I’m admittedly innumerate, but, since I’m teaching a new course and we just reached the halfway mark, I thought I’d take a little poll in class. I found one element of the results kind of interesting. Of 28 respondents, 25 said that the class was “appropriately challenging” and 3 said it was “too challenging.” However, when asked the extent to which they agreed with the statement “The concepts and approaches to writing that I’m learning in this class are new to me,” I got the following results:
- Agree - 10
- Agree more than disagree - 13
- Disagree more than agree - 5
- Disagree - 0
Not bad, but not as good as I’d like: i.e., about 16% of the students aren’t wholly persuaded that they’re learning something new. And while it’s possible, of course, that, for 1 in 6 of my students, the stuff they’re getting in class is somewhat old hat, my reading of their papers and our conversations in conference tell me otherwise: namely, that there are (always) a few students who perceive newness as noise — an unnecessarily confusing way to be asked to do what they already know how to do. Or, at least, this is my (perhaps erroneous and self-serving) perception.
Anyway, I raise the matter not out of anxiety, but out of curiosity: How do we insure that we’re not only teaching genuinely new stuff and that students are learning it, but that students perceive the new stuff they’re learning to be new? I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is pedagogically crucial. For a whole host of reasons — from the perverse incentive structure created by primary and secondary ed testing regimes to an all too human desire for certainty and a sense of control — our students are becoming, I think, increasingly allergic to novelty. And that allergy is fatal to deep learning.
Am I alone in feeling this way? If not, do you have any thoughts about how to treat the allergy?
A smart set of questions, John, and curiously aligned with an anxiety or concern I had yesterday, where you define novelty as "an unnecessarily confusing way to be asked to do what they already know how to do." I was feeling yesterday, as I tried to explain in different terms again an assignment that I've explained to students innumerable, whether I was cluttering the field with too many variations on a simpler 'point.' Whether I was making more-difficult-than-necessary what could be explained plainly. But I resist 'points' and getting to them, as I resist the efficiency of Tweets, for instance, even while sometimes luxuriating in the savvy, pithy directness of Tweets (good ones). It's like the popular critique of Judith Butler, for example, and whether she obfuscated her prose style unnecessarily or whether, in fact, the tenets of queer theory demanded some level of obliqueness. Are my students learning 'new' things or 'old things' in a 'new' way, and is my new way empowering them or muddling them? And to what ends? Perhaps in an attempt to defend myself against the charge of obfuscation, I recalled to mind how struggling through Butler -- and other like densities -- ended up being important to me. The struggle itself. Of course, I was a grad student, and curious, and wanting to locate ways of articulating dense topics myself. So, perhaps the demands Butler puts on a reader are intended for only certain readers. Are there easier ways to illustrate 'established ethos,' for instance, than the ways I've done in the past? Sure. Surely. But is 'ease' always a good thing? Won't students, in our McDonaldized culture, confront 'ease' plenty of times, and even be rewarded for rendering things in easy ways (e.g. Executive Summaries, bullet points, to-the-point emails)? Could "Notes on Camp" have been rendered in more lucid terms, as a thesis? Probably. Well, probably not. But either way, it's the text Sontag left behind, and there's something she illustrates to me about the need to slow down and re-read and contemplate and struggle and to learn to enjoy the struggle. (Now, convincing students, in our speeded up culture, to 'learn to enjoy the struggle' is a challenge: several of them admitted to me last week that the readings I've been assigned -- mostly pop journalistic OpEds, btw -- seem needlessly long, when the author could've just as simply Tweeted her 'point' and gotten on with it: it being 'life' I imagine, or 'pleasure'.)
ReplyDeleteJohn and David, this is such an important set of considerations.
ReplyDeleteI have found that when I do workshops across campus (and incidentally, I recently did my 100th workshop -- I don't quite know how that happened!), novelty is necessary -- in my experience, students in other classes are more likely to buy into the workshop if they are learning new terms (or new ways of thinking about familiar concepts and processes). So "exigence," for example, works as a kind of hook in workshops precisely BECAUSE it is new.
Of course, as I have written about previously, the same novelty with the same term (exigence) had had my 1122 students sighing in despair and sinking their foreheads into their hands all term.
I did find -- and John suggested something to me about this earlier -- that when we backed off the term and came at it subtly in the context of specific essays we were reading, it finally clicked for students. Is that because it no longer seemed new? Had students overcome their allergy to novelty"