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Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?Randy Bass |
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© Copyright 1998-99 by Randy Bass (bassr@gusun.georgetown.edu) The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author. |
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Section Five: One focus of my ongoing inquiry is now on the problem of teaching more directly to the student learning goals I value most. For me, in my own subject and pedagogical practice, that entails (to state it briefly) a combination of constructivist pedagogies--including work with electronic archives and hypertext writing tools--that engage students more actively with the complexities of textual form and contextual meaning, even at the expense of more traditional kinds of coverage. The general problem of teaching for understanding has led me to wonder specifically about the extent to which students’ prior understandings of a field--its deep structures and assumptions, not just its facts and principles--situate a person to acquire new knowledge. Many years ago, I was teaching a Freshman Honors English course in American literature. We were reading a non-fiction travel narrative by the historian Francis Parkman, called the Oregon Trail, a story of his youthful excursions into "frontier" America in the mid 1840's. Parkman’s book is not really literature in any traditional sense. The value in reading it in a literature course was for the exquisite insight the book gives into 19th-century scientism and ethnocentrism. In this way the book lays bare a set of 19th-century assumptions about romanticism, realism, culture, and truth that underlie much of the literature of the period. This was my rationale for teaching it, and it was my impression that these were the themes that the class and I were unpacking this particular semester in each of the first three class sessions on Parkman’s text. Then, on the fourth day, as I was unpacking my backpack before class, I overheard one student (a really good student) say to another student in the front row: "I can’t believe that Professor Bass thinks this is a great book." I was stunned. I had to interrupt: "You think I think this is a great book? Not only don’t I think it is a great work of literature, I don’t even think it is a great book in terms of ideas. In fact I think it is a horrible book, full of arrogance and self-aggrandizement. But it is also full of insight into a particular way of seeing in the 19th century. That’s why we’re reading it. I don’t think it is a great book. I think it is an important book." At the time, I thought the problem was merely that I had not clearly communicated my intentions for teaching this book to the class. And indeed I hadn’t. But I realize now that the problem was deeper than that. To me, the distinction between a "great" book and an "important" book was sufficiently rationalized in the context of my field. But it was a meaningless distinction to these freshmen. It was a distinction that they couldn’t make based not only on a lack of disciplinary knowledge, but on a whole set of learned assumptions (perhaps "socializations") about what literature is supposed to be, about why you take literature in college, about what it should have meant to be in a "freshman honors English" course, and about what kind of knowledge you were supposed to take away from studying particular kinds of objects in particular contexts. I’m not saying that all their assumptions were wrong and had to be unlearned; I’m merely saying that I hadn’t taken into account--nor endeavored to discover--what those assumptions were. And if my goal was to expand those assumptions--which in large part it was--then I needed to do much more to begin where the students were beginning. Now, many years later, I find myself returning to questions about the relationship between student prior understanding and their capacity to acquire new understanding, as a problem worth pursuing for my own scholarship of teaching. In this line of inquiry I want to learn more not only about my students’ entering knowledge, but how their self-awareness of learning might help them develop a deeper understanding of certain disciplinary principles more quickly and meaningfully. In fall 1998, while a visiting professor at George Mason University, I instituted for the first time an opening day reflective exercise that asked students to read and respond to a set of documents similar to those we would be working with throughout this interdisciplinary course on the culture and history of the 1890's. I had been using opening day inventories for years. In these I would ask questions about previous literature courses, what books students had read by the authors we would be reading, and how much experience they had working with new technologies (all valuable opening day data); this time I asked questions that attempted to elicit from students what they knew--and what they thought about what they knew--regarding the kind of work we would be doing. In this opening exercise I directed them to three different cultural/historical artifacts: a poem, a photograph, and a review of a stage play from the 1890's. I asked them to answer the following questions about each artifact: 1. What do you see here? Describe the document/artifact in terms of content, without being interpretive. 2. What do you think you know about this document based on reading it and any previous knowledge? 3. What do you think the document reveals about its era/ What kinds of information can be learned from the document? (There might be more than one kind of information). 4. What don’t you know about the document? What questions would you ask about it? 5. If you were going to do further research on this document on the World Wide Web or in the library, how would you go about it? 6. What knowledge or skills are you bringing to this course from other learning experiences you’ve had that help you make sense of these documents? The exercise took a long time. I gave them more than hour. In fact it took the entire balance of the opening day after the general introduction to the course. It was an hour when I would normally have started presenting or introducing them to the subject. I suppose I could have had them do it outside of class, but it was important to me for them to complete the activity before I had started contextualizing the course. I wanted to know what they knew, and what they knew about what they knew, not what they were able to perform based on what they thought I wanted them to know. What I learned was in part diagnostic. I learned which students had what kind of background (or background they remembered) in the period and in history and literature. But I learned much more than that. Their responses revealed a great deal about their assumptions of what it meant to look at and derive information from historical documents. For example, in their responses to #3 ("What do you think the document reveals about its era") most students indicated in one form or another that there was a "right answer" that they did not yet have enough context to know. Or, in their responses to #6 ("What knowledge or skills are you bringing to this course from other learning experiences you’ve had that help you make sense of these documents"), most students said they either were or were not bringing specific content knowledge to make sense of them. Only two recognized that they might have skills, or ways of reading, (as opposed to positive content knowledge) that would help them make sense of the documents. This was really important. Since one of my stated goals of the course was to give students skills and methods that would enable them to encounter historical materials in other contexts more capably, the disjunction between content-knowledge and method-knowledge was critical for me (and them) to see at the outset. This all helped me immeasurably to adjust the course even more to approach the question of historical and documentary interpretation from the standpoint of process and complexity and to foreground these emphases in the course. On the last day of class I handed back their opening day responses, asked them to look at the same three artifacts and to look at what they wrote on the first day. On this day I asked them how their response to these artifacts would be different now, what they had gained from the course that helped them read the documents more knowledgeably, and what they were taking away from the course that would help them in another course about culture and history. With this reflection, (again without going into any detail here) I was able to see a change in their rhetoric about the complexity of textual meaning, and in their perceptions about the components of the course that led to that change. This meta-reflective dimension is a key piece of evidence
in my ongoing inquiry into how students come to learn and understand complex ideas about
culture and history. Of course as I assess the effectiveness of the course and its methods
there are other places I would look for evidence of student learning, such as in their
written work. But overall, what has been striking for me is the way in which my initial
questions gave rise to particular problems. And, as with other kinds of scholarly and
intellectual work, the more I pursue those problems as inquiry and the more I reflect on
what I'm learning, the more complex those problems seem. Next Section: Against the Grain Previous Section:The Inverted Pyramid |