With cloudy grey weather and light drizzles this week, I
have spent some of my lunch breaks in front of the computer browsing higher
education news websites and articles. The most interesting article I read this
past week was called Teaching vs. Learning from Inside HigherEd written by
Steven Mintz
The article begins by extolling the virtues of a core
curriculum “great books” program. This is what first caught my eye since I went
through one of these as an undergraduate at a liberal arts college. I won’t
repeat the arguments in favor of such a program (you can read the article).
While I personally did not benefit as much from my own experience, due to
scheduling difficulties resulting in my taking such a core humanities in my
final year (alongside all the first-year student), I support the idea behind
the approach and I think this is a potentially very valuable experience for
students both inside and outside the classroom.
What I found interesting is that, at least in the Columbia
program, the instructors are called “preceptors”. As Mintz points out, this “originally
referred to the head of a preceptory, a fraternal or military order. A
preceptor, then, is less a teacher or mentor than a senior member of a
brotherhood.” Coincidentally, at my current institution, each incoming
first-year students is assigned a small class of 20 students called a
“preceptorial”. The faculty preceptor,
in addition to teaching the material for that course, also functions as the
students’ academic adviser until they declare a major. I have been a faculty
preceptor many times, but had never bothered to look up what the word’s roots.
I simply thought of it as the “academic advising” part of my job (which I view
as part of the holistic education provided to our students). I hadn’t quite
thought about it in terms of my teaching.
This brings me to the second
interesting point that Mintz brings up. One of the criticisms of such core courses
is that they are “amateurish bull session[s] due to the fact that sections are
led by non-specialists who do not richly contextualize the readings. In fact,
the great books core prides itself on [such] an approach… reading texts
without the scaffolding of earlier exegesis.” And furthermore, “many of the
richest learning experiences, especially in the humanities, involve learning,
but not structured teaching (as generally defined). Nor do these
experiences depend on a teacher as authority figure or fount of knowledge.”
This is clearly different from what I
do as a preceptor. I teach General Chemistry to first-year students. We use the
same textbook as all the other general chemistry sections. Now I do teach the
course a little differently because I can leverage the small class size of 20 students
by structuring learning activities that are not so easy to pull off in a much
larger class. However my deep knowledge of chemistry is crucial to the course.
Now one might argue that the goals and the approach taken by a great books
course is what Mintz would call Learning, and that this is somewhat different
from Teaching, which might happen in a science or technical course. Here’s the
relevant paragraph that forms the basis of the title of his essay.
“To teach is to impart knowledge and
skills or to give instruction. To learn, however, is generally quite
different. To be sure, it involves acquiring knowledge and skills—though this
is rarely the product of oral transmission. It is to construct a framework for
understanding and to acquire enduring mastery over a wide range of content,
skills, and habits of mind. It involves synthesis, interpretation,
judgment, and application. It is attained partly by listening, but also by
practice, problem-solving, reflection, and active learning.”
I disagree with this dichotomy since I
think of teaching and learning as an integrated whole. I also think that a
large part of what I do is to help my students construct a framework for
understanding, acquire wide-ranging mastery, and learn the necessary habits of
mind. (To be clear, I don’t actually think Mintz is making this dichotomy as
stark as I am painting it. I’m just using this rhetorical device to make my
own points.) But is there something different between the humanities and the
sciences in this regard? And is this learning something that does not require
the preceptor to have mastery in particular areas?
When I was an undergraduate, the core
humanities required of all first-year students had larger lectures (very much
“sage on the stage”) and smaller sections (very much “guide by the side”). The
lecture would be delivered by a content expert – or at least someone with a
Ph.D. and expertise in some part of the subject matter that overlapped with the
reading. The revolving door of lecturers spanned a gamut of fields, mainly in
the humanities and the arts, but occasionally in the social sciences. (There
was never a scientist.) The section facilitator, on the other hand, was
permanent throughout the semester. For one semester I had an English professor,
and for the other semester I had a Political Science professor. This means that
for much of the semester, the discussions were not centered on the expertise of
the professor. This actually seemed to work fine, or at least I did not notice
anything amiss – possibly because the two professors I had were very
experienced and had been at the college a long time. Could a scientist have
facilitated the discussion? Possibly, I think. I'd like to try it some day. (My colleagues in the humanities
may disagree.) But it would require some training and changes in how
many of us scientists “teach” our courses.
Could you use the same structure in a
core scientific inquiry course? Possibly. And this time I speak from
experience, having organized an interdisciplinary teaching team to attempt this
feat. Note that this was a scientific inquiry course rather than one focused on
scientific content (although some content is inevitably taught and learned.)
The structure we adopted was similar to the humanities – larger lectures with
revolving content experts and smaller sections (each having the same
facilitator throughout the semester) designed around hands-on activities and
discussions surrounding the different modes of scientific inquiry we wanted the
students to learn. Did we get it right the first time around? No. But I can now see how it could potentially work and perhaps work well after several iterations.
One of the biggest challenges that instructors
felt was significant was feeling out of depth when the week’s activities were
not centered around that person’s discipline. In this regard, perhaps I was
“fortunate” to be a chemist with wide-ranging interests in both biology and
physics, who happened to be pursuing research at the intersection of all three
disciplines. I was also an experienced instructor who had taught swaths of
science majors and non-science majors in a gamut of different courses. So while
I had a blast in my sections (and I delivered a couple of the
chemistry lectures), I think my less experienced and more narrowly trained
colleagues from other fields found it rather challenging and stressful. But perhaps
it’s not just an issue of experience, but rather that there is something
inherent in how most scientists are trained to specialize so narrowly, how
science curricula are structured, how quickly you run into difficulties
answering questions outside your field, and how the fundamental questions in
science are different from the fundamental questions in the humanities. There
was also significant difficulty in managing student expectations and varied
levels of exposure in the sciences, but that’s a subject for another blog post.
Now back to Mintz’s essay.
The third interesting point that Mintz
brings up is posed as a question. After discussing how the humanities core
contributes to identity development (a la Chickering), holistic learning (a la
Bloom), integrative (breaking down disciplinary boundaries), and immersive, he
asks: “[Can we] take the elements that the core does well and apply these to
other classes or academic programs. In short, can we separate the
container from the content? For many, the magic of the core lies in its
content. But I’d like to suggest that much of the magic lies in the
approach, which is developmental, holistic, integrative, immersive, and
learner-centered.” (And this is where the title of my blog post comes from!)
I’d like to think that many of us
already try to do some of this when we design the courses we teach regularly. I
had not really thought about this connection until after my experience teaching
the interdisciplinary core-like scientific inquiry course. Since then, some of
my pedagogy and curriculum design changes in my chemistry courses have been
influenced by thinking about the approach, and not the content. This is not to
say that content is unimportant (and I certainly need to cover a fair bit of it
in my chemistry classes), but perhaps too much of curricula design is
content-driven. This was certainly the case in my first year as a faculty
member. I was teaching the dreaded P-Chem (physical chemistry) year-long
sequence. What did I do to prepare? I sketched out the content I needed to
cover and how I was going to teach it to the students. But
it was mainly about covering content. I didn’t think as much about the pedagogical approach (I chalk this up to
sheer inexperience) and what learning entailed.
I had a bunch of “teaching methods” up my sleeve, but they were disparate
tactical tools rather than a coherent strategy.
It’s not magic after all, at least in
this case. We now know a lot about how learners learn, and it behooves us as
teachers to hone our craft to promote deep and transformative learning in our
students. Writing this blog has been one of the ways I have been learning about
learning, hopefully in a way that is indeed deep and transformative to my
teaching. (I’ve tried to tag such posts under “teaching” for the interested
reader!)
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