Category: Civic/global engagement

‘I Love Learning; I Hate School’

July 18th, 2017

Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology at Notre Dame, has written a fascinating and stark study of higher education.

The short answer for why so many young people dislike college is that it’s too much like school and not enough like learning.

The artifice of school has displaced our natural love of collaborative learning and shared exploration, she contends. School is more like an assembly line or an obstacle course than a sandbox or canvas.

At the same time, most professors love school not because of any intellectual superiority, but because they have succeeded at school despite the way in which it circumscribes learning and sucks the joy out of it. Putting them in charge makes a bad system worse.

In one of the most penetrating sections of book, Blum lays out a schematic of higher education’s component parts — including how students are admitted, how courses are designed, and how grades are assigned. Taken by themselves many aspects of higher ed seem curious or even irrational, but Blum’s point is to illustrate how interconnected everything is. That makes even small changes unlikely, and it makes radical departures from the norm nearly impossible. Moreover, the greatest obstacle to fixing school, we could add, might come from students, who have been so corrupted by the system that they resist any deviation from standard procedures, even ones that are exciting or beneficial.

Blum offers little in the way of prescriptions, she admits, but does list a number of small interventions that can make school a little more prone to learning, including team- and project-based assignments, gamification, and real audiences for writing (through blogs, etc). Having students exposed to material before class (“flipping”) allows class time to be devoted to higher-level skills and more active learning. Instructors can also use contract grading and portfolios to minimize the fetish for grades over feedback.

Students are also more likely to learn when the subject matter speaks to them. Simply put, “the more learning in school resembles the successful learning that is so abundant outside school, the greater the chance that some learning will take place.”

Some might question Blum’s method, which is a bit narrow. She’s well steeped in the research and writing on higher education, but her data is mostly limited to students at Notre Dame. On the other hand, if her findings are accurate there — that is, at an institution where the percentage of successful students is relatively high — it’s probably even truer elsewhere.

The book seems a little disjointed and meandering and maybe more like a journal than a book at times. But what it lacks in structure it makes up for in accessibility and engagement. Any full-time teacher will immediately understand where Blum is coming from and be able to follow her journey from a eager but frustrated teacher to one that understands her students well enough to meet them where they are.
Communication Breakdown

January 22nd, 2016

On Thursday, January 21, Dr. Anita August and the Writing Across the Curriculum program hosted a talk for faculty on race, writing, and literacy with guest speaker David E. Kirkland.

Kirkland is Associate Professor of English Education in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University and the author of A Search Past Silence: The Literacy of Young Black Men.

Kirkland acknowledged that race can be a controversial subject, particularly as it relates to literacy and education, but urged how conservations like these must happen, if anything is going to be done to remedy the “systems and cycles of underachievement” that plague education.

It’s an opportunity, Kirkland cautioned, not to point fingers, but to self-reflect and recognize that being aware of the problem is not enough. We must also commit ourselves to doing what we can to change the status quo since one in three black men will experience some kind of incarceration in their lifetime–a statistic that is as staggering as it is unacceptable.

As educators, one of the most important things we can do is see how students have a right to their own experiences and their own language. Kirkland offered the amazing story of Derrick, a gifted writer and poet, whose abilities were not appreciated by his teacher, despite her best intentions. Rather than work with Derrick to find and refine his voice, the teacher was more interested in his grammar, going so far as to calling his hip-hop style “lazy” because it did not conform to what is commonly held as “standard English.”

The goal of literacy, Kirkland explained, is not but stylistic precision, but effective communication, however that might look. As examples, he offered Junot Diaz, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, who weaves together different forms of language; Toni Morrison, whom Kirkland called “a linguistic border crossing”; and even television newscasters, who understand they need more than standard English to communicate to their audiences.

If nothing else, teaching is meeting students where they are. The opposite tendency—that is, focusing on what students cannot do—Kirkland called the “deficit theory” of education, which he places at the root of racial disparities in classrooms. He noted the criticism award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates leveled against his education and how he learned to write mostly out of school.

Lessons like these are a clarion call for instructors to be deliberate and creative in defining the places for communication. Kirkland suggested “pedagogical third spaces”—that is, places where students can do what we want of them, but in ways that make sense to them, such as translating the Iliad into a comic book or seeing social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) as text and template.

Instructors also need to be mindful about doing what they can to assign materials that connect to the interests of today’s young people, who are reading a lot but probably not things you would find on a typical syllabus. “We don’t have disengaged readers,” Kirkland offered; “we have disengaged texts and disengaged classrooms.” Shakespeare was the hip-hop of his day, and we do our students no service when we stop being at the forefront of culture.

The mastery of basic skills is not at the heart of learning; instead, it’s “pleasure, play, and curiosity,” which are the foundations of learning and should serve as the foundation for our courses.

If the purpose of education and writing is effective communication, then the goal of communication is “critical empathy,” Kirkland explained, which he defined as the ability to see ourselves in others, then acting on that awareness.

“We must teach like our lives depend on it,” Kirkland concluded, “because too often theirs will.”
The Last Straw

April 11th, 2013

It’s not every day that an assignment becomes a campaign.

That’s exactly what happened last month in my American Government course. We have been working on various public policy issues — immigration, energy, gun control, etc. During one of our last meetings before spring break, I asked the students to come up with a public event or demonstration related to their issue area. It was supposed to be just a hypothetical activity. But the idea that the gun control group came up with was so simple and perfect that we had to do it.

Our goal is to collect 100,000 straws — one for each incidence of gun violence in the U.S. every year — in support of gun control legislation. And on Dec. 14, 2013, the one-year anniversary of Newtown, we’re going to take the straws to Washington and deliver them to Congress.

We are only 17 miles away from Newtown. It didn’t happen on our campus, but it has affected our community. Almost everyone at the University knows someone or knows someone who knows someone who has been personally impacted by the massacre.

Jennifer Radatovich, a freshman from Newtown, lost someone close to her. One of the boys killed that morning was a neighbor of hers — someone she used to babysit. “He was like a little brother to me,” she explained. Her parents initially urged her to stay in my course, but it proved to be too much and she had to withdraw. The thought of spending the next four months discussing gun violence was more than she could stand. But now she is excited about getting involved with the campaign.

Without question, 100,000 is a lot of straws. We have no idea if we can do it or how it will look when we do. But 100,000 is also a lot of gun violence.

It’s estimated that 43 percent of homes with kids and guns have at least one firearm that is unlocked. One study, in Pediatrics, found that 30 percent of boys aged 8 to 12 who found a handgun pulled the trigger. The result is that 3,164 children are shot accidentally every year.

All in all, 270 Americans are shot every day by firearms. Of that number, 83 are killed — and eight of them are children. That means that in the months since Newtown, there have been 42 more Newtowns. And by the time the one-year anniversary rolls around, nearly 2,820 more children will have died, and there will have been 140 Newtowns.

We’re going to do what we can do to keep everyone on campus, in our state and around the country talking about Newtown and about gun violence.

For its part, Congress is busy doing anything but its job. The assault weapons ban, which a solid majority supports, has been stripped from the bill in the Senate. Background checks, which over 90 percent of the country supports, might be the next to go. And by the time the bill comes to a vote, if a bill ever comes to a vote, it might end up actually being pro-gun.

It has certainly been a political education.

It’s true that no single change will stop every incident of gun violence. But that’s a call to do more, not less. Gun rights and gun control are not mutually exclusive positions.

There have been instances where the ignorance and intolerance that so often passes for politics has spilled over into my classrooms. But I’m happy to report that today’s young people are far brighter, more active and more engaged than what is often said of them.

I confess to being troubled about the direction of the country. We are faced with big challenges, and Congress seems more interested in inventing pseudo-crises than solving real ones. But if my students are any indication of the quality of the next generation, there is good reason to be hopeful.

In the meantime, send us your straws. And make your straw the last straw!

Follow the Last Straw Campaign on Facebook (TheLastStrawCampaign) and on Twitter @StrawCampaign. And mail your straws to: The Last Straw Campaign, Sacred Heart University, 5151 Park Ave., Fairfield, CT 06825.

This article first appeared on The Huffington Post.

Category: Civic/global engagement

‘I Love Learning; I Hate School’

Communication Breakdown

The Last Straw