After yesterday's rant on the state of the Canadian education system, I think it is only fair to comment on some positive aspects of the enterprise, so in this discussion I'll focus on some of my experiences with students in the social sciences. In yesterday's post I summarized arguments pulled from the talk which referred to contemporary undergrads across Canada; today I will talk about some amazing undergrads whom I've been lucky enough to interact with personally.
Here's my argument: I have found that instructors must humanize themselves and treat students as scholars with worthwhile ideas in order to convince them to engage ambitiously with their own educations... but this only works if they're not still burdened by a misunderstanding of the basics.
As a student of the Freirian method of pedagogy (the theory of teaching), I think that it is extremely important to encourage students to become active in their own educations, and to realize that, when informed, their own perspectives are worth sharing and can contribute to the overall exchange of knowledge in a classroom.
On my first day as a TA with full marking responsibilities, I was given 10 minutes at the end of class to introduce myself. I told the students that they had two choices in their interactions with me; they could choose to keep our relationship professional, emailing me at my official address or see me during office hours with concerns about course material. Otherwise, they could regard me as a human, recognizing that I am a student only several years more advanced than they, and that I am learning along with them. If they chose this latter option, they were free to add me to their MSN contact list in order to consult almost any time, and I would be willing to advise them on general academic issues in addition to those covered in class.
I told them what I believe -- at the University level, education should not be viewed as a uni-linear transfer of information where instructors "fill the students up with knowledge, as though they are empty receptacles" (a classic Freirian metaphor). I then listed my email address and MSN contact information on the board, and told them to feel free to contact me at their leisure.
The prof with whom I worked was amazing and I do not mean to detract from his inspiring presence through a discussion of my role as TA. In fact, the success of my approach was undoubtedly connected to his professorial embodiment of its ideals. He was an excellent and forward-thinking lecturer with the most unique style I've come across. His lectures were delivered verbally, without notes, and inspired much class interaction. The students knew that he believed in their capacity to achieve the same logical coherence and insight that he himself had, and respected him for respecting them.
As his teaching assistant, I was extended the freedom to construct rubrics for each of the assignments myself, which ensured that I would never misinform students through misinterpretation. Before assignments I gave lectures on the exact structure that their essays should take, and the appropriate format of a thesis statement, realizing that many students were uncertain of the basics, and made more confused when the material they were dealing with was very theoretical.
The interactions that I experienced with students at that time were among the best of my career thus far, and it was because I (a) presented myself as an approachable, knowledgeable peer, (b) told them all that I expected the best out of them, thereby inspiring them to live up to their own capacities, and (c) provided them with a solid framework to drop their ideas and arguments into.
My office hours were full of students who wanted to improve their faculties -- seldom did a student arrive with a complaint on his or her lips, or a claim of a mark undeserved, and many stayed simply to talk about their current academic interests and aspirations for the future. While I was happy to see the majority of students exceeding their own expectations of themselves, what rewarded me most was when I witnessed great students crossing over that fuzzy line of a mid-range A into unquestionable excellence, developing an authoritative voice and creatively interacting with material. It puts a smile on my face to think about it... but I know that more students would have been able to excel if they weren't still struggling to understand how to construct an argument. I am not too old, and this was the purview of grade 11 English when I went through, so it blows my mind a little...
In any case, when we're discussing education, I think we need to make sure not to blame students for never having been taught the basics, but we do need to make sure that they are responsible for what they have been taught. We also need to be careful not to blame high school teachers for problems that originate in an overly lenient system. We also can't expect a lackluster system to produce masses of above-average graduates, yet the system is telling us it does -- clearly something here is off kilter.
What we need to do is to teach students responsibility, and to be honest with them about their capacities so that they *can* improve... what we do need to do is to re-imagine the enterprise.
High school must teach students the basics of language, structure and professionalism, leaving them free to develop into the best thinkers that they can be over the course of their University experience. If it doesn't do this, University is a waste of their time and money.
As demonstrated above, Freirian pedagogy has the capacity to motivate arts students who already possess a firm grasp of structure and form, and who take a serious interest in their education, to excel. Since so many students are coming to University, let's help more of them to make the most of the investment by providing them with a free, structured, quality education beforehand, and by encouraging professors to engage with their students on a more realistic level, and to look them each in the eye and say "I know you can master this material if you try. You're not that unlike me".
Showing posts with label highschool. Show all posts
Showing posts with label highschool. Show all posts
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Time to Glare Disapprovingly at the Canadian High School System
Yet another addition to the nightmare scenario we call 'higher' education:
"Time to Shrink the University" by Heather Mallick
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/s
Time to Glare Disapprovingly at the High School System
This January, Dr. Anton Allahar and Dr. James Cote of UWO gave a regretfully under-attended talk at the University of Guelph regarding their 2007 book 'The Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis' where they discussed a number of factors that have come together to decrease the quality of education in Canada in the last 10 years.
Their overall thesis was that a combination of disengagement and entitlement have come to characterize undergraduate-level university students. They’re disengaged because they don’t want to be there. They're in university because they've been told that they're nobodies with no future if they don't come. They feel a sense of entitlement because the high school system doesn't have the heart to tell them what their abilities are (for example, in 2006 over 40% of Grade 12 graduates from Ontario High Schools were labeled 'Ontario Scholars' and rewarded for 'earning' 80% + GPAs. This does not represent the increased capabilities of contemporary high school graduates, it represents a system-wide dumbing-down of curriculum. In fact, I strongly suspect that the high school system doesn't even consistently teach kids what a thesis is anymore, as is astoundingly evident made evident by the majority of students I TA).
In any case, what you get is a university system laden with students who not only believe (a) that they're hot intellectual shit when they can barely tell the grammatical difference between homophones, and (b) that they deserve marks for the difficult feat of attending class, but they also expect profs to WOW them with material--and profs want to engage them, so they adjust! This is turning the enterprise into a 'lite' version of what it once was as it takes cues from MTV and turns education into 'edutainment'.
In any case, what is most troublesome about this phenomenon is that, rather than correcting the monstrosity they've begun to create, our high school system is forging full-force ahead. What was once a great national socializing tool that provided kids with the skills to operate in the world of business post-grad – not to mention a sense of shared ‘Canadianness’—has begun to cater to sloth. Kids don't have to hand anything in on time and they don't have to take notes or learn cursive... then they get to university and realize that the rules have changed. But many of them they don't take it like adults, because they have not been trained to be adults. Instead, they clog in-boxes and office hours with excuses and complaints, and only care about improving their work as far as it can contribute to a higher grade. Massive sigh.
How these major problems could possibly be improved through tuition hikes is beyond me. What it would lead to is a drop in university attendance, selecting students higher up in the SES chain for 'higher education'. Their quality of education might increase, but the joke here is that the quality of education that the masses will be left with, thanks to the quickly plummeting quality of their high school experience, will be so laughable that our country's economy will undoubtedly start sucking more figurative balls than it already does.
Heather Mallick's suggestion (see link) that university tuition fees should be eliminated altogether is interesting, but I'm not convinced it addresses the whole of the issue, which, to restate it, is that the quality of ALL education has decreased in recent years. Why should we continue to invest universities with the full responsibility of shaping kids into adults? Why can't we take hold of the horrible shape of our high school system as well, correcting it to emphasize a value on professionalism, giving kids a dose of the benefits AND consequences of the independence that increased age grants them, rather than letting them run the show? Why can't we do that in high school anymore? Or is it because the vast majority of newly graduated high school teachers who are holding the torch for the future are themselves not equipped to teach what kids need to know by the time they graduate high school? Has it gotten that bad?
A great piece of advice that I was given a long time ago went something like this: surround yourself with people you admire, and you'll work to improve to their level, but surround yourself with people who admire you, and you'll sink below your capabilities. We need teachers who can show kids WHAT to admire, and a system that is built on professional mentoring rather than pandering to the lowest common denominator for the sake of feelings, so as not to rob anyone of their 'right' to feel 'special'. Yeah yeah, they're all beautiful snowflakes.
The point is, once egos get left at the door then maybe our education system will regain its capacity to positively influence the lives of students, teachers and the nation.... and allow professors to keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge by attending conferences and editing 'obscure journals', regardless of the specialized nature of their field.
If we expect professors to stop inquiring in order to bring their students up to speed on things they should have learned in high school, such as sentence structure, grammar, spelling, punctuality and attendance, then they won't have time to produce any of the material that 'higher learning' used to refer to. We will have lost sight of what the entire enterprise of ‘The University’ was intended to do in the first place.
Labels:
education,
highschool,
undergrads,
university
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