I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories and arguments. I thereby help to turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace which protects it against criticism and change. I take my job to be only mildly discreditable, partly because I don’t think, finally, that this realm of words is in most cases much more than an epiphenomenon secreted by power relations which would otherwise express themselves with even greater and more dramatic directness. Partly, too, because 10 percent of the job is an open area within which it is possible that some of these young people might become minimally reflective about the world they live in and their place in it; in the best of cases they might come to be able and willing to work for some minimal mitigation of the cruder excesses of the pervading system of oppression under which we live. The remaining 5 percent of my job, by the way, what I would call the actual “philosophical” part, is almost invisible from the outside, totally unclassifiable in any schema known to me—and quantitatively, in any case, so insignificant that it can more or less be ignored.
So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail—the endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications and quibbles—stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole.An extensive study received about 1700 responses from 250 students concerning annoying instructor behavior (Kearney, Plax, Hays, & Ivy, 1991). The researchers coded the responses into 28 categories, which can further be categorized into about five major classes of problem behavior:
• a variety of disorganized behaviors
• lack of feedback on student work
• poorly designed coursework or unprofessional content delivery
• disrespect towards students, including unfairness, discourtesy, or even abusive behavior
• professional misconduct, including not keeping up with the field
Other, newer, studies pretty much concur with the 1991 study. Disorganization is the most disruptive behavior on the part of an instructor, and can take a few different forms:
• Giving rambling or incoherent lectures
• Changing due dates
• Losing student materials
• Lack of awareness about issues outside class that affect students
Other researchers took a positive tack, asking students about helpful instructor behaviors: “giving lectures that are clear and well-organized” was the top helpful behavior no matter how students were sorted (by major, sex, year in program, achievement level).
Other helpful behaviors included:
• Helping students prepare for exams by giving review sessions
• Providing prompt feedback on student work
• Collecting and responding to student feedback about the class
• Providing examples of excellent work
Number 10 on the top 10 helpful list was “Having group discussion activities in class.” (Oh well, at least it made the top 10.)
These results are actually quite heartening, because the top problems (or helpful behaviors) are closely related to student learning. Organization and clarity are the top factors impacting student learning. Rapport and stimulation of interest are important but not as important as organization and clarity (Feldman, 1998). Students like rapport and stimulation of interest, of course, but it does not affect their learning to the extent that clear, organized coursework does.
I think that the assumption that students have baseline reading skills is behind the thinking of people who want more or less exclusively discussion-based classes — lectures, they suppose, are just trying to transmit information, which the books can do by themselves. If we assume that the students are reading attentively outside of class, we can use the class time to practice our critical reading with each other. I don’t think it’s at all clear, however, that students typically come to college with the skills necessary to make such a model work. Some will, but it’s much safer to assume that your students need help. And I believe that we should interpret students’ desire for more lectures precisely as a cry for help.
Kotsko's suggestion is that lecture can serve to develop these reading skills, and indeed, has significant advantages over other instructional modes:
Kotsko doesn't quite put it this way, but his thought is that lecturing is a form of modelling. We philosophers can reconstruct and represent our own forms of thinking and inquiring, which, after all, is what we want our students to ultimately develop. The hope is that once these forms of thinking and inquiring take root, students can then tackle course content on their own and will be ready to participate meaningfully in critical discussions that presuppose at least modest mastery of that content.
A final comment: Kotsko also reminds us that while lecturing can be criticized for being too passive to instill deep or genuine learning, lecturing is only as 'passive' as the lecturer. Yes, delivering information in a droning, unenthusiastic way is misguided. But if we approach lecture autobiographically, as a way of having students rehearse philosophical inquiry with us — and we do this with energy — it can be as intensive and intellectually active as any other teaching method.
ISW'ers: How do we make lecture something more than just the passive dissemination of information? And in particular, how do we use it to foster the skills requisite for discussion?