PETAL

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I have long been an opponent to the commodification of education, but I saw this blog post this morning and thought it might make for an interesting discussion.

The original post can be found here: http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2009/04/should-students-be-treated-like-customers.html

Should students be treated like customers?

From Mike Sansone:

I once asked a teacher what would happen if they treated their students like customers, with a design philosophy of customer experience in mind. The teacher was taken aback. She said the day she treats her students like customers is the day she would lose control of the room.

At that moment, I knew she was standing on the line of irrelevancy — and about to cross over. The reality is, she should have been looking for ways to share control rather than try to own it alone.

Hmmm… reminds me a bit of this Robert Fried quote.

In other news, student enrollments in more-personalized choice options such as charter schools, virtual schools, alternative schools, and home schooling continue to rise…

What do you think?

In a recent post, I shared a poem that I’d recently written about facebook, and part of the poem was specifically about facebook as a teaching tool. I also posted the poem on facebook and emailed to a few interested friends who aren’t on facebook.

Six people commented on the poem in facebook and about the same number commented by email. About two-thirds of the commenters were educators, but the comment that stood out was from a former student of mine. He had taken my English class last fall, and something he said really struck a chord with me.

Oh, and seeing you on here has made the “Dr.” in front of your name look not so big when it comes to talking to you.

The defense rests…

Whenever we teach, whether in the traditional classroom or online, that act of teaching can and perhaps should be understood as an act of textual production. Whether we are speaking or writing, the content that proceeds from our teaching has a textual existence. It is a rich textual fabric synthesized from countless sources of information and experience and then encoded into our own language, whether painstakingly or spontaneously, to be encountered by our students as language, as text.

Our students, then, encounter our teaching texts in what is essentially an act of reading. Their initial experience with that text is an act of decoding, an act of interpretation. However, learning only occurs when students then re-encode it into their own language. Learning, therefore, is also an act of writing.

Most of the literature on interaction tends to focus on learner-learner or learner-instructor interaction, but it could be argued that the most important interaction in the learning process is the process described above, where learners interact with content at the level of meaning and meaning making, where interaction constitutes full participation in the production of a lesson’s meaning, where the student re-writes the instructor’s text into her own learning, onto her own consciousness.

This interaction can be further enriched if we endeavor to achieve what Mikhail Bakhtin called “dialogism,” where there is conversation between the text and reader, where meaning is negotiated, translated, and appropriated. It can be present when an instructor provides some content and then asks questions or makes demands of the reader/learner to fill in the gaps or finish the lesson. It can also be present in the incorporation of multiple perspectives in that content delivery, in the form of guest speakers or intertextual connections between the instructor’s words and other existing texts, such as seminal articles, theories, or even the textbook.

Blogs offer an excellent opportunity for us to achieve this kind of dialogic interaction, this learning as textual production. More specifically, the blogging software CommentPress, allows this concept of teaching and learning as a process of textual production to happen on the screen, and not just in the abstraction of mental space. Unlike conventional blogs, where comments are added at the bottom of the text in an incoherent and unordered list, CommentPress allows readers to comment in the margins of the instructor’s (or any other) text paragraph by paragraph. It also allows readers to reply to other readers’ comments, creating what is essentially a thread-style discussion.

If you are interested in using CommentPress for your classes, let me know.

This semester, PETAL changed the format of our Roundtable Discussions, and it seems to have been an excellent decision. The new format is simple: a topic is announced beforehand, and then a group of faculty come together to discuss that topic. There is no presenter or facilitator, just an open and free-flowing sharing of ideas that is difficult to bring to an close at the end of the hour.

Each Roundtable has been attended by 10-12 faculty, which is about the perfect number for this kind of discussion (although I’m sure we could accommodate a few more), and each session has had a nice mixture of new and experienced faculty. One attendee commented later that the new form “allowed for all parties involved to express concerns while positively finding and suggesting solutions.”

Our first Roundtable was held on January 26 and focused on the issue of Engaging Students. Several excellent ideas were presented, ranging from something as simple as moving around during class to letting students take part in the creation of exams. One novel idea was to create tests that have multiple sections with a variety formats and to allow students to choose which parts they want to take. The advantage of this method is that students can match their testing method with their learning styles, which gives them more agency in the learning process.

In fact, I would say that the underlying theme to most of the suggestions presented, as well as to the answers to questions asked, is that the best way to engage students is to make them active participants rather than passive recipients in the course. This can involve radical moves such as revolutionizing how you create tests, but it can also be as simple as getting everyone talking, having them read “against” the text, or giving them a voice in the goals for the class.

Or, as one attendee put it, “Engaging students is as much a process as it is a purpose. It might not be accomplished in one class session but can evolve, in incremental steps, throughout the semester. Instructors and students can be equal partners in this effort so that ultimately engagement in the classroom is reciprocal.”

Our second Roundtable on February 16 and centered on the challenge of Improving Attendance, an issue that many faculty feel is one of the biggest impediments to student success here at USA. The University did a study a few years ago and found that class attendance is the leading determinant of student retention. When this was discussed at the Roundtable, the point was made that statistical correlation does not equal causation, that it is just as likely that students who come to class are the ones who are driven to be successful.

At the same time, however, I can’t help but believe that even unmotivated students could be more successful if they would just come to class-as long as the time they spend in class seems worth their time.

Most of the attendance discussion focused on various approaches to attendance policies, which usually boiled down to the question of whether we should use carrots or sticks, or a combination of both.

The main point we all took away from the session, however, is that students need to feel that the time they spend in class has to offer them a reason for being there.

PETAL Roundtable Discussions are currently being offered on one Monday a month at 2:00pm. The next Roundtable will be on March 30 and will focus on Teaching Critical Thinking, followed by Teaching Diversity on April 13.

If you have a topic you would like discussed at a future Roundtable Discussion, please let us know.