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EDUCATION CANADA
I
CANADIAN EDUCATION ASSOCIATION
ANTI-TEACHING:
CONFRONTINGTHECRISIS
OFSIGNIFICANCE
MICHAEL WESCH
I
 
T
he most significant problem with education today isthe problem of significance itself. Students – our most important critics – are struggling to find meaning and sig-nificance in their education. I teach at a large public univer-sity in the United States, and I see the significance problemall around me. Last semester I invited my students to tellthe world what they think of their education by helping me write a script for a video to be posted on YouTube. Aspart of the exercise, we created a survey measuring student involvement and engagement in various learning activities.On average, our survey sample of 131 students reportedreading less than half of the assigned readings, and furtherperceived only 26 percent of the readings to be relevant totheir lives. Others noted that they often buy hundred dol-lar textbooks that they never open and pay for classes that they never attend. The video, “A Vision of Students Today”was viewed over one million times in its first month andwas the most blogged about video in the blogosphere forseveral weeks, eliciting thousands of comments. With rareexception, educators around the world expressed the sadsense of profound identification with the scene. The signs of the significance problem extend beyond theclassroom scenes captured in the video and permeate oureveryday conversations in ways many of us do not recog-nize. Consider the often-heard lament, “some students are just not cut out for school.” The statement passes without question or even a hint of protest, yet think about what thestatement says when we replace “school” with what schoolshould be all about: “learning.” Some students are just not cut out for
learning 
? Nobody would dare make the state-ment. Learning is the hallmark of humanity. We are all cut out for learning. It is what makes us human. If our students
are “not cut out for school”, perhaps we have made themold
too narrow or inflexible, or more likely, just not meaningful enough to inspire a student to fit in. That’s thesignificance problem.If you want to see the significance problem first hand,visit a classroom and pay attention to the types of ques-tions asked by students. Good questions are the driving force of critical and creative thinking and therefore one of the best indicators of significant learning. Good questionsare those that force students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases.Oftentimes the answer to a good question is irrelevant –the question is an insight in itself. The only answer to thebest questions is another good question. And so the best questions send students on rich and meaningful lifelong quests, question after question after question.Unfortunately, such great questions are rarely asked bystudents in an education system facing a crisis of signifi-cance. Much more common are administrative questions:“How long does this paper need to be?” “Is attendancemandatory?” Or the worst (and most common) of all:“What do we need to know for this test?” Such questionsreflect the fact that, for many (students and teachers alike),education has become a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful explo-ration of the world in which we live and co-create.Contrary to many of my faculty peers, I do not blame thestudents themselves for asking these kinds of questions. Asteachers we have created and continue to maintain an edu-cation system that inevitably produces them. If we accept John Dewey’s notion that people learn what they do, thelecture format, which is the mainstay of teaching (especial-ly in large introductory courses), teaches students to sit inneat rows and to respect, believe, and defer to authority(the teacher). Tests often measure little more than howwell they can recite what they have been told. Hoping tomemorize only just as much as necessary to succeed on thetest, they ask that question I never want to hear – the ulti-mate exception to the rule that “there is no such thing as abad question.” Frustrated with this question, and hoping toget my students to ask better ones, I decided to get to workcreating a learning environment more conducive to pro-ducing the types of questions that create lifelong learnersrather than savvy test-takers.Since I dedicated myself to this task, I have found myself doing some odd things in the classroom. In fact, my class-room has started to look less and less like a classroom; myteaching, less and less like teaching. I have even toyed withthe idea of calling what I do “anti-teaching”, as I have cometo the conclusion that “teaching” can actually be a hin-drance to learning, especially when it is assumed that learning requires it. As most of us know from our ownexperience, the best learning almost always occurs in theabsence of a teacher, for it is then that learners are free topursue with great passion the questions that are meaning-ful and relevant to their own lives. Focusing on the qualityof 
learning 
, rather than the quality of 
teaching 
transformsthe entire educational agenda. As for myself, I have increas-ingly focused less on simply trying to convey good informa-tion and more on inspiring good questions. It struck methat all learning begins with a good question, and if we areultimately trying to create “active lifelong learners” with“critical thinking skills” and an ability to “think outside thebox” it might be best to start by getting students to askbetter questions.Unfortunately, I didn’t know where to start. I have readand heard a great deal of advice on how to ask good ques-tions of students – non-rhetorical, open-ended, etc. – but nobody has ever told me anything about how to get stu-dents to ask good questions. Fortunately, soon after I set out on this course I found a book that seemed to resonatewith my philosophy,
Teaching as a Subversive Activity
by Neil
EN BREF
Les bonnes questions sont la force vive d’une réflexion critique etcréative. Elles constituent donc l’un des meilleurs indicateurs d’un apprentis-sage significatif. Malheureusement, dans un système d’éducation en crise designification, les élèves posent rarement les bonnes questions. Les ques-tions courantes sont plutôt d’ordre administratif : « Quelle est la longueur dutravail à remettre? », « Est-il obligatoire de participer? » ou pis encore (et pluscouramment) : « Que faut-il savoir pour l’examen? ». Ces questions indiquentque, pour beaucoup d’élèves et d’enseignants, l’éducation est devenue unjeu de notes relativement dénué de sens. Mettre l’accent sur la qualité del’apprentissage plutôt que sur la qualité de l’enseignement transforme leprogramme éducatif et trace une voie où les élèves s’engagent dans uneexploration importante et significative du monde où nous vivons et que nouscréons collectivement.
I HAVE TOYED WITH THE IDEA OF CALLING WHAT I DO “ANTI-TEACHING”,AS I HAVE COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT “TEACHING” CAN ACTUALLYBE A HINDRANCE TO LEARNING.
CANADIAN EDUCATION ASSOCIATION
I
EDUCATION CANADA
5
 
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EDUCATION CANADA
I
CANADIAN EDUCATION ASSOCIATION
Postman and Charles Weingartner.Borrowing from Marshal McLuhan’sfamous aphorism, “the medium is themessage,” Postman and Weingartnerargue that the environment (or medi-um) of learning is more important than the content (the message), andtherefore teachers should begin pay-ing more attention to the learning environment they help to create. Theemphasis is on “managing” this envi-ronment rather than simply convey-ing information. This is not in any way a cop out of “real” teaching. In fact, approaching aclass of nearly 500 as a “manager” is atremendous task. It would be mucheasier to simply give in to traditionand deliver a standard lecture. But while the sheer numbers of studentsis a burden in one sense, there is alsotremendous potential. Think of theknowledge and life experience in that single room, if only I could find a wayto harness it! I wanted the studentsto be fully engaged, talking to oneanother, grappling with interesting questions, and exploring any and allresources to find answers, and moreimportantly, more questions. The raw materials I have at hand tocreate this environment are a compli-cating factor. The physical structure of the classrooms inwhich I work simply does not inspire dialogue and criticalthinking. They are physical manifestations of the pervasivenarrow and naïve assumption that learning is simple infor-mation gathering, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information. Nearlyfive hundred chairs in neat orderly rows face a massivestage. A small podium houses a microphone, computer,and a wireless gyromouse that controls some 786,432points of light on the massive screen at the front of theroom. Like most classes taught in this room, my Introduc-tion to Cultural Anthropology class fulfills several require-ments, so many students arrive with the hope of putting forth the minimal effort required to get the grade andget out. The structure of the room seems to suggest that university administrators may have a similar agenda, as theroom’s sheer size, layout, and technology are landmarksof the efficiency and expediency with which we can nowprovide students with their required credit hours.Nobody who seriously values learning could be anything but subversive in such an environment, and I have con-stantly grinded against this structure in my quest to createa better learning environment. Students end up sitting backwards on the backs of the fixed chairs or climbing overand around them as we struggle to create a more interac-tive space. More than once I have received calls from the janitorial staff wondering just what was going on in myclassroom. I have even tried turning over the control of those 786,432 points of light on the screen to the studentsthemselves, using a hacked mix of online social media likewikis, Twitter, Jott, and Facebook toturn their cell phones and laptops intoa local learning network.At a deeper level these are littlemore than simple parlour tricks. Theymake up a rather creative and inter-esting 
means
of learning, but not a
reason
for learning. They do not address that most significant prob-lem, the problem of significance.Neil Postman pointed the way tothis problem over ten years ago in hisprovocative book,
The End of Educa-tion
. Meaning and significance areassured only when our learning fits inwith a grand narrative that motivatesand guides us. In the past, religiousnarratives could serve this purpose, ornarratives of national progress. Some-times national and religious narrativesco-existed and mutually reinforcedone another. In the US, we now arewitnessing the last vestiges of thesegrand narratives in court battles overschool prayer and fears that thecountry is “falling behind”, but thereality is that, for a substantial portionof the population, these narrativeshave been dead for a long time andno longer serve. They are simply not grand enough to grapple with anincreasingly global, post-industrial,media-saturated world, and not grounded enough to passthe necessary and healthy skepticism towards grand nar-ratives that we find in an increasingly diverse and informedpublic. As our focus shifts from the national to the global,our grand narratives must also shift.Fortunately there is a meaningful narrative that has beenemerging all around us over the past several decades. It israrely named and therefore not often noticed. Nonethelessit is there, waiting for anybody interested in creating ameaningful learning environment to harness and bring sig-nificance back into the classroom. It is the grand narrativegrand enough to make the others seem small, groundedenough to pass under the radar of our skepticism towardgrand narratives. It is the simple narrative that tells us that beyond our own provincial grand narratives we are allinterconnected, sharing one planet, and that our futuredepends on us and future generations. In the 1960s Buck-minster Fuller harnessed this narrative by popularizng theconcept of Spaceship Earth.
WHEN STUDENTS RECOGNIZE THEIR OWN IMPORTANCE IN HELPING TOSHAPE THE FUTURE OF THIS INCREASINGLY GLOBAL, INTERCONNECTEDSOCIETY, THE SIGNIFICANCE PROBLEM FADES AWAY.
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