EMERGING ISSUES

Emerging Issues and Questions

By Randy Bass

This is a space for issues and intersections emerging from Project discussions. Here we will highlight in each newsletter at least one recurring theme, concern, or question in the Project. An additional purpose here is to bring some of the thinking and discussion of participants to the foreground. If there is an issue or set of concerns you would like to see brought to the foreground in this space, please write us at vkp@georgetown.edu.

This edition of E-merging Issues focuses on the main question:

How do I study student learning without becoming an educational researcher?

This, in turn, breaks out into the following subquestions:

What's the problem with looking at learning?
Is VKP more than an assessment project?
What's the role of technology in the VKP?

How do I study student learning without becoming an educational researcher?

Many of you have expressed-in different ways-perhaps the most difficult of all challenges for the Visible Knowledge Project: how do liberal arts faculty who care about teaching engage in the systematic inquiry of student learning? In essence there are several obstacles here. First, there is the problem that liberal arts faculty do not perceive themselves as adequately trained to examine learning systematically. Secondly, most faculty have never had occasion to be in contexts that promoted or valued the careful examination of student learning. In fact, most graduate programs, and institutions for that matter, privilege professional activities like teaching and research in ways that render serious questions about student learning pretty inaccessible. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, within the disciplines (and the interdisciplines), we have very little common language or understanding with which to have a sustained conversation about student learning in the culture and history fields.

What's the problem with looking at learning?

For all these reasons, several VKP participants have voiced versions of their struggle to reconcile their own desire to understand student learning better and an apparent disconnect with the means and language to go about doing just that. For example, Ed Gallagher, from Lehigh University, wrote in his introductory posting:

I have some fears about participation in VKP. I tend to move by instinct, to plunge ahead, and to try to keep moving. I don't seem to engage in the elaborate pre-planning that I see in many of my VKP colleagues. I often act before I think a lot. And I tend to move from project to project quickly. I don't think I'm used to the kind of "slowing down" and even looking back that is at the core of VKP. Also, I have always been sort of allergic to theory, which should make for an interesting VKP journey for me.

Similarly, Samira Kawash, from Rutgers University, wrote:

I initially feel a little overwhelmed by the goals and research areas outlined in the VKP workspace. I feel like my practice as a teacher is much more modest than that; I'm not sure I can keep all these questions in my mind as I juggle the other tasks of the semester. But I suppose the question is more manageable if I approach it from the perspective of what I feel isn't quite happening in my teaching or in my classes, and what I wish could happen more. From that perspective, I think the most important goal for me is discovering ways of enabling the students to see themselves as active and invested learners.

It seems perfectly productive to make these feelings of resistance visible. In the first few months of the project we tried to pose ways to help faculty participants begin the process of "slowing down" and reflecting. We presumed that the use of theoretical ideas and terminology from educational and cognitive psychology was one way to "slow down" and to ask teachers to look at their own teaching activities with a new lens. (In the humanities and cultural studies, we borrow other fields' terminology to defamiliarize familiar materials all the time). We also hoped that the reflective writing on one's own teaching and thinking would do the same. Ultimately, what matters is finding some subtle and meaningful points of access to student learning.

One end-of-the-year campus report put this paradox poignantly:

We come from history, literature, political science, and sociology, and we have realized that each discipline approaches the use of multimedia in the classroom differently, based upon disciplinary specificities and professorial idiosyncracies. How, then, to apply a uniform method of-or even discussion about-assessment? That has been our primary challenge. We do not seem to have the tools or language personally to respond to this type of challenge on our own, so we realize where we need a great deal of help is in this area of assessment.

Then, later in the report, they add:

At the same time, faculty are not very inclined to learn the language of education specialists, so there is resistance to VKP's terminology and framework, if not to the idea of investigating learning.

I see two critical questions emerging from the passage above: What is the difference between the scholarship of teaching and educational research? And is there something that the Visible Knowledge Project is trying to do beyond better assessment of technology-rich courses?

Let's take the first question: What is the difference between the scholarship of teaching and educational research?

I think there are two key distinctions between the two. The scholarship of teaching and learning, as defined within the project, is something that teachers do on their own teaching and their students' learning. The premise here is not to turn faculty into educational researchers, but to ask them to bring their own uniquely qualified perspective to bear on the relationship between their teaching and their students' learning. This is a kind of knowledge that Lee Shulman calls "pedagogical content knowledge." And it is a particular kind of knowledge that the disciplinary/interdisciplinary practitioner brings to bear on the exploration of student learning. The other key distinction between educational research and scholarship of teaching has to do with implications for improving teaching. Although educational research may result in findings that ultimately help teachers teach better, the impact is not direct. In the scholarship of teaching, one's findings not only contribute to a broader public conversation about teaching and learning in the field, but ought directly to cycle back into the classroom.

Is VKP more than an assessment project?

This brings us to the second question emerging from the campus report above: is the Visible Knowledge Project doing something more than just assessing the effectiveness of technology in courses? Here, I think we come back to the source of resistance and difficulty in exploring student learning: How do we investigate something we don't really have a language for or understanding of, to begin with? It is an assumption of VKP that not only don't we have a clear sense of the student learning experience (something we can begin to uncover through better assessment), we also don't really have full access to our own "pedagogical content knowledge"--that is, access to the nature of the thinking that leads to teaching that in turn produces learning.

Kim McCollum-Clark, from Millersville University, in one of her online postings for VKP, cites a language and literacy theorist named James Paul Gee. Kim describes Gee's distinction between "acquisition" and "learning." She says,

[P]rimary discourses (or literacies) are ACQUIRED through immersion with other members. Acquisition is unthinking, uncritical, and "natural." One might use the example of a primary language. As a teacher of English teachers, I often talk about how native speakers of English "know" on a certain level many of the rules of English grammar but they cannot articulate the rules. This is because they have acquired them. Acquired discourses are noted for ease of USE, but are difficult to reflect upon. A secondary discourse is LEARNED--deliberately taken on with effort and direction (i.e., school subjects with "direct instruction.")

This distinction is useful because it helps explain why it might be difficult for faculty to get some perspective on the relationship between teaching and learning. Kim writes,

So when Sam Weinberg was talking about 'letting students in on the game'of our disciplines.many faculty members don't know there IS a game because they have ACQUIRED their disciplinary discourse--not by learning it in a directed way, but in more of an apprenticeship format with our professors, advisors, and peers.

What's the role of technology in the VKP?

The complexities of the teaching-learning relationship then become even more complicated with the introduction of technology, both in small, modest uses, and in more complex ones. Often the use of technology not only alters the relationship between students, teachers, and the material, but may also alter the nature of what it means to learn or to represent learning in the field. Many VKP participants volunteered stories about their questions related to technology and learning in the project. Here are three:

The first is from Jeffrey Dym, from California State University, Sacramento:

In teaching lower division courses to large sections of students who don't really want to be there but who are taking the course as a requirement, I try to be as interesting as possible while at the same time still conveying the information that I feel is most important. I want to believe that enhancing my courses with technology and visual knowledge is adding to the learning experience, but I wonder if it actually is. I say this for the following reason. Sometimes while I lecture I will mention something in passing that is a very interesting point, but not all that important. I just throw it out there as extra information. Often, however, I find that this will be the only point that students remember on tests. Thus, I am wondering if adding lots of visuals to my class is helping or not. Are students remembering what I say or merely the pictures I show? Does it matter?

The second is from Gloria Dickinson, from the College of New Jersey:

One anecdotal account from the previous semester is encouraging. A student who failed the Africana Women course 2 years ago repeated the course. She came to me at the end of the semester to say how much "better/easier" it was for her this time because of the online writing and other technological components of the course. She says it was "easier to understand and digest" the materials with the technology. Her grades, and writing, were also much better this time around. While there are other factors that could have contributed to her improvements, it was heartening to have her "volunteer" this information because it is connected to my VKP goals and the underlying assumptions

The third is from Mark Kann, University of Southern California:

My main goal has been to use multimedia as a means to improve students analytical skills, including: how to emphasize and dramatize major points; how to examine a subject from multiple viewpoints; how to interact with an ambiguous topic; and how to do depth analysis of a topic. I have found that computer-based multimedia approaches facilitate these thought processes. However, I am not convinced that the time required to teach students to use the software necessary for achieving multimedia literacy is a good investment; that time might be spent in other more conventional ways with potentially larger educational payoffs..

My current thinking is to use the new media to help students to examine, visualize, and present abstract concepts--which should require little software training. Once one defines "anomie," for example, can one develop an image that exemplifies the concept? That explores it? That raises questions about it? Just as a good political cartoon can condense a great deal of meaning into fairly simple images, our students should be able to use the new media to do the same. At least that is my current thinking.

In all of three of these postings-and in many others like them-behind questions about the impact, effectiveness, and tradeoffs related to the use of technology, are important questions about learning. What is one to make of Jeffrey's students who best remember the one incidental point? What is it exactly that Gloria's student was finally able to "understand and digest," and how might that be reflected intentionally in course designs in the future? What can we all learn about the role of multimedia in Mark Kann's classroom that helps illuminate not merely the impact of technology on learning, but the nature of all the disciplinary thinking processes that make up the ability to "condense" meaning, and value it as a competency worth acquiring?

Regardless then, of whether one is stimulated or not by theory, educational concepts, or the language we've borrowed from cognitive psychology, the constellation of challenges at the core of the Visible Knowledge remains the same: how do we open up and deepen our methods and language for looking at student learning and do so in ways that meaningfully connect thinking processes with teaching and learning in our fields?

May 2001

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