his name. (Morrison 136) That's Sula trying to make sense of Ajax, the only person in her life who she loved enough to let hurt her, and who she realizes she never really understood. The book is all about the difference between knowing and understanding. But for Nel, left living in the Bottom without Sula, it all becomes clear too late, when she understands that it is Sula she has missed:
After reading this, my question to the class, and maybe more to myself because I am interested in what Sam Wineburg calls the "intermediate cognitive processes" of novice and expert learners, is how do we move from knowing something (that Nel misses Sula) to understanding it (that Nel misses Sula more than she misses Jude because Sula matters more). This is content and no one line in the book will reveal to them the "correct" answer, no matter how hard they read. I named this sophomore critical reading and writing class, "Based on a True Story," and I worked with my students to discover how we learn to understand the truth, as if our place in the world is more secure when we understand the steps we take to arrive at any given place. When we try to make order out of chaos. How, as Jeanette Winterson writes, "In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance." We talk about literature in themes: about truth and lies; secrets and gossip; truth and reconciliation (http://www.truth.org.za/ror/page04.htm); forgiveness and the grace of selective forgetting (http://remember.org/wit.sur.luc.html (search on Altman's 2X)); and about how to recognize an aftermath (http://remember.org/image/400.gif http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/gallery/10481-86.htm). We read Forster's Howards End about the Schlegels, who represent England's countryside and the Wilcoxes, who represent England's growing cities, and then we talk about Tennyson's "the quiet sense of something lost," of countryside and suburbs (http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown/building.html) and manifestations of modernity. We read some of Raymond Williams' work in the Country and the City. And then, of course, we talk about technology. About soundbites and Napster, and how technology provides information and images, but it doesn't understand them. We learn about Basho who wrote haiku and about how a haiku represents an image, a thought, a complete understanding, but we know that all too often it takes our students five pages to produce one sound thesis statement (http://www.lsi.usp.br/usp/rod/poet/haiku.html). So we begin by writing haikus and by the end we write thesis statements. And then they are writing about the modernist belief in the ineffability of words to fully express human emotion, and how the narrator in Lydia Davis' "Break It Down," "wants words, but they were no good, no good at all." In "Break It Down," a man tries to quantify in dollar amounts his recent break-up with a woman. So I ask my students to think about this man and then to write about how they measure their lives, how they quantify the quality parts of their lives, as J. Alfred Prufrock quantifies his:
and how the men in Tim O'Brien's short story, "The Things They Carried," measure out their days, as "grunts" during the Vietnam War, in tangibles and intangibles, in memories, fear, guilt (http://www.pbs.org/pov/stories/index.html (click on stories, displaced)). What happens next is knowledge becoming understanding. A student uses her rational powers and makes a connection outside of the text. She creates a link. Her connection is "opportunity costs"-an economics terms that measures the cost of the foregone opportunity, the tradeoff-which she realizes is how the characters in "Break It Down" and "The Things They Carried" measure out their lives. As we often do in class, we prepare for writing by gathering all of our sources of information, website images, newspaper clippings, pieces of art, and outlining our ideas, drawing charts, matrices, waves and troughs, mattering maps, as Edward R. Tufte illustrates in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Students enjoy the opportunity to think visually and we often map out our ideas to make sense of them (http://mars.elcom.nitech.ac.jp/mizuno/portfolio-062099/Work/reports/tufte/ed229c-tuftedesign.html). I ask them to chart Mrs. Dalloway's
path through her day, because as E.M. Forster asks, "How can
I know what I think until I see what I say…" We use Microsoft's
Visio and mind mapping techniques to make visible our common understandings
and textual links, as both Septimus and Clarissa, separated by class,
gender, and experience, jump when the car backfires and as Peter passes
by distraught Lucrezia dealing with post-war Septimus (http://www.tsd.jcu.edu.au/netshare/learn/mindmap/sampleessay.html).
I think to myself now, as I write the word "links," that
I don't want technology metaphors to take over my way of thinking,
but obviously it is way too late. ·Distributive Learning describes pedagogy that allows students to be more active and which encourages collaboration in the classroom. The students, as well as the teacher, are responsible for "making knowledge" because by distributing the learning, students take a more active role in looking at texts, rather than in passively receiving the information from their teachers. In addition, students are more equipped to transfer what they have learned in earlier lessons to later ones, construct and share their ideas in a range of public contexts, effectively teaching each other, as part of a process of discovery. A teacher's role shifts from expert learner who imparts wisdom downward to students to more of a facilitator of inquiry working alongside students. ·Authentic Tasks and Complex Inquiry use information technologies in ways that are challenging, multi-disciplinary, and most importantly are relevant to students' lives. Multimedia tools for searching and sorting through primary source material encourage critical thinking and synthesis skills as students follow and make linked connections in ways that make clear the relationships among them. Working with electronic primary materials asks students to arrange and represent complex ideas in multiple ways in electronic environments, and to work with scholarly resources which previously only "the experts" had access to. ·Dialogic Learning occurs through the use of interactive technologies, such as email, electronic discussion lists, and teleconferencing, which provide synchronous as well as asynchronous spaces for student-teacher conversations and dialogue, which more often than not represent a more extensive range of viewpoints than they have in their class or school. For example, the Bread Loaf School of English's telecommunications network, BreadNet, connects students and teachers across the country through online content-rich classroom exchanges throughout the academic year. ·Constructive Learning lets students develop their own strategies for discovering and mastering new ideas in learning environments that emphasize connections and interdisciplinary thinking. New knowledge gained through their discoveries becomes a permanent base for the construction of more new knowledge. Teachers help guide students in their discoveries through individual coaching and through their involvement in hands-on kinds of projects. Public Accountability means that students use technology in the classroom to share their knowledge making, take responsibility for their ideas, and view them as part of a larger classroom dialogue rather than as a closed academic exercise. These projects tend to foster a productive self-consciousness about choices, selection, arrangement, narrative interpretation, and design. As Bass writes, Nowhere else but in school will students ever produce work for no audience. Publicly accessible and accountable projects add to the authenticity of the learning experience by helping to teach students that knowledge-making is neither a solitary nor an isolated and episodic experience; instead, it is the product of public dialogue. (Bass 31) Reflective and Critical Thinking occurs because technologies facilitate group process and revision, helping students to learn how to make strategic choices in constructing cultural and historical knowledge. Learning to read and write in nonlinear environments allows students to understand multiple perspectives and to engage actively in the public conversation of ideas in a range of ways Of course, all of these dimensions require (as well as create) rich contexts which facilitate the work of constructing knowledge, developing skills, crafting designs, creating works, formulating theories, testing hypotheses, employing interpretation, and exercising judgment. Technology by itself could never be responsible for achieving these many goals. Technology is merely the vehicle which, when used well, delivers the tools we need to teach well. Furthermore, technology-based assignments that explore archival and primary materials ask students: to engage in the critical assessment of these sources as a means of moving into other discussions about truth, accuracy, bias, reliability, models of research, misinformation; to consider the production and the politics of knowledge; and to learn to winnow the wheat from the Internet's prolific chaff, in the same way we ask them to look at books and articles and know the difference between substantial and insubstantial sources (http://servercc.oakton.edu/~wittman/find/eval.htm). Nowadays, many academic libraries' websites offer fully developed units on how to use the web effectively (http://www.ala.org/acrl/undwebev.html). We need such diagrams to help students
learn to judge web content. The following two sites serve as exaggerated
examples of websites that claim authority: (http://www.improbable.com/airchives/classical/cat/cat.html
and Finally, not that all of this doesn't
lead to a whole new set of questions about knowledge and understanding.
But what is most important to me is that my students learn how to
critically link ideas and themes so that they see the possibility
of everything connecting, and that way, everything we have discussed
in class, from the beginning with Simon Weisenthal's book, The Sunflower,
to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, to the end with Arundhati Roy's The God
of Small Things, and everything in between, no matter how small, stays
alive and becomes a trigger for more understanding as the semester
ends and they go forth into the world.
Bass, Randy. "Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History," Engines of Inquiry: A Practical Guide for Using Technology to Teach American Culture. February 1998. http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/guide/engines.html. Burke, James. The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible-And Other Journeys through Knowledge. (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1996). Chickering, Arthur W. and Zelda Gamson, eds. "Applying the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" New Directions for Teaching and Learning. 47 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991): 63-69. Chickering, Arthur W. and Stephen Ehrmann. "Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever." AAHE Bulletin. October 1996. Davis, Lydia. "Break It Down." Story and Other Stories (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1983) 9-16. Educational Policies Commission. "The Central Purpose of American Education." National Education Association (Washington, D.C.: 1961). Forster, E.M. Howards End (New York: Bedford Books, 1997). Landow, George. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Laurillard, Diana. Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology. (New Jersey: Routledge, 1993). The quoted passages are taken from her interview in the AAHE Bulletin, March 1997. McClymer, John F. and Lucia Z. Knoles, "Ersatz Learning, Inauthentic Testing." Journal on Excellence in College Teaching. 3: 33-50. Morrison, Toni. Sula. (New York: Plume, 1973). National Teaching and Learning Forum 8.5 (1999). Tufte, Edward. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983). Wiggins, G. "Teaching to the (Authentic) Test." Educational Leadership, 46.7 (1989a): 41-47. Wiggins, G. "A True Test: Toward a More Authentic and Equitable Assessment." Phi Delta Kappan. 70 (1989b): 703-713. Winterson, Jeannette, "The Twenty-Four
Hour Dog." Bark 10 (Winter 2000): 37-38. |
|
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|||||
 |
|||||||||||
