Belittling my thoughts
The student's response continues:
…but the class i took with you you belittled
my thoughts and didnt help me prosper … as a teacher i believe it would benefit
you greatly to encourage students more in their writing and work online then to
belittle their thoughts
This is a critical point that
deserves immediate consideration: “belittling”
of thoughts. To fully consider this concern requires looking at both the
medium in which these thoughts are expressed as well as the ability of the
student to critically assess feedback on his/her thoughts offered in that
medium.
After 10 years of teaching
online courses, it is my observation that one of the real drawbacks of this
format is the propensity for misunderstanding other human participants therein.
Without facial expression, tone of voice or body language, mere words are
easily misunderstood.
That works both ways in this
depersonalized medium. It is quite possible for a student to see critical
comments about their writing as somehow an attack on their ability to think per se, their belief systems, if not
their very person, as this student did. Without any kind of context in which to
consider those comments that’s not necessarily an unreasonable conclusion at
which to arrive.
Conversely it’s also quite
possible for an instructor to see comments offered without any context,
references or explanations as cryptic and poorly formed. It’s a short leap from
there to presumptions that the student him/herself is perhaps shallow and not
terribly thoughtful.
In both cases, the ability
to simply ask, “What did you mean by that?” which a face-to-face class would
provide, not to mention the possibility of hearing what other students think about
the same subject, is missing. As a result the potential for the worst
presumptions to inform both student and teacher about the other is unlimited.
Human beings are incapable
of understanding texts without contexts. When the latter is missing, we supply
our own. And, sadly, given the increasingly driven, hypercompetitive atmosphere
of the corporate university today, the context many of our students presume is
that their relationship with their instructor is by nature adversarial. Thus
they assume the worst about any critique of their comments.
That said, it is always the
duty of responsible college instructors to point out to their students when and
how their thinking and writing is lacking. Episcopal Bishop Jack Spong is prone
to say that “It’s precisely because I take the Bible seriously that I do not
take it literally.” Confronting a student on the limitations of their thinking might
be experienced as having that thinking “belittled.” But, the reality is,
limited, poorly expressed thought is already little. Drawing a student’s
attention to that fact is not an act of cruelty, it’s an act of devotion to the
vocation of teaching.
Most of us have some difficulty
separating our senses of our self and our thinking such that when the latter is
drawn into question, we experience it as an attack on our person. While there is a
great deal of difference between saying “Why would that be so?” and saying,
“What a stupid thing to say,” increasingly our students have a difficult time
distinguishing the two.
Critical thinking has been
one of the major casualties of standardized test driven pedagogies in which
there is only one right answer, a downward spiral that acontextual student
ratings only exacerbates. And nowhere is that more true than when one’s religious
beliefs are considered in the harsh light of academia outside the friendly
confines inside the circled wagons of the tribe.
I Shouldn’t Have to Agree With You….
…because my beliefs did not agree with
yours on a matter of who God was and the importance of the Bible. I think you are talented but you need to
realize that not everyone has the beliefs you do….
It’s a fairly common defense
mechanism among students today to claim political correctness as the
explanation for their own failures. When a student’s ideas are questioned or
their arguments and explanations fall short on exams, a good way to save face
is to say that their argument was correct but counted wrong because it was inconsistent
with the instructor’s belief system. While comments like these are not terribly
unexpectable and are given much more credence in a consumerist student culture
today than they deserve, they also reveal a problematic approach to any college
course and this course in particular..
The comments offered by this
student arise from a class in Christianity. Previously the class was entitled Christian Thought but this was changed during
a curriculum overhaul to make it commensurate with courses entitled Islam and Buddhism. The former designation clearly indicated the academic
nature of this course. The retitled course proved subject to no small amount of
confusion. As a result this course drew a large number of conservative
Christians largely indisposed (by their own admission) to considering the
subject matter in any kind of critical manner which would draw the
understandings they brought with them into question.
What’s problematic in these
comments is the student’s obvious presumption that personal belief systems - the
instructor’s or the student’s - were somehow the subject matter of the course.
In fact, I had gone out of my way to dissuade students of such a presumption
from the beginning of the course.
On the course Syllabus, the purposes of the class
included
·
to gain a historically informed understanding of the
person of Jesus of Nazareth, his life and its impact on his immediate culture
(and)
·
to ascertain how the movement within Judaism around the
person of Jesus developed into an independent religion of its own.”
Under practical skills I had
listed the goals of developing
·
critical analysis, questioning of presumptions, awareness
of one's own hermeneutical lens
·
expansive thought, developing data into knowledge through
understanding the context, subtext and significance of ideas
·
the ability to
construct and defend logical arguments to support positions.”
I also linked a document to
the homepage and assigned students to read it the first week of classes.
Entitled “How to hold an intellectually
honest discussion of religion,” it featured an entire section on how to “Check your presumptions at the door.” Among
the presumptions to be checked were the following:
·
What
are you presuming about the existence (or absence) of G-d/the gods?
·
What
are you presuming about the nature of G-d/the gods?
·
What
are you presuming about the nature of human beings and their relationships to G-d/the gods?
·
What are you presuming about the nature of truth and how it
is discerned?
The essay further noted that
“the value of any discourse on religion often turns on whether that discourse
is marked by intellectual honesty including:
- an awareness of one’s biases, unconscious and unreflective presumptions and the impact of one’s cultural matrix and individual life experience on one’s understandings
- a tentativeness in discussing questions of “ultimate truth” based in a humility springing from the recognition of the limitations and partial nature of all human understandings and the human capacity to know
I’m not sure what more I
could have done to alert the student to the expectations of this academic class
in which all ideas about religion
would be discussed critically, their development examined historically and the
dangers of presumptions guarded against zealously. This was not a Bible study
or a theology class and I wanted students to know that up front.
Clearly that was not enough
for some.
Being Mindful of Our Purpose Here
After grading the first
round of discussion posts in the class, I found myself nearly in despair. In
post after post, students had taken to the virtual pulpit to speak for G_d, to
use the Bible as a weapon in their fight for revealed truth and to dismiss the
text, its author and the instructor. This was *exactly* what I had sought to
avoid in those opening readings. Clearly, few had read them or taken their
contents seriously.
I began my weekly
announcement to the class that week with these words:
When I first suggested that Christianity be taught this semester online, I wondered to myself
and to others why it was not taught on a regular basis. Previously offered as a
Humanities course, Christian Thought,
it seemed to me that gaining an understanding of the history of the Christian
streams of tradition was essential to understanding western history and
culture. So, why wasn’t it offered every term?
After last night’s grade-a-thon of the first round of
discussion posts and responses that ended about 11:30 PM, I think I understand
why academics are hesitant to teach this course. It has little to do with the
course materials themselves which those of us with degrees in religious studies
find to be the most fascinating thing we have ever studied. Rather, it has much
to do with the way students interact with and respond to the materials being
taught.
The announcement went on to
discuss the difficulty of separating deeply held beliefs from critical
consideration of the concepts we were discussing. I noted that many people experience
such consideration as being asked to reexamine understandings about things they
thought they already knew. I noted that this had the potential to draw into
question what they had been taught by significant others.
For many, having such
teachings drawn into question also draws into question the authority of those
significant others and thus can be experienced as an invitation to commit
treason. There is no small amount of cognitive dissonance potentially generated
by such conflicts and it is important to recognize that for what it is.
Even so, I reminded the students
that they had entered a class whose syllabus and other course materials had
made clear what the class was about from the beginning. But just to make
certain, I added the following to the announcement:
In the Ways to Study Religions powerpoint lecture linked to the
Schedule that I assigned for viewing, one of the final slides is entitled “What
must I believe to pass a Religions course at UCF?” The slide is intentionally
left blank. The message? You are not required to believe anything to pass this
course. Conversely, outside this class, you can believe anything you want.
Let me be clear about this: Religious studies classes are
NOT about believing, they are about coming to know about and critically
understand belief systems. Whereas believing is personal, communal,
experiential and existential in nature, knowing about and critically
understanding are largely cognitive in nature.
Clearly, the problem here
was not a failure to make course parameters clear. Nor was it a situation where
the instructor pushed a belief system onto students at the expense of academic
integrity. Rather, in this student’s case and a handful of others, it was a
failure to provide the student what s/he had come to the class seeking –
affirmation of the religious beliefs with which the student entered the class.
This post concludes in Part III.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div. Ph.D.
Member,
Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest,
Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Asst.
Lecturer: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
Osceola
Campus, University of Central Florida, Kissimmee
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Most things of value do not lend
themselves to production in sound bytes.
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