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This special late night post is to let you know that In the Bin is back in regular production. This was a wonderful conversation between Matt and I about the issues facing debate and facing the university today. We discuss the role of debate in the classroom and the promise of creating a center for debate, an “advocacy center” which would be somewhat similar to a writing center.
Past episodes are available here in the feed, and for more visit the podcast here.
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.
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.
Professors, stop requiring reading.
Instead, require engagement. Require response. Require conversation. Require a challenge.
It seems incredibly sad that I have to say this, but requiring someone to do something because you are an expert or an authority is not how you teach. This is more along the lines of how to be a bad manager, or how to treat employees poorly. It’s how to be a disliked, irrelevant, and problem manager of a team rather than a leader or contributor to a team. Teaching isn’t – and has never been – the dictation of facts from someone who knows to a bunch of people who don’t. Instead, it’s modeling and practice in how to think along the lines of what constitutes good thought for a field.
Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash
Learning and evaluating the quality of claims is best done in groups where people are interacting with one another. Our reasoning does not work very well at all when we are sitting isolated and engaging a text. So reading itself is not learning nor is it the best way to develop a critical approach to information. Assigned reading must be considered a part of teaching and learning, but how significant is it?
Why do we require reading?
This is the first question that I have to ask when I’m assigning something to read. What is the point here? Why am I having them encounter this text alone?
For me the answer is that it becomes a commonplace, or a meeting place, or an ingredient we can all bring into the larger class discussion in order to have some common ground for a conversation.
I teach in the humanities, so I’m not sure what the approach might be in hard science. Perhaps something like a guide on how to approach a problem or how to understand what we know already about an issue or thing, as a basis for a more robust treatment of the theory, knowledge, or approach by the professor in the class. There is always the catch-all of having two different approaches to something helping you understand and retain it better.
I don’t assign any reading that I don’t plan to directly use in the construction of my own in-class speech, or video. I plan to model a response to the text if I’m going to give sustained comments. This is much more common in the pandemic. My typical way of teaching is to ask a lot of questions of the students to see what they thought about the reading. This encourages them to encounter the text at least a bit in the moment.
Assigning reading has to be incorporated by the professor in more ways than just a quiz or just some examination on the reading. It has to be the provision of some information, some material, for them to create something with. Most often this should be a response. The best way of doing this is for the professor to model the response to the reading themselves, performing the quality, standards, and approach that is accepted in their field. Education in all cases is the teaching of a discourse, and modeling that discourse is perhaps the best way to show students the difference between a field expert and a layperson on an issue or idea.
Eliminate Textbooks
Textbooks are a bane on education. They are distilled comments that would be made in class anyway, and don’t really help students with anything other than disciplining themselves to read and engage boring material that they have little interest in. The textbook is often just a flatter, less interesting version of the professor.
Some defend textbooks as a reference, and I think this might be the only defense out there that makes sense. But the web is a much better reference for the things we might find in a textbook, and the cost is often hundreds of dollars lower.
If you feel compelled to assign a textbook, you should consider assigning a reader instead. Cut right to the professional essays on the topic and show the students those. Have them read some bits of things you have found to be illuminating and inspiring. The reader will serve as a much better orientation to the course and the course topic than the textbook, which distills. The reader is more of a sampler, and also doesn’t insult the students’ intelligence like a lot of textbooks do.
Four Real Books
Several years ago I was chatting with a friend who was in graduate studies at Cornell University about why students today seem to have so much busywork to do for every class. There are blog responses, discussion boards, endless quizzes, etc. I believe this is because faculty are more insecure about their position and less prepared to teach than ever before. They don’t see the need to look to what the high schools are doing, and they feel that students should be happy to be in the presence of someone with a terminal degree and just accept what they have to say. There’s also the ease of the internet, and online instruction, where the presence of something like a discussion board feels like pressure to find a use for it. There are probably a ton of different reasons why faculty are assigning so much work per course, when I remember most of my courses were a midterm, a final, and perhaps a short review of a book somewhere in there.
The thing we found in common with our best class experiences in this conversation was that our favorite classes all had assigned four books, no textbooks, and had just gone through those books in conversation and with some short papers perhaps. I think this approach has many advantages over the required reading of the chapters of the textbook. It’s not insulting – here are some books written to a critical mind from one. It’s interesting: You get a concentrated approach to a set of ideas or problems, instead of a distilled covering of a number of ideas in a field. Most importantly, you get four arguments. These arguments call out to the students to respond either with questions, agreement, disagreement, or the desire for further framing.
You can assign four books and have students choose what to focus on, or have them read around in them, or do them in order. Most importantly, you are not assigning reading, you are assigning engagement here, assigning them to come to terms with a few different ways of thinking about your course and field. And most of these books are probably 14 dollars at the most, maybe 30 if they just came out, and students are pretty savvy at finding books online for free.
Don’t assign reading. Assign experiences. Don’t force reading with a quiz. Encourage conversation by introducing your students to a difficult text. Students don’t refuse to read because they are dumb. Students refuse to read because they don’t see the value, they feel it’s dumb, they feel that it’s ridiculous in the way it’s written, that it isn’t taking them seriously. Assign something that treats them like a valuable mind, and encourage reaction to the text in speech or writing. This is how reading becomes a part of a good course.
It seems that what COVID 19 won’t eliminate in terms of higher education, Google will. The recent announcement that Google will offer certificate training in technology jobs is not surprising. What is scary about the recent announcement is that Google will accept certificate training – basically those “badges” on Linked In – as the equivalent of a four year college degree.
Google isn’t to be blamed for anything, they are following along the ineptitude of our college and university administration. For years the discourse from university administrators has been “college matters because you can get a career and make money from it.” That has literally been the only thing that administrators have leaned on to defend the university. Who can blame Google if they take a look at this justification, take it as an honest argument, and then respond with, “we can do it cheaper and better.”
As other companies like Microsoft and Facebook, as well as some of the halfway-in companies like EdX start to follow Google’s lead, university enrollment in the things that keep revenue coming in will diminish. Most students are at the university because they want to work a corporate job. The university has taken the position of unquestioningly facilitating this, assuming that an 18 year old has a fully formed, fully explored vision of what they’d like to do with their life for the next 45 years. This business approach of giving the “customer” what they ask for is foolish, unethical, and anti-educational. But any other approach appears to threaten the revenue stream which funds both a bloated administration full of bureaucrats and also floats a lot of really great, really good programs that aren’t self-sustaining like languages, philosophy, anthropology – necessary modes of inquiry that can’t sustain themselves right now.
As Google’s move takes off and admissions starts to see students who are choosing to go the way of corporate certification, a defense will develop that will be terrible. Administrators are timid and easily panicked individuals. They like the trappings of an executive role – the suits, the meeting rooms, the cynical sneer and hallway conversations of those “in the know,” but they can’t face decision points, and can’t do anything in a crisis except repeat old arguments or backpedal. They enjoy the trappings and can’t do the work.
The defense we’ll get is one where the certificate is described as “not good enough” to secure the “best jobs.” Of course, this won’t be persuasive at all. People are already at their limit in what they will accept as the cost of university. They are at their limit in accepting the narrative that eccentric and mean professors are just part of the experience. The entire college experience seems to be accounted for with a ton of debt, a shrug, and the acceptance of a job and career path where paying off that loan is not something that will happen until retirement.
The defense against the Google move that the universities should make, but won’t, is to abandon the idea that the university makes a difference in career track. If you want a career, don’t come to college. If you are that sure, and that focused on what you want to do, go get the relevant certificates instead. But when you find your life to be somewhat shallow, when there’s nothing else to watch on Netflix, and when you are wondering about the purpose of all of this, then you can come to college to get a certificate in life, thought, citizenship, or inquiry.
The core curriculum is what the college should be doubling down on, that and the campus space. In COVID 19, we have lost the second one in totality. The first one though, that’s something that we all sort of feel, in the back of our minds, that the administration wishes we didn’t have. But here is what a job training program can’t get you: The practices in creating narrative, justification, and explanation that help you navigate everything from political polarization in the news to doubts about the nature and purpose of existence.
These conversations require time and space, and are probably best held when people are not panicking about what sort of job they are going to get. They are best when people have stories to share about their own experiences out in the world working with other people and experiencing life in a community. They are not taught at their best to 18 year olds whose experience with others in the world has primarily been under the draconian thumb of some high school teacher or principal.
The defense of the university should be to abandon the certification game in favor of the narrative game. The answer is in radically changing the narrative to one that plays on the strengths of college: Space, time, engagement, questioning, and conversation.
