Three (Teaching) Things Thursday: Modeling, Comparing, and Consuming

Going to visit my family is great for many reasons, but among them is the chance to pick my brother’s brain about teaching things. This always reveals the yawing gap between how I think about teaching and how he, a professional K-12 educator, thinks and talks about teaching. He loaded me up with some new bibliography and, more importantly, some new ideas to chew on. 

Thing the First

One of the most compelling ideas that I discussed with my brother is the role of modeling thinking in the classroom. Over the past few years, I’ve found it pretty challenging to teach research writing despite offering more and more examples of solid professional writing in the classroom. My frustrations tend to stem from watching students struggle to imitate what I tended to see as easy to recognize forms supported by fairly basic rhetorical moves (e.g. “they say, I say). 

An observation that my brother made suggested that perhaps I needed to shift my attention from offering model forms to modeling the thinking behind these forms. Fortunately, this week, I have to talk about citation practices and this is one of the hardest areas for students to grasp. So instead of my typical, dry-as-dust, talk about how to footnote, I think I’ll model a bit how I decide to footnote something and how I tend to do it. While one example of modeling thinking is unlikely to transform the class, I’m excited to build more of this into my pedagogy in the future particularly in my methods class.

Thing the Second

I’m thinking about the final paper in my Greek history course this semester. The students read Nicholas Doumanis’s A History of Greece this semester and I think the final exam is going to be a critical examination of this book against the backdrop of my rather different class and ask the students to compare key themes in both. I’ve come to really enjoy projects that ask students to engage their course material even when this simply means critiquing their textbooks.

Despite the current climate that has looked regularly to challenge expertise, students still seem to cling to authority whenever they can. As a result, textbooks and surveys, like Doumanis’s book, take on an exaggerated place in how students engage a topic. There’s also the matter of the book being permanent and stable and not necessarily requiring classroom attendance or immersive reading of challenging and difficult texts. I’m looking forward to seeing how students read Doumanis’s book against the backdrop of my lectures. It’s not that I’ve said anything that directly challenges his arguments, but my class certainly has had a different point of emphasis. Producing two arguments that are equally authoritative nudges the students to have to offer a position.

Thing the Third

I had an intriguing conversation with a colleague last week about the place of consumption and production in academia. He declared himself more of a consumer than a producer. I think that sometimes I prefer the work of production and feel guilty if I consume too freely without giving anything back in return. In fact, somewhere along the way, I developed a somewhat dim view of individuals who consume widely and deeply but are content to remain local sages. I know this is unfair, but it is what it is.

Our students have increasingly shown a preference toward production and my editing and publishing class next fall will focus on producing a digital anthology of North Dakota Quarterly. This will involve the students having to consume 90 issues of the Quarterly, but more importantly to produce 100 key articles in NDQ history and justify this list. I’m thinking a bit about how to balance consumption and production in that class.

On the one hand, there’s a lot of text to navigate, consider, and characterize. The students will have talk about the changing life of the Quarterly and think about how they can bring together the various contributions in its pages against the backdrop of the journal’s history and larger trends. They’ll also have to think about an audience. So the production of this anthology will invariably involve a fair degree of consumption and processing.

At the same time, I do like to imagine that reading for the sake of reading and consuming for the sake of consuming still has a place in higher education. My fear is that our outcome driven educational practices have tended to privilege outcomes to such an extent that everything becomes process.