E-MERGING ISSUES
First Harvest: Reading the Project Reflections
for the Summer Institute
By Bret
Eynon and
Randy Bass
In preparation for the Summer Institute, the 45 participants attending
prepared 1-2 page reflections on the kinds of questions they are posing
about their teaching that point toward the development of scholarship
of teaching projects. They are a rich harvest. We're offering a sampling
of voices below. And what follows are some initial impressions we
had reading through the reflections-beginning to identify some common
ground on which we can build a collective sense of progress and inquiry.
In reading through the "reflections on project questions" prepared by
the Summer Institute participants, we were struck both by their diversity
and their commonalities.
On the one hand they demonstrate the extraordinary diversity of the Visible
Knowledge Project: diversity of teaching settings, types of students,
disciplinary focus, course content, even the nature of questions being
asked about teaching and learning.
Reading through the reflections also underscores quite dramatically what
we have in common-our shared values about teaching and learning. In particular,
these center around the values intrinsic to what we have always referred
to in the project, loosely, as the "culture and history" fields. More
specifically, these are the core issues related to a liberal arts education:
empowering students in reading, writing, their abilities to represent
their understanding.
Along with these general values, the reflections privilege some common
goals: achieving a decentered classroom in which students take increased
responsibility for their own learning; looking for ways to push students-and
for students to push themselves-to the next level of complexity; and finally,
ways to deepen learning and understanding and strengthen the ability of
student to transfer their learning, from one class to the next, and from
coursework to their living contexts.
These are the general skills, values, and goals expressed richly throughout
the reflections. With regards to technology there are at least three broad
areas of interest, relating to three different ways of conceptualizing
digital spaces in relation to the teaching and learning process: (1) Seeing
digital spaces as a "content space" and in particular a place where students
work with primary cultural and historical archival materials of all kinds.
(2) Seeing digital spaces as a "social space" especially in connection
with collaborative learning, premised on the idea that knowledge is socially
produced, and lasting learning depends on a level of socialization, or
articulation of ideas within a "community of practice." And (3) Seeing
digital spaces as "constructive space," a place where students express
their understanding by building representations of knowledge digitally,
through annotated web sites, multimedia essays, and other new expressive
and analytical forms.
Finally, present throughout the reflections are intimations of tensions
of various kinds that inform, inhibit, and inspire the kind of work we
are trying to achieve. Some of these tensions are intrinsic to new technologies;
others are related to conflicts between our pedagogies and prevalent forms
of institutional assessment.
More subtly, it is clear to us that there is inherent tension if asking
the kinds of questions we're asking. Higher education institutions are
not well-organized for taking learning seriously. Throughout the Visible
Knowledge Project, we feel both the enormous energy and some trepidation
about opening up the questions about learning that often go unasked in
higher education. This highlights the need for us to engage in this work
together, considering at every point the value of doing this work as a
collective endeavor, rather than as individuals, or as individual campuses.
This also points to a tension in the kinds of questions we are asking
about technology. In some cases the kinds of subtle, fine-grained questions
about technology that we want to discuss are not the kinds of things being
discussed about technology on campuses. Our concerns are not necessarily
about scale or speed or productivity. Maintaining the integrity of our
questions, while still connecting with local needs and issues of teaching
practice, is one of the great challenges of the Project.
These first reflections are an inspiring and auspicious beginning.
Listening to Each Other
Voices from the VKP Reflections
by Summer Institute Participants
ENG 99, 101 and 102 are designed to help students develop writing skills
necessary for college work. I think these courses do a lot more. They
initiate students into the world of institutionalized communication; they
provide students with audiences for students' written ideas; they are
gateways - sometimes open and sometimes closed - to higher education;
they are heavily traveled routes to changes in social class.
- Gail
Green-Anderson
English, LaGuardia Community College
This is at the heart of what historians do in their work - they develop
their own approach or philosophy of history, and they constantly strive
to hone their skills as they research and write books and articles. In
a broader sense, these two goals are at the heart of a liberal arts education
- reading and thinking critically, and pursuing key questions through
research and writing.
- Marshall
C. Eakin
History, Vanderbilt University
I am using a variety of the communication tools in WebCT... I have set
up chat rooms so that students in groups of three can get together and
have a workshop on their stories. That is, each student will submit her
or his story to two peers. They will then meet in the chat room and discuss
the elements and craft of each story.
I am most interested in tracking my graduate students' ability to run
their own workshops on each others' stories. I want to be able to see
how they pose questions and respond to each other while I am not present.
One of my greatest concerns is whether the students' access to technology
will make this experience worthwhile, and not simply frustrating. I want
the technology to be in use, but invisible or at least not intrusive.
- Doug
Rice
English, California State University, Sacramento
I would like to collect and meditate on data that represent students'
initial and recursive encounters with primary materials, especially web-mounted
archive materials. Implicit in the design of my course is the notion that
there is a relationship between historical research and historical interpretation
and that the intermediate ground between the process (research) and the
product (interpretation) is historical narration (writing or representing
in a way that both describes and explains). My previous efforts at assessing
student learning have privileged the products of that inquiry. This time
around I want to focus my observations on the process of historical inquiry
& research. I want to get a much clearer understanding of how my students
encounter primary sources, how they make sense of them, and how they use
them to build explanations of causation and consequence.
- Tracey Weis
History, Center for Academic Excellence, Millersville University
I'll be focusing on English 101 (Composition One), to which I'm giving
a theme of urban legends/popular beliefs/Internet lore. I want my students
to understand that cultures and communities have different beliefs and
ideas, and that they have reasons for those beliefs and ideas, that they
have origins and purposes. I want them to be able to look at popular beliefs,
especially those they hold, from the outside and the inside.
I'm most interested in tracking and exploring exactly how much of the
critical and exploratory thinking I want actually goes on, and especially
how much of it gets translated into other courses in other subjects, and
into their lives outside of school.
- Joe
Ugoretz
English, Borough of Manhattan CC
Africana Women in Historical Perspective is a course that tries to do
too much. Yet the realities of offering a "General Education"
course that draws large numbers of students because it can be "triple
counted" (gender, non-western, race) is a driving force in the course
design.
- Gloria
Harper Dickinson
African-American Studies, The College of New Jersey
The research problem I intend to focus on this year is the degree to
which new media technologies facilitate collaborative learning among students
in an introductory course such as mine, and how the specific learning
outcomes I have established for the course are or are not advanced by
that collaboration.
- Mills
Kelly
History, George Mason University
Right now I am interested in how we develop skills in working with primary
sources and making arguments based on those sources. I know my students
are becoming more practices at working with sources because we do that
regularly during the semester. I do not know if they are learning to think
more like historians (or, to use the learning science phrase, if they
are developing adaptive expertise as historians).
I hope the online writing will generate "data" on student learning
that will help me determine whether my students are developing adaptive
expertise over the course of the semester - for example, are they better
at classifying historical problems as the semester progresses? And do
they become more skilled at questioning their own assumptions - and the
assumptions made in the sources?
- Peter
Felten
History/CFT, Vanderbilt University
My particular course is designed to stress the acquisition of critical
literacy, that is, an increase in the ability to read with discernment,
precision, and subtlety of judgment and to write with analytical facility
and self-confidence.
I am especially gripped by the need to decenter both teaching and its
evaluation - i.e., to move the measurement of good teaching away from
a focus on the teacher (as charismatic center, model of expertise, authoritative
pronouncer of the final word a subject, and so on) to the students as
developing leaders.
- Leona Fisher
English, Georgetown University
My students are excited and animated in looking at these visual and multimedia
"texts." However, while my students are immersed in images,
they are not necessarily expert at analyzing them. So I am interested
in determining what level of "preparation" they need. Should
I be distributing formal guidelines for "looking" as I do with
writing analytic essays? Also, how do I move beyond fairly narrow discussions
of what they see? My goal is to contextualize those images, to make connections
between the themes, the non-visual documents, and the newer visual ones.
- David
Jaffee
History, City College of New York
A more philosophical question: what is the impact of visual material
on student imagination? Does it stimulate imagination (and if so, in what
specific ways)? Or does the epistemological concreteness of images discourage
a vigorous "life of the mind"?
- Jane Naomi Iwamura
American Studies & Ethnicity, School of Religion, University of Southern
California
I am most interested in exploring and understanding how students deal
with and learn from new material that conflicts with their current values
- of class background, fashion, educational status, religion, sexual orientation?
How does the teacher encourage students to explore potentially threatening
material that might require a re-evaluation student self-image or social/political
position? How can writing and electronic discussion help students explore
their new awareness and share their intellectual and emotional conflicts?
How can the web be helpful? How does the teacher maintain his or her own
position without unduly influencing students?
The data I would like to have about student learning is how best to help
students achieve their own informed views about the world; how to nurture
students through the process of facing their own prejudices and biases;
how, in short, to help students to become critical thinkers against the
daily exposure to mass media and culture.
- Leonard Vogt
English, LaGuardia Community College
The course I'll be focusing on is Reading and Study Skills III. The prupose
of this class is to prepare students to: 1) pass a standardized reading
test; and 2) succeed in their other college-level courses. [But] I think
the most important goal for me is getting the students to ask increasingly
complex questions - to move beyond factual questions to interpretive ones.
-Sharon Levy
Development Skills, BMCC
These two questions have, it seems to me, two corollaries - how can the
web help individualize information and training for specific students?
And how can it enhance collaboration among students? The contradictory
impulses in these corollaries reflect both a general problem of collaborative
learning and a specific intensification of that problem because of a technology
that, within our culture, is specifically designed to misrepresent isolation
as community, and mindless numbness as activity and feeling.
- Mark Schoenfield
English, Vanderbilt University
Back to top
|
