On Tuesday we reflected a little about former English teachers and the teaching philosophies they used. I wrote and spoke about a memorable teacher whose pedagogy was largely mimetic. Since I received my BA in Philosophy, I have had many other teachers of the mimetic persuasion. They were experts in “the detecting of hidden assumptions, emotional appeals, and fallacies in reasoning” (Fulkerson 432). I learned through working with those instructors how frequently my feelings and intuition are the source of my (unexamined) opinions. This is a form of mindlessness.
In “Four Philosophies of Composition,” Fulkerson writes about another form of mindlessness—mindlessness in relation to teaching. He points out that teachers often do not harmonize “teaching procedure” with “evaluative theory” (433). So, an assignment description might have a strong expressive flavor, but then get graded formalistically (that's a word according to dictionary.com, I promise). Near the end of his piece, he presents two examples of this procedure/theory mismatch in the classroom. In each one, the student is penalized for not doing the “right” thing in spite of the fact that his or her assignment was not matched to the evaluative criteria applied to it. In that way, the English class is made incomprehensible to students. This probably has a particularly devastating effect on those students who would be struggling even if their English teachers were as mindful as Buddha. But the scariest thing is that mindlessness on the part of the teacher doesn’t only cause confusion and frustration on the part of the student. It also encourages discouragement and then disengagement. In other words, it causes mindlessness. If the teacher isn't mindful, the student won't be either.
Looking at this issue through Bruffee's perspective is important, too. Bruffee demonstrated that traditional pedagogical techniques like standing in front of a class and lecturing, are not effective in teaching students to write. With knowledge so distributed on the internet and through books, lectures are increasingly useless to people. When people need information, they can pretty easily find it for themselves, and they can figure out how to apply it (maybe I think people are a lot smarter than they really are). Therefore, the old model of having a lecture hall as the only source of a particular philosophy or certain ideas is obsolete. Education must adapt. It must become intelligent discourse between peers.
ReplyDeleteBut then how does an instructor grade that? How can collaboration be evaluated? Perhaps through how well the group collaborated within the confines of the assignment, but isn't putting parameters around collaboration counterproductive? I'm stuck at an impasse between evaluation and collaboration.