teaching – Strategic [Urban] Ecologies, Engineering, and Decision-Making

As spring break approaches even in the wake of 5-10" of snow expected in the Baltimore/DC region, I am feeling that a slightly more personal message is warranted. I have been thinking about the many ways my students are being assailed on all sides by midterms, papers, presentations, and projects, and what this all means for their learning and long-term personal development. [That is what education is about, right?] I feel the key to this is storytelling. All of us have learned our most important lessons through stories, but then we come to university and the stories stop. Some of this is appropriate, I guess, as part of the point of university is to figure out how to tell your own story. But in trying to teach fundamental truths about the way things work--these ideas should be framed in stories. So often, we fail to do so. I'm not sure what the penalty will be for us as a society, but I have some hint of why this alienates so many trainees. Consider this excerpt from my personal blog this week:

Consider the nonfiction you have read recently. Very likely, the author was appealing to your reason with facts you could objectively verify. Although your interpretation was free for you to shape, you were probably looking at things as an outsider or a judge. Now, think about a fiction book you have read. Although the author may or may not have been doing the same thing-appealing to your reason-you were probably much more likely to see yourself as a character in the story. At the very least, you could empathize with the characters and take on their perspectives as they developed. As a result, what happened in the story also feels like it happens to you as well.

Perhaps this also happens to some extent in biography. But the point I’m trying to make is that the fiction method of teaching, if you will, is much more effective because fiction is processed by the heart first, while nonfiction is processed by the mind. Thus, you will have forgotten the story well before the lesson stops working in your soul. To remember important truths communicated as stories is much simpler because you can remember the feeling. Whereas facts require you to master the prose.

And this is the challenge in teaching or studying engineering, mathematics, and science. Most people who engage these ideas as beginners can't find themselves in the story. They don't view the equations they're memorizing or struggling with as the conversation that it is.

Nothing is working in their soul.

And the problems they are asked to solved aren't compelling because those problems don't affect them. In fiction, everything that happens to the characters happens to you: in engineering training, what happens at best happens to an object-at worst, to some abstract variable appearing in some equation the student didn't create.

So, why am I writing this? Why am I bringing up fiction on my research/teaching page? Because we need to find out how to make everything in the university a story when students and researchers first interact with it. Our trainees will "remember" their instruction, because they can "remember the feeling." And since everything that happens will have happened to them, they will be in a much better place to move the conversation forward.

Admittedly, I am having trouble developing a title for this post. Broadly speaking, the idea behind my thoughts is that most of my education has been done under a paradigm characterized by two things:

I am a consumer of information.
I am a producer of information only for the professor.

Now, obviously most professors and students alike understand that the professor is ultimately not the final evaluator of the quality of a student's preparations. This privilege belongs to those who will consume whatever the student produces in their professional (or personal) life. Moreover, the student will probably have the ability to largely select the audience to whom their work will be offered. Although many professors and students will readily acknowledge these truths, ultimately, our approach to classroom pedagogy does not prepare students to be producers of information for the audience of their choosing.

Honestly, there seems to be much room to modify the classroom experience for students such that they become not merely consumers of knowledge, but that they might also be producers of knowledge for an audience of their choosing. Certainly, there is not total freedom in this respect, as one of the most important responsibilities of a professor is ensuring the students have mastered the requisite body of knowledge. So, there probably will remain some aspects of the "professor as audience" characteristics of the current classroom. I do believe, however, that education can be greatly enhanced if the transition from receptor to transmitter can be facilitated in the classroom. In this regard, I am reminded of something I read recently that makes this point: "Program or be programmed..." [OK, so the idea is the title of Douglass Rushkoff's book... Reviews welcome!]

To this end, I wonder if there's not also room for explicitly incorporating production into more engineering classes. We have some aspects of the production model in place for capstone and senior design courses, and much ado has been made about problem- and project-based learning. But what about the use of communications as a way to ensure mastery? I was recently reading an old blog post on Academhack about changing the approach to teaching writing. In this post, a professor had been assigned to a class that had shown difficulty learning to write effectively. While the professor had been advised to provide "more structure" for the students, the students were directed instead to write and produce a short documentary. [This killed about 50 birds with one stone, but I won't get into that here...] Because the students were given control in an assignment that built on their skills and interests, their attention remained sharp during the entire semester and the pedagogical results were encouraging.

I'm thinking that requiring students to produce media for the broader public, or whatever audience interests them, will help them internalize mastery of the subject material in a way that is well situated into their increasingly media- and information-saturated lifestyles. In my experience, I have found it to be widely accepted that teaching a subject is the most effective way to ensure mastery of it. Why not incorporate some of these aspects into the student's experiences in the lower-level or fundamental engineering classes? Admittedly, engineering curricula are very demanding, and such approaches may be too risky. In the interest of full disclosure, I do not plan on routinely using these ideas to teach my courses [yet]. Furthermore, we often have design aspects explicitly incorporated into our curricula, so this may be a moot point in the eyes of many students and professors. But certainly, such approaches may hold out promise for ensuring students understand the broader social, policy, and economic implications of the technologies they are developing...

Tag: teaching

what’s your story?

Who should consume what our students produce?