My adviser, Michael Wesch, just published an insightful article about the state of education. I won’t go into terrible detail about it here. I’ll let you all read it for yourselves – it’s definitely worth it. He makes a poignant critique about the lack of vision and the overwhelming myopia that characterizes education today. Of course, I agree with him.
He introduced the provocative book Teaching as a Subversive Activity to me a couple of years ago and from there I’ve jumped head first into the world of media ecology. It couples very nicely with anthropology. Not to shamelessly inflate Wesch (he is deserving of it though), but the environment he creates in his classes is so effective in helping educe the potential in his students that I measure every class I take against his.
It amazes me when I enter a classroom environment that gives no indication of having changed in the past, hmm, decade? The addition of PowerPoint is hardly an exception when the professor reads from the slides; it’s just a visual representation of the notes she/he would use anyways. It in no way adds positively to the learning environment other than reducing spelling errors in the students’ notes. The emphasis here is heavily on content rather than form. Multimedia learning environments, in my experience and when used appropriately and effectively, are much better.
However, there is a continuum. Just using videos to use them doesn’t fly. Teachers should ask themselves “Can I express what I want to express better with video than by just saying it?” Each medium used in the classroom is better at conveying certain messages than others. For example, visual media are better at conveying emotions. They are more expressive. Text media are better at conveying information, facts, the raw material most teachers focus the most on. They are more informative (but this doesn’t mean they are the most important). This isn’t to mention the medium of the spoken word between not only the students and teacher but between the students themselves. I am a strong advocate of Wesch’s definition of teachers as co-learners. Teachers should be moderators, leaders, students; not lecturers. I think when teachers see themselves this way and begin practicing this behavior we will see a gradual flattening of the master/slave relationship that is implicit in many learning environments.
There is some great conversation going on about this topic over at mediatedcultures.net. Come share your thoughts!
Tagged: anthropology, education, media, wesch
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Integral Education – More Commentary…
Earlier today I left the following comments on Adam Bohannon’s blog, more commentary on education… Once again I am just trying to put voice, for the first time, to an outline of education using integral concepts. So far I have just suggested that w….
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One thing I find interesting about all this is my romantic vision of what a college classroom was like back in the day, say 50 years ago. I liken this to, what in this context is a very contrasting style, Dr. Prins classroom. In his upper level courses he provides an example of the opposite, no media, no powerpoint, no chalkboard, just him lecturing. I was certainly interested in the content matter of a course such as Anthropological Theory, but nonetheless I found myself engaged day in and day out by the simple task of recording helpful notes based on no visual queues or presentations whatsoever. What happened to me in a classroom divorced of any sort of complexity is that I was driven to engage.
Mind you, this does not do anything to the dynamic his classroom creates, namely one in which his is the voice of God, if you will. He has the content and the answers, and yours is a task of decoding it all. But, I think when the circumstances are right and there is no oppression, this can actually be a good thing. Afterall, aren’t many of our professors our professors because of their proven knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, ability etc.? The tendency is to abuse the position of power, but I like to make room for the chance that a “traditional” approach can work.
Of course, this for me just goes back to the different types of students I mentioned in “Overthinking”. I think a traditional environment will be a successful one if the student profile is suited to it. I used to make a big distinction between Wesch’s style and Prins’ style: Wesch’s whole goal is to make the subject matter apply to the student’s lives, even if that means changing the subject, whereas Prins whole goal is to elucidate the truths of the subject matter, leaving it to the student to force the application in their lives. I suggest and hypothesize that there is a student profile, or level, that would actually thrive more in the second (Prins) style than in the first.
And all of this is simply my attempt to drive in the ideas of complexity, reality, and development into the dialog of education, hoping to broaden our perspectives and push the conversation to increasing the perspectives we take. Too often we end up just latching onto “better” concepts and then simply use them to disprove the previous “worse” concepts. This I think is destructive to what is our actual and shared goal, improved praxis.
Maybe we should liken teachers to media. They each have their own limitations, biases, etc. that will influence what and how they teach. This might go a long way in explaining the different, but still very effective, styles of Prins and Wesch. Each have different orientations of knowledge and they are talented enough to know the teaching methods that help them thrive as effective teachers.
I think problems arise when teachers refuse to experiment in their classrooms. For instance, perhaps Prins would be a more effective teacher if he used PowerPoint or something similar (I doubt it though, his style is uniquely his). I recognize it could backfire, though. Wesch has told me of a certain professor who was very effective off-the-cuff but when he incorporated PP his effectiveness plummeted.
I totally agree. I would like to apply the same type of simple breakdown in the profiles of students to professors. In this regard there would be preconventional, conventional, and postconventional professors. Moving from preconventional to postconventional is a move of increasing perspectives. So, a professor at a postconventional level of teaching would be including more perspectives than one at a conventional level, and thus, I think, would be a more effective teacher.
I think it is very intriguing to think of professors themselves as different forms of media. I think that this could be a helpful way for professors to view themselves. I think that perceived convention infects so many professors, professors think they have to or should use Powerpoint, for instance. I also think that most professors don’t ever have any training in how to teach. So, it goes on assumed that convention is a proven, effective method.
So, if professors use media/iums, and are themselves media/iums, what is the message? Is Prins saying, “I know something; if you do the work you can find out”? Is Wesch saying, “You/we know something; if we collaborate and share we can find out”?
That’s a good question. I think because I highly respect Prins I automatically accept his authoritative teaching style compared to my other professors who I don’t know very well. But despite his authoritative teaching style, he does engage the class and his personality lends itself to this. As you know, he’s very charismatic and I think the students (some atleast) find this “attractive” in terms of the educational environment. Other authoritative teachers I’ve encountered don’t have this same charisma and thus their classes deliver the message “listen, be quiet, obey.” Also, Prins is older than Wesch. Wesch has an advantage in terms of his own teaching method because he isn’t *that* far removed from his students generationally. He can afford to be more of a co-learner. This isn’t to say Wesch isn’t experienced. Indeed he is, but I think you get what I’m saying.
In addition to this, to add on to what I was saying about Prins… he’s a great story teller and that also sets the occasion for his learning environment. I personally love just sitting and listening to Prins talk about all the crazy stuff he’s done in his life. His passion for anthropology comes through THICK when he gets going on some of his stories and I find this contagious. It makes me want to hear/learn more.
The current paradigm of most classroom education is a remnant of the midieval academies where the curriculum consisted of a monk at a lecturn reading from a sacred text and everyone in the class copying word for word at their desks. Education consisted of making a copy of all “great” books for your own library.
The model has survived into the industrial age because, if you add a series of bells and a rotation schedule, you prepare students to “graduate” to the factory from the school. In the information age the Monkish/Assembly line mode of teaching is revealed as an arbitrary and perhaps counterproductive way to impart knowledge.
I don’t have the exact citation, but this educational transformation was predicted over 40 years ago by Marshall McLuhan who stated that students don’t want to “learn” how to do a job, they want to immerse themselves in a role.
My only objection to the productions of Dr. Wesch is that he doesn’t seem to realize that his videos owe more to the aesthetic paradigms of print, billboard and mass media advertising than to academia. For the past 50+ years the true eduction of our culture has come from Madison Avenue, not the halls of academia. The irony is that Wesch thinks he is demonstrating the obsolescence of classroom pedagogy when he is really using advertising motifs to provide content for the New Media/Internet communication environment.
Hi Robert, Great to see a fellow media ecologist joining the conversation. I generally agree with everything you have stated here. I think it would be important to separate my video content from what I do in the classroom. I don’t mean to demonstrate the obsolescence of classroom pedagogy through my videos. (Actually I might, but that video has not been released yet!) My videos are intended for large audiences, so they will naturally invoke mass media techniques, hence the appearance of advertising motifs (of course, how can anybody avoid them in any creative act when the culture is so profoundly created by them?)
Where the “obsolescense of classroom pedagogy” bit is more relevant to what I do in the classroom – where I attempt to transform huge lecture halls of 200-400 students into huge working groups of co-learners … not an easy task, and one I continue to fail at. Fortunately it is the failures that we all learn from!
I would also go on to say that I am not exactly saying anything new in my approach to teaching, especially to a media ecologist like yourself who is familiar with Postman, etc. The article above is clearly modeled off of Postman, and cites him as such.