Too little time is available for us to reflect on what is being said and what we have said. Perhaps this can be addressed in the classroom where professors seem to feel that every single minute of the class should be occupied with some productive activity. I call this philosophy the “productive bias” pedagogy.
Productive Bias Pedagogy means that to know if learning is occurring you have to have students producing things. They have to be posting in discussion forums, they have to write reading reactions, they have to write short papers all the time. Reading quizzes are essential; how else will I know they have read (aka: learned) anything? This approach conflates good teaching with a pile of papers to mark and the perverse pleasure of posting to Twitter: “Buried in a pile of grading!”
The trouble with this approach is that it is highly capitalistic – turn your students into the means of production; liberate them! Secondly it substitutes hard work and thought for box-ticking. There’s no reflection here, no space to consider the conversations and readings and things going on in the course.
There are a few ways to build a rhetoric of reflection into the course. First you can take some of that productive bias energy and channel it into re-doing assignments. This can quell faculty nerves in relation to the amount of work being done because the re-do might satisfy that part of you that really wants students to write a huge paper or several small papers. For example, instead of a 10 to 20 page paper at the end of a course, how about an 8 page paper done twice? For me, I really can’t be bothered to read undergraduate writing longer than 8 pages so that’s a hard cap for me. You might feel differently. I think working through the small thing is better.
You could also have students work through one idea in many different iterations. For example, you can assign a quote or an aphorism for them to work on throughout the term. Every short paper comes back to this line or uses it as a jumping off point. Furthermore, you could also pick one issue. In debate I have had success with this in terms of energy policy, public land, so-called “sanctuary cities,” and now I’m going to try to use the debates about AI and autonomous vehicle ethics. Reflection on new material can come from the continual return to a familiar topic, similar to the 18th and 19th century idea of a commonplace notebook.
There’s also the idea that I’ve never tried of having students actually do the ancient concept of recitation, coming to class with a short statement to say orally to the other students about what they believe the reading/material/topic to mean. They communicate understanding to an audience – their fellow students – and at the same time satisfy that burning desire of the bad professor to have the students “do something,” so that they feel like they are teaching. The whole trick here is to quell the productive bias anxiety of the professor without creating a bucket of anxiety for the modern university student who, at least in the U.S. is overworked with arbitrary, meaningless tasks for points, working part time, overcharged for university, and not sure if there will be a functioning world waiting for them on the other side of their degree.
More time in the classroom for the rhetoric of reflection means less demand to produce for points, or produce on time because “this is what a job will demand.” It’s not clear to any of us if jobs will be around in this current form in a few years – look at how much COVID-19 has changed the workplace. Instead, back to basics, back to thought – can you communicate your position on what we are reading? How do you feel about it? Most importantly, what do you have to say about it to others? Is it similar to what you thought the first time I asked you about it? What changed?