Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History

Randy Bass, Georgetown University

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As Leo Marx pointed out a long time ago, rhetoric of the "technological sublime" is an American tradition, and though it first emerged in response to the inventions of the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine, the telegraph, the railroad, the idea of the technological sublime is still with us in this so-called Information Age. With their emphasis on solutions and efficiency, popular images of information technology have contributed to a misleading mythology,a new rhetoric of the technological sublime,about technology's impact on culture and especially education. Computers are touted primarily as machines for increasing productivity, speeding up problem-solving, and finding answers. All you need, we are told, is the right set of tools, the latest microprocessor, the newest operating system, the fastest Internet connection,and your satisfaction is guaranteed. Stuart Moulthrop calls this matrix of images and rhetoric the "game of perfect information," and it skews the conversation about the use of new technologies in education in dangerous ways.

Discussions about educational technology are influenced as much by the rhetoric of the "technological sublime" and language of "perfect information" as by what is actually possible. Furthermore, the discussions have been dominated by policy-makers, corporate PR firms, and administrators with little or no experience using technology in real classrooms with real students. Or, the parameters of the discussion become entangled with debates about educational standards that speak in reductive terms about content and student skills and too seldom without any appreciation for higher-order thinking abilities and real understanding.

What is missing from the discussion about educational technology is a more nuanced and careful approach, a sustained exploration of the kinds of learning that are,and are not,enhanced by digital tools. Moreover, the discussion must extend beyond the "early adopters" of technology and the faculty innovators to include mainstream faculty, all sharing their experiences, perspectives, and needs. And most critically, the discussion must recognize something that educators and scholars often take for granted: teaching and learning is not about perfect information, but often about imperfect information. Indeed, learning is often about indirection, ambiguity, complexity, and multiplicity. What's more, in the fields of culture and history, imperfect information is not necessarily something to be wished away, but is sought after, interpreted, and synthesized. Sometimes knowledge is simply too complex to be perfect.

Refocusing the discussion about teaching with technology into an investigation of effective practice and intellectual inquiry is a daunting challenge. If we want to answer the question, "What is the impact of computers on learning?" then we have to begin with the premise that teaching and learning is a complicated process that builds knowledge over time, and in not always predictable ways. In her book Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Information Technology, Diana Laurillard describes one framework for quality teaching as a "conversational framework" that is premised on a "cyclical process." This process, she argues, has to allow "both teacher and student to understand each other's intentions and descriptions of the phenomena at the discursive level, and come to some kind of agreement; then at the interactive level, the students practice their subject, and get feedback on their actions; then they reflect on this experience to integrate it with the theory, and rearticulate what they know at the discursive level." In short, Laurillard posits that good teaching must be discursive, adaptive, interactive, reflective, and most critically, intentional.

The Contexts of Good Learning

All teachers have intentions when they design and teach a course. In many ways those intentions are a kind of hypothesis, as if to say: "If I teach these particular things, in this particular order, in this particular way, then this kind of learning will probably take place." This mostly unarticulated "course design hypothesis" is loaded with complicated questions, and informed by a range of knowledge about one's subject matter, one's students, and the learning process. Yet, faculty almost never have the opportunity to look at those questions slowly. Although many faculty have the inclination to improve and innovate, a rare few have time, training, or institutional incentives to examine their teaching systematically, and consider their intentions in curriculum design for all their assumptions and ramifications. Furthermore, most faculty who teach literature, history, and interdisciplinary culture courses have so internalized this process that they do not recognize it as a hypothesis or design process at all, but mostly as a set of decisions about content, coverage, and materials.

The proliferation of technology in higher education has provided an opening to address our intentions in an fresh way. In fact, new technologies and new learning environments provide an opportunity for intentionality. Quite simply, when we ask the question "How do our students learn when we teach with technology?" we are really asking this question: "How do our students learn when we teach?"

So, despite the temptation to focus on technology alone, it is critical to step back and first ask some basic questions about one's own teaching:

If there is anything common to the many answers I have heard faculty give to these questions, it is their desire to heighten student engagement. Faculty commonly wish that students would come to class not only having done the reading, but with something to say about it. Faculty wish that more students would talk in class or use class time more productively to dig into material. They wish students would develop their own interrogative stance toward material or look at a document or issue or event critically on their own. And perhaps most commonly, faculty want their students to develop an ability to see and express complexity in the language of that discipline in such a way that it is transferable from one problem to the next.

All of these dimensions of engagement address faculty desire for their students to move beyond what John McClymer and Lucia Knoles call "coping mechanisms." "Coping mechanisms" are the set of "acritical techniques" that students develop over the life of their schooling that they too often are able to use as a substitute for "genuine learning." Varying from field to field, "coping techniques involve doing exactly the opposite of what you must do in order to learn. A student who wants to cope with a poem must systematically ignore those elements that seem confusing or contradictory, but a student who wants to construct a real interpretation must seek out the most puzzling elements in the work" (42).

There are many reasons why students develop coping mechanisms; many have to do with the nature of schools, and some have to do with the expectations of teachers. McClymer and Knoles argue that students are often encouraged simply to cope because the kinds of tests, assignments, and activities we give allow them to do so. "If one of the hallmarks of a serious [historical or literary] interpretation is a willingness to confront complexity, it behooves us to practice what we preach" (42).

In light of this, I think that it is worth asking ourselves, before considering the revision of our pedagogy, "In what contexts, and by what means, do students tend to engage in learning rather than coping?" Following that question, then, I think we can reframe the discussion about technology's impact on teaching and learning around something like this question: "What aspects of good teaching, and contexts of good learning (rather than adequate coping), do particular technologies serve well?"

Perhaps it is also appropriate to ask what it is that drives learning for teachers and scholars. I argue that there are three factors that drive the learning of experts: the questions that we want to ask, the cultural record and materials that we have to work with, and the methods and theories that govern our practice. First and foremost, compelling questions motivate expert learning; similarly it is in those moments when students are driven by questions that are compelling (or interesting) to them that they learn best. And, ultimately, it becomes its own "cyclical process": it is inquiry itself that drives learning,and resources, materials, and methods that drive inquiry. The question confronting us as teachers, and the question that governs this volume, then, is how can information technologies play a role in the engines of inquiry that drive learning?

For the balance of this essay, I will look at the study of American culture and history and the ways that faculty have been applying different technologies in different contexts. To do this, I have drawn on two different kinds of sources. On the one hand I owe part of this framework to the thinking not only of Diana Laurillard, but also to the fundamental and well-known "Seven Principles of Good Undergraduate Practice" (Chickering and Gamson) and its later reconsideration in light of information technologies (Chickering and Ehrmann). On the other hand, the framework that I offer below is a synthesis of practical findings that come from faculty who teach culture and history with new technologies. I have worked within the tenets of what we might call "new media pedagogy" to reflect on the reported experience of faculty working to discover meaningful ways to use information technologies in teaching interdisciplinary approaches to culture and history.

The ongoing work of faculty innovators (much of which is documented in the Works and Days volume that came out of the Crossroads Research Project) indicate that information technologies offer a range of opportunities for meaningful learning for students in history and culture classes in secondary and post-secondary settings.

In our experience, most educational uses of digital technology fall into three broad categories:

Each type of activity takes advantage of particular qualities of the new media itself. And each type of activity is also linked to particular pedagogical strategies and goals. Most if not all of the essays in this volume fall into one or more of these categories. So, let me explore each of these areas more extensively and, in particular, highlight the connections that innovative teachers are making among technologies, pedagogies, and the study of culture and history.

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