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Grad School Q&A: Donovan Tann reflects on the courses and professors who shaped how he now teaches [external link]

Donovan Tann is a 2008 graduate of Eastern Mennonite University who now teaches courses in literature, writing and film at Hesston (Kansas) College. A member of the Lilly Graduate Fellows Program’s first cohort, he earned his English PhD at Temple University in Philadelphia.

How did your academic studies and professors at EMU prepare and inspire you for your graduate studies and/or current work?

Being able to have a faculty member as my advisor at EMU helped me to select coursework that interested me and which has contributed to my scholarship in unusual ways. I might not have taken as much interest in religion’s role in the early modern world without my introduction to theology course. I also had the flexibility to take senior English seminars in both French postmodern literature and transatlantic modernism, and these courses helped to prepare me for graduate school and to develop my voice as a literary scholar.

The mentorship that I received as a student, both formally through the honors program and informally within the language arts department, was crucial to my decision to pursue graduate study. I developed important intellectual virtues of critical thinking and reflection with my honors cohort, and I was honored to share an informal weekly lunch with Jay B. Landis in my last years at EMU. I’m immensely grateful for the way that my professors invested in me as a person and future teacher-scholar.

Read more at Eastern Mennonite University

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“What the storyteller narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself, at least as long as he is in the act or caught in its consequences, because to him the meaningfulness of the act is not in the story that fellows. Even though stories are the inevitable results of action, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and ‘makes’ the story”

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

First day of class

from The Idea of a University, Cardinal Newman (John Henry Newman)

“It is a case of contract:—’I will speak, if you will listen:’—’I will come here to learn, if you have any thing worth teaching me.’ In an oratorical display, all the effort is on one side; in a lecture, it is shared between two parties, who co-operate towards a common end.”

“The result is a formation of mind,—that is, a habit of order and system, a habit of referring every accession of knowledge to what we already know, and of adjusting the one with the other; and, moreover, as such a habit implies, the actual acceptance and use of certain principles as centres of thought, around which our knowledge grows and is located. Where this critical faculty exists, history is no longer a mere story-book, or biography a romance; orators and publications of the day are no longer infallible authorities; eloquent diction is no longer a substitute for matter, nor bold statements, or lively descriptions, a substitute for proof. This is that faculty of perception in intellectual matters, which, as I have said so often, is analogous to the capacity we all have of mastering the multitude of lines and colours which pour in upon our eyes, and of deciding what every one of them is worth.”

 

[Source: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/article9.html ]

Thinking about course texts and technologies

After teaching a course designed to introduce students to Shakespeare’s plays and to their film adaptations, I’ve been wondering how reading technologies shape students’ engagement with course materials.  On reflection, the traditional screening format for films or film clips (single focal point, lights off) might implicitly invite students to tune out or change their focus when our classes don’t explicitly discuss the assumptions that we bring when we begin reading or interpreting.

When we used electronic versions of the plays (eBook readers, tablets, and laptops), the change in format seemed to free students from the implicit authority of the printed text and spur conversation.  At the same time, many of my students have talked about how their study habits differ when they work with either electronic or printed course texts.  Some prefer to print even short readings because the medium changes the relationship between the student and the text.

How, then, do embedded video clips within a course management system differ from the same clips shown during a classroom session? How do they differ as modes of educational instruction with their own implicit interpretive maps?

“[It’s] been my…

“[It’s] been my experience that whether they are studying accounting or philosophy, hotel management or history, the vast majority of college students are capable of engaging the kinds of big questions–questions of truth, responsibility, justice, beauty, among others–that were once assumed to be at the center of college education”

“[A]nyone who witnesses or participates in this kind of teaching is likely to be chastened and moved. It is a reminder, as Botstein puts it, of ‘the connection between ethics and learning,’ which can be harder to establish among students ‘for whom the privilege of moving seamlessly from high school into college is taken for granted.’ In general, I think, we are too quick to assume that students with lesser preparation are unfit for education in this enlarging sense.”

from Andrew Delbanco, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be. pp. 173, 174.

Newstok on ‘Close Learning’

Newstok on ‘Close Learning’

In this recent article, Scott L. Newstok eloquently defends the face-to-face interaction that serves as the basis of the student’s learning experience.  While I may not agree with every conclusion here, Newstok’s interest in student learning as the end that technology–and any other classroom practice–must serve is important.  Newstok reminds us that these debates aren’t new and relate closely to our understanding of what education should be or should become.

What’s new and significant here is Newstok’s argument for “close learning” as something valuable in itself and something closely linked to the purposes of education more generally.  We need educators that can articulate the purposes of education and the value that students bring to shared learning experiences, whether in the classroom or through emerging technologies.

Electronic Texts, or Staying on the Same Page

Having organized two extra-credit “reader’s theater” sessions in my general education Shakespeare courses this semester, I was drawn to the possibilities that electronic texts provided for this kind of learning experience.  While more carefully edited texts continue to have a central place in my classroom, I decided to work with a public domain text from Project Gutenberg because the primary intent of these sessions was to invite students to experience the aural quality of the texts at length*.  Many might not ordinarily attend a Shakespeare performance or even imagine themselves in an actor’s role, and the more informal setting meant that asking students to purchase texts would be a difficult proposition at best.  Because I would be trimming the texts down to about two hours’ time in performance (no small feat with some Shakespeare texts, which is why I didn’t suggest King Lear), I wanted to give students a single e-text that they could print or use as they saw fit within the reading.  The advantages of providing a single version for students would be that students should theoretically have the same texts, but I have some concerns about the possibility of needing to troubleshoot several different media (print texts, tablet, e-reader, laptop, phone) within a very short session.  Where should this kind of training and support come from in the twenty-first century university?

*As the Project Gutenberg terms indicate, these public domain e-texts can be reproduced/changed provided they are not sold and that those texts including any references to Project Gutenberg itself must then include their full terms of use.

Asynchronous Questions as Starting Points for Discussion

One pedagogical experiment that I’m taking on this semester is an attempt to draw students into the lecture/discussion more fully by using exploratory questions to invite students to work on a common problem with the instructor.  While it is admittedly somewhat Socratic, beginning with a shared question can help to articulate the purpose of the class session and motivate students to think about the underlying intellectual issues that this problem engages.  For classes that tend to be relatively pragmatic, this kind of starting point seems to provide a more concrete analog for discussion at a more theoretical level.

Teachers can pose these initial, exploratory questions to the class directly, or they might pose them rhetorically and articulate the stakes before inviting student input.  According to What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain (Harvard UP, 2004), these questions “confront students with a common problem (of understanding, application, analysis, or synthesis)” and help to explain its broader significance.  In a larger class, however, this can lead to a few students frequently dominating the conversation if other students feel less comfortable speaking publicly about new ideas.  I’ve tried a number of strategies to try to invite more of the class into the conversation.

The first strategy is requiring that students complete a course journal or discussion board question on the topics to be discussed in class.  Gathering these responses before class allows me to see what students throughout the class are thinking, and calling on students based on their ‘published’ written work does not put them on the spot in the same way that asking them to respond to a question or idea for the first time might do.  A second option, which I’m trying this semester for the first time, is to use in-class polling.  Many campuses still have “clickers” for this purpose, and smaller classes can use the resources at PollEverywhere to have students answer with their phones or computers.  Students can see the breakdown of results immediately, and the distribution of responses (particularly to more open-ended questions) can be provocative.  In a sense, students can see how many other students in the class share their opinion in real time, which might inspire confidence in students less likely to speak on their own or might encourage students with different opinions challenge the prevailing assumptions.

from ProfHacker: “Multiple Choice Exam Theory (Just In Time For The New Term)”

from ProfHacker: “Multiple Choice Exam Theory (Just In Time For The New Term)”

For those of us interested in what Sterne calls “large lecture pedagogy,” this post from ProfHacker covers some of the best practices for large sections in humanities classrooms that can mitigate some of the potential shortcomings of the multiple-choice test.  The comment on clickers resonates with my experiences as a student and an instructor, but I have seen them used in more illuminating ways from time to time.  Ultimately, what may be the biggest challenge related to the multiple-choice format of assessment is the fact that the instructor cannot fully control the way in which students approach the exam–through the lens of their previous experiences with this kind of assessment.  The genre of the ‘test’  can encourage students to draw upon either positive or negative habits of thought developed in their earlier educational experiences.

Social Media and the Classroom

Social Media and the Classroom

From Forbes magazine – an instructor at Temple University talks about using social media in the classroom as a way of engaging students twice with the same material. While the article offers some great starting points and can provoke some useful discussion among the technophiles and curmudgeons, I think that Shapiro might have emphasizes more strongly the underlying point that harnessing these existing technologies means educating students about the potential benefits and limitations of these technologies.  He points to this explicitly when talking about Twitter, but changes to the traditional curriculum–such as hybrid or online courses–means asking students to think critically about their existing use of technology and meeting them at widely varying levels of familiarity and technological fluency.