The New York Sophist

There really isn’t such a thing as “graduate student pedagogy,” but I thought I would write about it anyway. I’m always hopeful about it, but I know why it doesn’t exist: People who want to teach graduate students don’t understand how teaching works, they aren’t interested in thinking or talking about teaching, and they also have a very high self-image of their own importance to the field and to their studies.

Graduate student pedagogy is essential, particularly in pedagogy. It is clear that nearly all future jobs for advanced degree holders are going to be in teaching, and will likely consist of a lot more teaching than we are used to in academic appointments. When departments don’t have serious conversations about course and assignment design, and don’t have regular conversations about how to teach, pretty terrible things happen as they recently did on my campus.

A graduate student was removed of his teaching duties after he tried to get a class to come up with arguments in favor of slavery. As someone who teaches argumentation for a living, and someone who thinks a lot about the power and nature of classroom speech, this assignment cannot adequately be described as terrible. It’s the epitome of bad graduate student mentoring and what happens when you don’t have open conversations about teaching and what it’s about. Professor Taylor’s terrible assignment is a symptom, not an independent problem. And it’s a symptom that exists at some level in higher education in general.

Graduate student supervisors, as a rule, are really nervous about talking about teaching quality with graduate students. I wonder why this is? Are they afraid? Are they unwilling to let the graduate students know that teaching is an art that requires a lot of work and thought just to realize you could have done it so much better? Is it that they don’t know what to say, they believe in a simple transmission and response model? Taylor is, to his credit, trying to have an interactive classroom. But his assumptions about things like critical thinking, student engagement, and what his role is as a professor are detrimental to his ability to teach. He is one of these people who seems to believe the professor’s role is to offer the opposite, to teach from the point of opposition, to take up the impossible position and push it toward the students to see if they can push back correctly. This is not teaching. This is like mixing chemicals as a Chemistry teacher to see how the students will react to the explosions. It’s irresponsible, and it’s simply not teaching.

This professor was trying to be edgy, he was trying to really get the students to “think outside the box” to have that moment of “Wow! I’ve never thought of that before,” or whatever trendy nonsense was going through his head. It is not teaching to rupture the students’ relationships with the things they bring into the classroom. It is also not appropriate to think that you are offering radical expose about ideas to them. This assignment screams the attitude that Taylor believed he knew more about this issue than his students. This is an inappropriate attitude for teaching anything. Good teaching is realizing that you know different ways to encounter knowledge, not that you have amassed more than they have.

Secondly, Taylor did not do any adequate research to try to teach this assignment. People have written books where they have contextualized the arguments in favor of slavery from American history as well as the history of other countries that practiced it. But this was done carefully, with research, with context, and with the understanding that bad and good are contextually understood. Taylor did not offer any of that to his students, by all reports, and just tried to get them to speculate what good could come from slavery as they were sitting there, in a classroom, in 2020, with no other resources than their own feelings and thoughts. Of course that is inappropriate. More than that, it’s irresponsible to think that this would help teach these students anything about how slavery was permitted to survive so long, or how people justified it in the time and place where it was practiced. How is this the teaching of history if you are not providing deep context? Again, there are entire books written on this topic.

Finally there is this idea floating around that the pedagogy of critical thinking consists of examining the extant “two sides” of every issue. These two sides exist already and can always be accessed. One is preferred now, the other is not although it could be preferred given the right argument.

This is an unhealthy and improper model of argument, controversy, and critical thinking. If you can access arguments in favor of something it does not mean this side of the issue has legitimacy. That legitimacy is always conferred by audiences. In order to think critically about any controversy, all positions must be situated within the discourse, the context, and the ideology of the time. This requires a lot more than just sitting and staring into space in a classroom and writing down whatever reasons come to mind.

Taylor seems to believe that a starting point for critical thinking and teaching is to tell students to imagine a horrible atrocity from a positive point of view. This stereotype of thought often appears in popular culture as what rhetoric or debate offer. Nothing is further from the truth. If Taylor had actually prepared to teach his class, he would have provided them ample readings from scholars of the time who discuss why it was that people who were decent citizens in every other respect would consider it normal and healthy to own other human beings. That’s a conversation worth having, and that’s something where the critical thinker could make connections between our discourse about global economics and the terrible conditions of Chinese labor could be recognized as a more modern version of this atrocity.

Thinking that coming up with a logical argument to justify atrocity without any consideration of context is evidence of only one argument: A lazy, unprepared teacher who should not be teaching in the first place. But isn’t the blame really with the supervisors and mentors who clearly didn’t inquire, or investigate, or suggest how to teach to their graduate student?

The biggest hazard from teaching online I think is that you get huge waves of grading that have very firm time requirements.

If I assign students to prepare a speech 6 minutes long, I have to listen to 40 or so 6 minute speeches. There’s nothing I can do to reduce that amount of time at all.

It could be argued that if you assign papers you have a bit more control over how long it takes you to grade, and you can shorten it, but I am not sure that’s true at all. For me, reading student papers always takes longer than listening to them speak. I think even with the fixed 6 minute speech I’m still doing pretty good with classtime on grading. I’m hoping to turn everything around by Saturday so we’ll see how it goes (everything came in last night).

In my other course where I would traditionally assign a paper I have been allowing students to present their ideas either by recording themselves on a powerpoint or submitting an audio file as the assignment. I’m hoping to work a bit more on oral assessment, and giving students multiple opportunities to practice speaking their ideas to others.

The power of oratory cannot be denied now more than ever. The deluge of podcasts and the dominance of video calls, vlogging, and websites like TED Talks and The Moth show that the power of speech is not something old or less important than writing. It is not writing, but it is definitely composition. Unfortunately most people in my field teach public speaking as the transmission of facts and truths from research, which is extremely thin and limiting. Speech creates understanding in incredible ways since it is ephemeral, immersive, and helps us feel our way through ideas as we listen to the persons speech patterns, tone, and how they adjust what they are saying as they go.

My focus will be to push for more casual recordings, more one-take recordings, and more supplemental or response recordings as students interact with one another’s work. I hope that by December we’ll be in a place where submitting a voice memo from the phone is at the same level of critical engagement that a nice paper would be. Considering how little time college students spend on papers, I feel that this might be a good way to practice critical thinking.

Following in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, I have used Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Maelstrom” as a way to describe rhetorical strategy, kairos, and how argument really works away from all the too-firm theories that are floating around out there.

Now I’m thinking that the Maelstrom is a useful metaphor for universities and university instructors to plan for the rough times ahead. Just like in the story, universities cross a dangerous stretch of water every year, hoping that they will be able to make it out and back before the storm arrives. To be caught in the storm certainly means that you are going to be pulled directly to the bottom.

Fritz Eichenberg, U-M Library Digital Collections

The narrator of the story is caught in a maelstrom and there doesn’t appear to be a way out. For a moment, the character can see the wall of water around him, and notices that things he thought would sink are moving up the column, and things that he believed would float are heading to the bottom. He decides to lash himself to a heavy object in hopes that this will be pushed to the top of the whirlpool.

For rhetoric, the meaning is pretty obvious, at least to me. It’s much more valuable to look around and make use of the way things are floating around you in your situation and encounter with topic and audience than it is to stay committed to the things that you brought with you. Things you prepare alone are always going to be persuasive for you. But the audience has their own assumptions and feelings, and those might work in ways that make little sense to you, but still work. The goal isn’t to be right; the goal is to persuade, or at least to bring the audience closer to your point of view (which is often what persuasion ends up being, realistically).

For online teaching, what instructors have been doing is panicked grasping to things that they think will keep their class afloat in this mess. Quizzes, daily discussion, handing in various reading reactions, etc on a near daily or weekly basis is much more frequent than would be assigned in an in-person course. The panic of not being able to see the students makes instructors think that they have no idea if the students are engaged, learning, or “paying attention” – whatever that means. Often this last one is just “looking at me while I’m talking.” Not the best measure of student engagement quite honestly.

These measures are all comfortable and familiar and we believe they tell us something. We believe they have the power to keep the objectives of the class floating. But in this unusual situation, frequent daily or weekly stress of doing a bunch of work that isn’t clearly connected to a larger goal in the course is just going to continue to pull the course to the bottom.

The panic that there are not comfortable ways or familiar ways to take stock of a class and see if people are engaged is very real, but we can’t just replicate the in person online and think that it will provide the same value or information. Honestly, the in-person metrics are more comfortable than valuable; I wonder if they actually float in any circumstances.

Looking around to what engages and works in the online space is what’s needed, even if it’s not familiar or comfortable. What we are looking for are things that communicate value to students. Things that make them feel that they are part of something educational, meaningful, and valuable.

For me what has gotten the biggest response are short podcasts just checking in with everyone that I post to our class chat about once a week. These are just audio recordings where I address questions I’ve received 2 or 3 times, mention a comment that someone left that I think is good, or general guidelines or thoughts I have about upcoming readings and assignments. The students really like these because they give them the sense they have something to hold onto that helps them stay afloat. Notice this doesn’t require them to do anything – it doesn’t add to an already stressful and over-assigned term.

One of the things I’m most frustrated by is how much of my ability to adapt is connected to professors who do not think – never think – that they need to adapt to the students. They think the students should be grateful to be able to hear the professor speak. They think they are transmitting the best information to the students. They also think they are defenders of “real” knowledge, and are noble for looking out for cheaters and those who trick the professor into giving out precious undeserved “points.” Nobody feels engaged or helped by seeing a bad laptop camera professor telling them that they need to read the syllabus.

I’m just hoping that by associating myself with the things that feel like they would sink I might get a chance to rise to the edge of the storm and be picked up by someone else. I think that the scramble for the things that appear to work, because they fit a shallow and undeveloped model of what it means to know or teach, is to ensure that your entire crew will be consumed by the maelstrom.

Yesterday I started making Google Slides presentations for various reading assignments for my courses. I planned to video some lectures with these, but also providing them as documents on the learning management system (we use Canvas in my shop).

As I started making the slides, the amount of work I needed to do kept increasing. For every slide I made, I felt like I needed to make five more because of what making that slide revealed or what it indicated to me needed to be added next to help explain the readings.

I started to get worried. How long was it going to take me to create all of these slides for all of these readings?

What happened was that I lost the thread of the course. My role in the course is not to explain every reading, every argument, every page. My role is to place the reading into the context of the class that I created.

Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash

The role of the teacher is not to elucidate the text but to illuminate the text. The function of a good lecture or presentation for students is to provide the light and perspective by which they can read and interpret the text within the context of the course. So I was pretty out of line with what I was trying to do.

The course should be designed as an investigation that requires the students to take what they get from the text and use it to address or add to the questions the course is set out to pose. The course should be structured in a way where the students add their own response and reaction to the reading toward the major aim of the course.

I know all this, and always try to structure my courses around inquiry and keep the spirit of inquiry as the attitude of the course. But yesterday I sort of fell into the social pressure of having to explain the readings, of transmission or transfer of what I think rather than creating the space of exposure and encounter for them to generate their own experience.

Why is teaching so difficult? It always feels like I’m starting over, every semester. It could be that I’m not that great at it, or it could be that it’s just that hard. Or it could be my favorite answer: Good at what? What is there to be good at? Does teaching really exist in terms we can talk about this way?

“Finger pointing at the Moon” is a famous koan that has been rewritten and offered so many times that the search for the origin of this early teaching lesson might as well be lost. As a koan we can accept it as a case that is worth our investigation, a case that everyone must investigate and try to answer. In Buddhism, the koan is a method of teaching that attempts to get students of Buddhist thought into the sort of thinking and attitude that Buddhism as a religion, or thought-system, requires. It’s a tool of critical thinking we could say, one that pushes on your ability to think in a new discourse or a new discipline.

I’ve often borrowed “finger pointing at the moon” to talk about teaching and pedagogy and every year, at the start of the year, my mind drifts back toward it for another go. Although there’s obviously a lot we can say about this koan right now it has me thinking about the relationship to grades and the privileged discourse of the teacher.

We talk a lot in pedagogy about the authority of the teacher and how the teacher can often be a source of disciplinary or other troubling power. I’ve written before – many years ago – about the great Chinese proverb “It is a pleasurable thing to teach.” This has an ambivalent sort of meaning, that the teacher can often be overcome by their own position, thinking they are doing a lot of good when they are really just causing a lot of suffering. There’s also the great Paulo Friere quote, “A teacher must be an authority without being authoritarian.” And Staughton Lynd’s great saying, “You shouldn’t be standing in front of your students, but shoulder to shoulder with them on the issues of the time.” These are all very meaningful teaching ideas to me, and I think about them a lot. I’m not sure what they all mean for my teaching practice, but they are definitely tools for me to reiterate it. The biggest block I find in my way though, is grades.

Grades are the ultimate finger, and most of the teaching authority relies on grades. The reason students attend to what you say and ask and do is because they are concerned about grades. In this sense you are the arm extending the finger, pretty far removed from learning or knowledge in that sense. Grades have too much authority and control in order to be valuable at all. They really best serve as a lighthouse that helps you and the student avoid the shoals.

The other concern with grades that I’m noticing is that they boost a real sense of confidence among students who probably should be a lot more humble and questioning of their own abilities. It’s like they borrowed a book about some topic, and they carry it around, thinking that their presence with the borrowed book is what learning looks like.

The university will not be able to compete with the rising certificate programs, particularly if major companies start to accept or prefer the certificate program over the traditional four year degree. Grades are thought about too much as the evidence of learning and not what they serve as, the payment for labor. The analogy needs to be rethought. Students think of grades as what they deserve for sitting though a class and doing what is asked of them. Professors think of grades as a way to control student behavior and judge student ability. Neither is a good way to think about grades.

Let’s get grades out of the way and move to a system where professors help students create a portfolio of work that showcases what they are best able to do. If you are teaching a public speaking class, like me, this means some sort of recordings. Wouldn’t it be a better use of a semester to help mentor students through a process of reiteration on a presentation to make it look and sound really good for larger audiences? Wouldn’t that be more valuable than giving them a quiz about some made up outline structure that only has value in a glossy, overpriced textbook?

What’s the moon here? What does it mean to get it in a class like public speaking? What should students be able to do at the end of such a course? These are the questions we should use to drive our course, not textbook chapters, quizzes, and midterm exams.