Dr. Derek Bruff takes issue with my satire on the use of clickers (“The Data-Driven Classroom,” March 3, 2010). His comments, professional and sincere, are also provocative at a time when many colleges are in existential crisis about their raison d’etre. Dr. Bruff’s promotion of clickers as meaningful to student learning prompted me to re-examine what I think college is for, what a teacher is, what a student is, and what teaching is. I am mindful that Dr. Bruff is a mathematician, Assistant Director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, and has published a book on clickers. I, on the other hand, teach literature, publish about teaching, and coordinate a Great Books Program. One cannot help but feel a sepulchral draft from the ghosts of C. P. Snow, F. R. Leavis, and the 50 year old “two cultures” debate which Roy Fuller described this way:
the essential question that divided Lord Snow and Dr. Leavis was this: are there, as Snow maintained, two cultures, the literary and the scientific, which need to be brought together; or is the vital thing, as Leavis said, the prior cultural achievement – ‘the creation of the human world, including language?’
Neither Snow nor Leavis, however, imagined that science and technology would effortlessly become the context for all our thinking . . . with especially dehumanizing consequences in education. For example, education professor David Steiner asked a group of teachers whether they would prefer the play Romeo and Juliet, a YouTube video of Franco Zeffirelli’s gauzy film of the play, or a Cliff Notes pamphlet on the play. He expected YouTube and was shocked when 16 of the 18 teachers chose the Cliff Notes, citing “economy, simplicity, directness, and accessibility.” I would note that those are machine values while we humans are notoriously profligate, complex, oblique, and inaccessible. Still, college curriculum ought to produce educated humans but as Neil Postman famously noted, at most schools “The curriculum is not, in fact, a `course of study’ at all, but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses `skills.’ In other words, a technocrat's ideal...” Clickers, PowerPoints, and SLOs are also a technocrat’s dream but they do not improve learning. Administrators of my acquaintance describe themselves as “data-driven” and as seeking a “culture of evidence.” My questions are: how is the data interpreted and evidence of what? It looks scientific, all those tables, rubrics, decimal points, and bar graphs, but what does an instant feedback loop have to do with reflection? Humans, and how they learn, are what Monica Anderson calls “bizarre,” meaning they are at once chaotic (or unpredictable), irreducible, ambiguous, and emergent. The importance of “like a patient etherised upon a table” is not whether students recognize it as a simile. That’s junior high school level. The significance is that Eliot devises creative, arresting, and suggestive images to which individual students react in different and surprising ways. My own classes are most effective when they proceed as conversations, and I learn how best to teach them from the questions the students themselves ask me. Yet conversations are increasingly rare. Today, teachers are pressed to become designers, archivists, presenters, and programmers. Is that teaching? Richard Paul once propounded five stages of teaching and learning. Paul estimated that 80% of teaching is at the Didactic level, 14% at the Tactical level (engagement without intellectual skill development), 4% at the Analytic level, 0.9% at the Holistic level, and 0.1% at the Exemplary level. He said, “Teaching for intellectual skills that enable students to grasp content deeply is rare in education today. The overwhelming majority of teaching is didactic. Most of the rest is merely `tactical’, engagement as an end in itself or as a tool for lower order learning.” At the exemplary level, the teacher is a “`model’ or `living example’ of the mode of reasoned learning she teaches (e.g., historical reasoning, or sociological reasoning, or mathematical reasoning, or chemical reasoning). The teacher is good at thinking aloud, slowly and carefully, in front of the students...” I remain leery of instructional technologies and tools. As Marshall McLuhan put it, “We create our tools and thereafter our tools create us.” The only documented factor that improves student learning is smaller class size. For me, clickers, SLOs, and PowerPoints develop conformity, what Jaron Lanier calls “the hive mind.” If you have read my blog posts here you may find that they in some ways form a call for a New Humanism in higher education. Students urgently need unmediated classrooms and Exemplary-level teachers who through Socratic dialogue and shared inquiry develop independent, informed, and original minds.
