Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
HowFar
04 August 2004, 3:52 pm
I struggle sometimes with the question of how far to go for a student, in particular those students who don't respond to my usual ways of teaching and encouraging my classes to learn.It is really hard to accept that a student is either unwilling or unable to learn in a particular situation, especially at university which no-one makes you attend in the first place.
However, given that many of my students come from countries where there is both greater authority vested in parents concerning their children's future and more immediate financial benefits to the family if their children have university qualifications, not everyone in my classes is as open to the university experience as I would like.
With local students it is easy enough to recognise who has other issues at stake, who needs more time to develop as a person and so on, and to stand back and let those things happen (or not happen), but in the cross-cultural setting of some of my classes it is hard sometimes to know which non-responsive students are this way because of a cultural difference (something in my teaching practice may be alienating them) and which are this way because of other issues (for example, not wanting to be here. New Zealand is a long way from almost any home you can care to name).
Then of course there is my constant assessing and reassessing of what I'm doing in class, attempting to align my teaching practice with my sense of the demands of the content and constantly scrutinising my beliefs about what good teaching is in light of student reactions to what I do, and their subsequent success or failure in assessment. Added to this is the ongoing decision of whether to resist or acquiesce, in any given teaching moment, to the wider departmental politics about how we should be teaching our students.
I have, since the beginning of the year, experienced difficulty with a small cluster of students, spread across several different papers (and therefore not a cluster, I suppose). What I tend to find as the year goes by is that, while I may be no closer to figuring out what motivates them and what makes them tick (or sit silent like a stopped clock, in some cases), I find out a lot about myself and my own values in terms of my reactions to them.
For example, I find students who display arrogance concerning either content, subject areas or our programme as a whole to be frustrating. This is because I value humility as the starting point of learning. (Think of all those things I don't know!) Likewise, I get weary when students ask the same question several times, apparently for the sake of asking, considering the efforts I go to to answer it for them each time and my frequent checks that they have understood. This, I suspect, is because I value reflection--and a certain amount of being able to remember things--as part of learning.
Curiously, given that I don't see group work as the be-all-and-end-all of class room teaching and that when people talk about "team players", I shudder, I get frustrated when students put their needs ahead of the overall needs of the class. By this I mean the student who stops the talk or the discussion in order to take it on a tangent relevant to them but not to the learning of others present. I can only think this is because I value an underlying consideration for others' learning as part of a classroom environment. (Yet I get frustrated when students won't ask questions in order to clarify their understanding, which some have explained to me as not wanting to disrupt others' learning!)
Having said all this, I should add that I never show my frustration to the students at the time, although if someone is acting inappropriatley I will ask them to stop.
In a single-culture teaching situation, where the majority of students and the teacher are from the same culture, it can be assumed that many of the values the teacher has will also be shared by the students (though by no means all or even most of them). So I am able to run my prep lit lectures, for example, in a very informal way, since students understand that informality in our culture is a kind of pose or gesture; that is to say, informality is not the same as chaos or lack of respect between students and teacher. But for my international students, although it is possible eventually to work like this in some cases, to begin the year like that would be dynamite.
In the cross-cultural situation of most of my teaching at the moment, there are few or no shared assumptions; however, I cannot presume my students value any of the things I value, and it reminds me continually of how culturally-determined so much of our teaching is. What ends up happening is a kind of hybrid teaching, where I am trying to lead students towards not only their goal (of university study) but also towards the style of teaching and learning that study will involve, at the same time as working in a way that honours my own ideas about what teaching and learning is and which cultural values are important.
Nonetheless, I still feel a sense of failure when students fall by the wayside and, at the same time as the self-selecting exit of difficult students from the programme makes my job easier, I also wonder if there was a key to involving them that I failed to discover, or whether some of my core teaching values alienated them.
I should add, as a post scriptum in effect, that some of my difficulties with international students are compounded by being young, white and female. My persona thus fails to signify any traditional marks of authority to some international students, particularly, though not limited to, a few of the young men.
Addendum
31 July 2004, 3:04 pm
I should add that I reached the original anonymity/pseudonymity discussion (on leuschke.org), which took me to many of the new links you see gracing my teaching blogs menu at right, via Yami at Green Gabbro.Pseudonymity/Gender
30 July 2004, 4:23 pm
I have been following with a certain interest the current debates spiralling around some of the blogs in my link list concerning anonymity or pseudonymity in blogging, especially by academics. While I find curious some of the accusations levelled against those who choose to conceal their off-line identities in their internet writing (as I do), I suppose that could be because for myself I'm not terribly confessional within this academic writing space, nor within my personal blogs either. I find the process of writing to be a mental release rather than the content itself of what I write; indeed, the more rhetorical, restrained and abstract the work I do, the more relaxing I find it. I choose pseudonymity because it seems to me to acknowledge the fact that on-line, personae are all we have. I like the idea of representing myself through a network of thought and ideas rather than the usual signs of name, age, appearance and status, although obviously traces of all those things can be found here and in my other on-line writing.Some of the most interesting commentary I've read on this issue comes from the absent student who writes pseudonymously out of South Wales. Linked to below are two entries, independent of the current debate, under the topic of "gendering the blog". They link pseudonymous on-line writing, as others have done, to earlier traditions of feminine epistolary writing, and make an interesting schema out of the cultural weightings of "blog" and "journal".
Gendering the Blog
Gendering the Blog Again
I think those who challenge others, academics in particular, on their preference for pseudonymity or indeed anonymity, forget the extent to which aliases, pseudonyms and personae permeate our lives anyway. Public figures and celebrities go by assumed names; role-players and gamers of all kinds live alternative lives through personae; many of the books of the bible were written by collectives identifying themselves with a single saint or holy antecedent. Even the fictional friends cited below (quoted since the link will eventually expire) in this news item from The Onion are bewildered by the meeting of two personae which are barely related despite belonging to the same person.
BENBROOK, TX--Close friends and neighbors attending the backyard barbecue of Bill Hunkins were surprised to hear the host's coworkers call him "William," attendees reported Monday. "All these people kept saying, 'Mmm, this is delicious, William' and 'Hand me a beer, William,'" Hunkin's friend Bryan Koppe said. "It was so bizarre. Why weren't they calling him by his name? Were they trying to give him shit or something?" Koppe added that Hunkins once spent a semester answering to the nickname "El Pudd."
In a sense, I consider myself a collection of pseudonyms with no particular identity stronger or more authentic than the rest. Harvest Bird trades places with my professional self during the day and eats the same meals as my recreational, creative self at the weekend. The different identities inform each other and are housed in the same mind, but, as much they are not the separate, warring factions of a disordered personality, neither are they attempts to elide or conceal a lesser, more conflicted self.
NZS4
30 July 2004, 3:45 pm
Although when I started in this job it was as a teacher of New Zealand Studies (and the experience of teaching five classes of four contact hours a week two years ago meant that when I negotiated my continuing contract, it was at 0.8 of full-time), these days I have only one group of students taking that subject in my care.It's a different experience from my other papers, largely because it's a compulsory subject for the programme, meaning that students are rather less motivated and more resistant than they are in their elective courses.
My current group of students are all, except for two out of twenty-two, from mainland China. They are used to textbook-based learning, in which success in assessment is related to the individual's ability to remember what is written in the textbook and reproduce it on demand.
Our inquiry into New Zealand's history and politics is therefore a challenge for many of my class, since the usual things they do in order to learn don't work anymore. It is interesting to see how many will opt not to do the set work in favour of staring at a single page of the textbook, waiting for understanding to occur.
Many students find the pressure comes off with collaborative work--not so much group discussion as group projects--which gives them entirely different ways to engage with the material. (Reading from a variety of sources works much less well, since it has the added stress of being like reading from a single textbook, but not exactly the same.) It's always gratifying to see students who might normally drift in and out of paying attention during the lesson seize the opportunity to try something new and to work with their peers.
At the same time as this happens however, I noticed today two other groups of students not participating. (Today's class was probably the most creative lesson plan of the year, and certainly the least like convetional university study: students were making "wanted" posters for Edward Gibbon Wakefield, writing a version of James Busby's letter from 1830s New Zealand asking to be recalled to Britain, and mocking up a newspaper article of a ship stormed by a Maori raiding party.) The first was that small core who aren't engaging with any of their classes; in the group environment these students had even more reason to take twenty-minute toilet breaks or simply look on while others worked. (The most elaborate examples of these were two students I had two years ago, who once spent an entire fifty-minute class miming the act of writing millimetres above blank worksheets.)
But the second group, unexpectedly, was those students who normally participate and perform well in the discussion-based or lecture-based classes. It was as if their classroom identity--their ability to distinguish themselves from other students by their fast answers and reliable attention--had been taken away by having to collaborate, and the creative rather than recall-based nature of the project seemed to annoy and offend more than one student. Comments ranged from "I need to know what this is for" to "Do you mean we have to use our imagination with this work?", the latter said with the student equivalent of a curled lip. These are students who have grasped so far the changes in learning environment working in a New Zealand classroom brings and whose intellectual understanding of the new learning processes is better than most, but to take the lesson that much further out of the realm of normal seemed to undermine the seriousness of it for them. Perhaps they looked at those who were having fun and decided it couldn't therefore be real learning.
Moved
29 July 2004, 4:46 pm
The office shift of which I learned almost three months ago has finally taken place, and I am sitting in a rather cavernous converted classroom, having moved from the new building to the old.It will be a little better once my bookshelves arrive and the part-time teachers move in, I think.
At the moment I feel rather lonely for my newly former office mate, with whom it was a pleasure to share our cluttered, narrow workspace.
I have put up, in the windows beside the door, the collage of postcards from the Louvre and the Musee D'Orsay I made a few years back, since the temptation for passers-by to peer in from the corridor is considerable, and I'd prefer not to be an in-house version of one of those performance art installations whereby the artist/performer sleeps or eats in an exhibitions space.