That Uncomfortable Video

It didn’t win any awards at the academy last week. But Kansas State professor Michael Wesch is to be commended for his creativity in collecting and creatively presenting the thoughts of his undergraduate students about the lives of American college students today. The video is provocative, to say the least. And it is in response to that provocation that these comments from a fellow teacher of undergraduate students halfway across the country are offered.

Wesch’s students are hardly reluctant to critique the process in which they seek to become educated citizens. Early into the video, a handwritten note on the white board declares “The information is up here.” At some level, that is true in perhaps more places in academia than not. In what Brazilian educator Paolo Freire calls “the banking method” of teaching, much college education is marked by information posited by supposed experts at the head of a classroom (or, in this case, the auditorium representing the mass production factory approach many state universities use).Presumed blank slate students in need of such expertise are expected to inscribe the information and then deposit it in their minds only to regurgitate it upon command at test time as a means of demonstrating their “learning.”

Wesch’s students readily reflect the problems with this information driven factory approach to college education. One student notes that the average class size is 115 followed by another who observes that only 18% of her teachers actually know her name. While standardized tests, designed to demonstrate how much memorized information has been retained, have long been used in higher education, the best means of assessing learning is always to observe student behavior. Such is unlikely in auditoriums packed with young faces without names that more resemble Henry Ford’s auto assembly line than Plato’s Academy.

Wesch’s students have this one right - this is a particularly poor way to teach or to attempt to become educated. What a difference small classes where students were known by name and expected to produce written and verbal responses to assigned readings would make! Freire ably lays out the many problems with the banking method in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. But the fundamental problem here is the limited value of information-driven pedagogy.
In Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy, The Failure of Reason and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century, author and retired professor Donald Wood describes a progression of understanding that takes this form:

Data – (raw bits of thought) ->
Information - (data assembled into comprehensible form) ->
Knowledge – (Information critically assessed, evaluated) ->
Wisdom (Knowledge reflected upon in light of life experience, other perspectives)

It may well be true that “The information is up here.” Any instructor will employ a modicum of effort to make raw data comprehensible. Moreover, the presumption that an instructor will actually have information worth hearing about is certainly reasonable given the qualifications most colleges and universities require of their instructors. And in a standardized test driven world of educational bottom lines, for many students, memorization of that information and the regurgitation of that same information upon command like Pavlov’s dog is all that will be required of them. But there is little possibility of knowledge resulting from mass produced processes which focus primarily on gathering information. And even less wisdom. Little wonder Wesch’s students are cynical about the factory.

The two most striking lines in the entire video are as follows:

1. When I graduate I will have a job that probably doesn’t exist today.

2. I did not create the problems but they are my problems.

Let’s begin with the first. This is an incredibly important insight for any college student today. Many students have approached their college educations as potential worker drones seeking training, work credentials and the resulting security for their place in the professional middle class. How many instructors have had to put up with the response of “This isn’t my major” when confronting a student on their less than stellar performance as if this assertion somehow self-evidently explains why the student is entitled to blow off this class in which they are enrolled?

One hears this same theme in the student’s assertion in the video that “Only 26% (of the assigned readings of which students admit to reading only 49% to begin with) are relevant to my life.” There is an old Yiddish proverb that goes “If you want to make G-d laugh, tell G-d your plans.” How could an 18 year old possibly know what kind of life they will lead? Correspondingly, upon what basis would such a person lacking information about their future life make an assessment of relevancy of assigned readings to that life? Indeed, isn’t that precisely why they have hired instructors to make such assessments based upon their educations and life experience?

Clearly pursuit of a major is a valuable means of focusing one’s education in upper division studies. But the notion that there is nothing valuable to learn outside that major is both incredibly short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating in the very job market Wesch’s students fear. As I often say to my students, “You can live as limited a life as you choose.” Focusing on one’s major to the exclusion of any other learning experience suggests a bottom liner approach that is destined for failure for two reasons.

First, if the student’s observation that the jobs s/he will hold in the future do not yet exist is accurate – and this is a fairly common observation within the academy today - a vocational, major-driven approach to college education can provide only limited valuable skills with very short shelf lives to that future worker. Ironically, it is precisely the very liberal arts lower division education that bottom lining students are blowing off as unimportant that will probably determine how well they fare in that future job market.

A good liberal arts education does not simply supply information or job skills with a limited shelf life. Liberal arts curricula are designed to teach students how to think critically, creatively, synthetically. They are designed to prompt students to become aware of their presumptions and to recognize the limitations of their own cultural backgrounds in an increasingly global work world. Liberal arts curricula are designed to teach students how to express themselves verbally, through writing and art, using technologies. They are designed to teach students how to take positions and support them with evidence and reasoned argument. They are designed to teach basic understandings of math and the sciences. They require transcending one’s own cultural limitations through learning foreign languages and a wide range of cultures immediately and increasingly around them in their own country. In short, a liberal arts curriculum is designed to help students become more aware of the universe, hence the reason many pursue such learning at a place called a university. How well one develops that awareness probably will determine much of their success or failure in the rapidly evolving and largely unpredictable job market the student in the video describes.

And that leads to the second key point above: I did not create these problems but they are my problems.

At some level, this is a true statement. Today’s college students were born into a cultural context of technology as a way of life and consumerism as the primary lens through which Americans view and thus construct their lives. The closing scene from Wesch’s students’ video includes a quote that “Some have suggested that technology alone can save us.” It is immediately followed by two confessions that reveal the problem with this belief: “I facebook through most of my classes…I bring my laptop but I am not working on class stuff.” Clearly, the world of technology into which our current students were born has not proved to be our – or their - salvation. But just as clearly, the actions of these same students reveal that they are a part of the very problems they lament.

You see, college students who by their own admission spend only three hours studying each day are also admitting they are failing to live into their part of the college bargain. Study after study shows that an average of two hours preparation outside each hour spent in class is necessary to successfully learn that which the classes seek to teach. Even if three hours are spent each day of the week, that only adds up to 21 reading/study/preparation hours weekly. Given the 2 hours prep/1 hour class formula, that’s not even equivalent to a full time load of 12 hours. And when the students in the video add up all their various daily activities including spending more time each day online than studying, their total comes to 26.5 hours. That not only suggests very poor time management skills, it also suggests some rather misplaced priorities. Both of those are plainly within the realm of student responsibility.

The “problems” also include paying for classes never attended, paying $100 for textbooks never opened. It includes conscious decisions to spend time reading webpages (2300) and facebook profiles (1281) rather than books (8). It includes the choice to spend time writing voluminous amounts of email (over 500 pages) at the same time only 42 pages are written for classes. None of these conscious choices about time and energy expenditure suggest any sense of responsibility as students much less maturity as young adults. Indeed, the implication from the comments is that these students are somehow victims of the world into which they’ve been thrust and simply play their parts.

And yet, none of this just happens. Time expenditures are always the result of choices. Priorities evidence decisions about the use of time. Which is why the assertion that “I am a multitasker…I have to be” is rather ludicrous. Multitasking generally translates to doing a number of things in a mediocre at best fashion because insufficient attention is being paid to any one of them. If a student feels driven to multitasking, perhaps it is because they have so cluttered their lives with constant distractions from cell phones to facebook to gameboys that they have little time left for their responsibilities as students. One wonders what is so horrible about the self-confessed privileged lives of young people that they must be constantly distracted from conscious presence in them.

At some level, much of the commentary in the video Michael Wesch’s students produced comes across as uncritical in its reasoning, immature in its inordinate and unsupported sense of entitlement, consumerist in its expectations and morally irresponsible in the way the students assess their situation and who is responsible for it. As a college instructor of now 23 years, I find the video troubling even as I recognize the consistency in these comments with those I hear from my own students. At some level, we are all in Michael Wesch’s debt for providing a means for these understandings to be articulated. But confronting the problems it raises will take a lot more than a collaborative video production.

If there is a ray of light in this production, it was the recognition by these students of their own privilege. While one student whines about leaving college with $20,000 debt, as if this investment in his own future was somehow not worth $20,000, the very next student confesses “I am one of the lucky ones” followed by the student who recognizes “One billion people live on less than $1.00 a day.”

What makes me hopeful in this recognition of privilege is the possible insight that the educational process of which clearly few of these students are actually taking full advantage comes with responsibilities to something larger than their own immediate self-interests – a very needy world around them. Perhaps that recognition will spur some students to take their educational process a bit more seriously, to accept responsibility for their participation in that process and the time management it requires, out of the recognition that there is something at stake a little larger than technology and consumerism.

This is the hopeful side of the Generation Y students we are teaching today. It is the side that makes it possible to deal with the myopic tendencies Michael Wesch’s video lays out so well. I thank Professor Wesch for a provocative look at the minds of college students today and I wish him and his students well. Thanks to them, we have fairly well defined many of the problems in higher education and its students today. The question that remains is what will be our - and their - response.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dear (?) Rush......


RE: Rush Limbaugh calls on conservatives to take back nation
[CNN headline, March 1, 2009]

Ahem.

Dear Rush,

1. It doesn’t belong to you. You can't "take back" something that never belonged to you in the first place.

2. Conservatives have already done their best at screwing it up over the past three decades. Recess is over.

3. Rush, why don't you find a new line of work? Clearly your current one isn't working out so well. (see election results, 2008) There is a limited market for witty but vaccuous and sometimes toxic commentary, you know.

Sincerely,

The Nation

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Of Darwin, Understanding and Human Limitations

I often tell my students that the fact they do not understand something does not mean it cannot be understood or, worse yet, that there is nothing to understand. I have had to learn that lesson myself the hard way, over time.

When I encounter an article, like that I have just skimmed by Joseph Carroll, professor of English at University of Missouri/St. Louis, entitled “From Evolution Comes Literature,” I recognize my limits as a thinker and, ultimately, as a human being. Carroll talks about the “co-evolution of genes and culture,” an idea I simultaneously find fascinating and yet difficult to follow in the argument he offers. I sometimes assuage my bruised ego by reassuring myself that with enough time and work, I could probably make sense of the article. And in this particular case, that’s probably true. But I also know that there are many disciplines of thought ranging from the physical sciences to linguistics in which my best efforts would yield, at the very best, a rudimentary understanding if an understanding at all.

Recognizing that one does not understand something is an admission of one’s limits. It’s also the teachable moment in some cases. Such admission becomes more difficult with the amount of education one has undertaken with the corresponding expectations others anticipate from those little letters and periods one adds to the end of his/her name. The Florida Humanities Council employs people like me to go to events ranging from a public discussion of religion, science and sexuality to a reading program for working class families bearing the title “scholar.” As I often say, it inevitably makes me nervous to be so described since, as I jokingly say, “People will expect me to actually know something.” In truth, what I mean is that some people will expect a “scholar” to know everything, i.e., to have all the answers. I have never even momentarily indulged myself with such a fantasy concerning my own capacities.

The story I often tell my classes is of my work study job at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, a nine seminary consortium combined with several religious studies institutes (e.g., The Institute of Religion and Economic Policy) and the famed Planet Bezerkeley University of California campus just a block to the south. I worked in the library at GTU which also gave me occasional reason to go over to the main library at Cal. It was a wonderful job for a book lover. It also provided me an important lesson about human limitations.

My job was to reshelve books. My habit was to identify certain books I wanted to read, take them down the street to the Krishna Copy Center where for 2.5 cents a page I could copy them, bind the copies and thus take home a copy to read at some identified later date. It was a great job and a great way to become exposed to the wide range of literature in world religions. One day I noticed that the pile of books I had reserved to copy was greater than the pile I was to reshelve. And suddenly the realization came crashing down on me that if I did nothing more than sit on the floor of that beautiful library for the rest of my natural life reading the books I would select to read, I would never finish reading the books on the shelves that day. Moreover, I would never read anything that was published thereafter. I was limited. I had experienced what Buddhists call a sudden kensho, a flash of momentary enlightenment into reality, which brought into painful focus my own limitations, limitations I would have to learn to live with, ending my self-delusions regarding my own capacities. It was a painful lesson but an enormously important one.

Human beings are not meant to know everything. That we desire to know everything can speak to a healthy sense of curiosity. It can also suggest some darker motivations such as security issues informing a drive to control one’s lifeworld. One way such drives play out is the denial of anything which contradicts one’s own existing set of understandings and the absolute avoidance of change. A rather hackneyed criticism of the western church asserts “It’s not hard to have all the answers when one never allows any questions.”

As difficult as it is for people with average intellects and educations to deal with information they find incomprehensible, difficulties that often end in dismissal if not anti-intellectualism (think Spiro Agnew’s “pointed headed liberals,” an unwitting reference to the dunce caps named after misunderstood scholar John Duns Scotus), it is at least that difficult for well educated people. Perhaps it is our hubris that tells us that we are smart, that we are well educated, and that if we think a given way, it stands a much better chance of being correct that what others think. Of course, that reasoning has some merit. But it also readily serves as rationalization for avoidance, denial and dismissal of ideas which run headlong into understandings we hold deemed settled if not sacred.

The article that spurred this reflection comes from a series of articles that Forbes magazine is running on the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origins of the Species. It is well worth your time to investigate. Having recently watched the very fine Nova program, Intelligent Design on Trial, on PBS, I have become increasingly intrigued with the ongoing controversy about evolution which I find somewhat incomprehensible. Of course, the fact I don’t get the concerns of the sworn enemies of Darwin doesn’t mean they don’t exist or that they are insignificant, particularly to their holders.

There are many issues that seem to leap from the pages of the Forbes articles and from the Nova program. Perhaps the primary issues are the avoidance of the ongoing change and development that evolutionary theory recognizes and the loss of a sense of specialness of both individuals bearing the image of G-d and human beings as the apex of the chain of being resulting from creation. The former is a security issue. Recognition that human beings do not totally understand their universe, much less control it, is both a blow to our egos as well as destabilizing of our sense of security. The realization that human beings are the outgrowth of a process that necessarily places us among rather than atop if not outside all other life forms strikes at both our egocentrism as individuals and our anthropocentrism as a species. It’s little wonder that human beings seeking existential security and affirmation in the arms of mother church would find Darwin’s contribution to our self-understanding troubling if not threatening.

Admittedly it takes a modicum of self-assurance to be able to say, “I don’t understand this but that doesn’t mean it cannot be understood or that there is nothing to understand.” In my own case, 17 years of higher education has provided some assurance for me even as I recognize that my life history is somewhat of an anomaly – if not a lesson in privilege – vis-à-vis most human beings. But what those years of education in disparate disciplines - ranging from education to law to theology to the social sciences – has taught me is the realization that crystallized for me that day on the floor of the GTU library in Berkeley – how much there is to know, how little of it I actually know and how little of it I could come to know prior to my death- was absolutely true. It is a lesson in humility though hardly humiliation. And if I doubted the truth of that lesson learned in Berkeley in 1994, the last 11 years of teaching interdisciplinary humanities covering understandings taken from the arts to philosophy, from critical theory to architecture and from literature to cognitive science have certainly provided many examples of the limitations briefly glimpsed on that library floor so many years ago.

One last thought on this. That I find something incomprehensible and offer the maker of an argument the benefit of the doubt does not somehow mean that all arguments are, in the end, compelling. An example on point here: it is difficult to take seriously the arguments of organizations like the Discovery Institute or my former instructor at the GTU, Dr. Phillip Johnson from the UC Boalt Hall Law School, that the world is but 6000 years old, give or take a few years, and that the first (of two) accounts of creation found in the Hebrew Scripture’s Genesis are somehow reportorial in nature reflecting actual events. One has to jump through too many presuppositional hoops to get there. At some level, this is both bad theology and bad science. And it’s particularly bad thinking for any number of reasons beyond the scope of this entry. Humility of thought requires neither a blind relativism nor an uncritical search for understanding. For those who would be mindful, figuring out which is which becomes our life work.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Kansas State Video: Some Preliminary Thoughts

There is an interesting youtube video making the rounds of the internet. It purports to be the work of a Kansas State University professor, Michael Wesch. According to the video, his students were encouraged to share their experience of higher education online and the contents of that survey ultimately became the substance for the video filming. It is provocative in a number of ways. Before reading my comments here, watch the video at this URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&feature=email

The video begins with an odd use of a quote by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan: "Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules”. The producers then provide a series of students holding various handwritten or computer generated messages which supposedly spell out the experience of today’s college student. Their comments are well worth considering even as I sense that they fail to make the case for the quote with which they begin.

As an opening consideration, I would like to defend structure in college classrooms. Clearly, all means should further the ultimate end they are designed to serve and all of us have been in situations where rules and procedures became ends in themselves for anal retentive taskmasters. And yet, in one segment of this video, students add up the time they spend working, listening to music, watching videos and television and, oh yeah, studying (3 hours/day) and the total comes up to 26.5 hours/day. In short, our students today, much like we students of yesterday, have a difficult time with time management. Clearly, structure is a needed value in higher education today, not simply an antiquated relic of yesterday.

In years past, I began my college classes with the expectable statement that “You are all adults and you can choose whether you want to come to class if you want to.” It was the early 1980s. With the rigid, bell-driven scheduling of high school still in mind with its priority for sports-related events and its imperative of keeping students busy – and thus out of trouble – at all times, I felt I would not fall into the same traps into which my own teachers had fallen. I was generous with grading, allowing students to turn in assignments the class after they were due with a minimum number of late points taken.

Since then, I have taught at three community colleges, one private university and two state universities in a career of college level pedagogy that stretches back 23 years now. For the last seven years I have taught at the University of Central Florida. About five years ago, I began to notice some problems in my laissez-faire approach to teaching.

First, I began to notice that some of my students rarely came to class. Under my “you’re an adult” approach, that signaled to me that they had agreed to absorb the hit to their grade that decision would require. What I began to notice was that it was often precisely the students who were frequently absent that were most likely to challenge their grades at the end of the term. It was also these same students who frequently gave their group members a hellacious time any time a group presentation was due, often leaving to the responsible students all of the work and then demanding to share in the group grade. Clearly, my policy on attendance was not working.
I had also adopted the attitude that if students didn’t want to do the reading, so be it. I simply assigned it, expected students to come to class prepared to discuss the materials and conducted my class with those who were prepared.

About five years ago I began to notice that I was conducting soliloquies or limited dialogues with two or three students more often than not. Calling on students who were not participating often failed to elicit any coherent comments. One encounter in particular stands out in my mind. I called on a young man, a generally polite and bright honors student who would later leave school to do his obligatory Mormon mission work, only to receive a response that indicated he had not read the rather minimal reading prior to class. When I asked him if he had actually read the material, he responded, “What would be your point?”

It was thereafter that I adopted a series of new approaches to teaching. I began to take roll each class, giving .5 points participation score per class and allowing for a two day absence grace period to allow for the inevitable sickness, death in the family or the perennial grandparent needing a ride to the airport at exam or paper time. After two absences, I began to deduct .5 points each absence and counted the final attendance grade toward participation.

In my Intro to the Humanities classes, I instituted a series of online content quizzes which closed prior to class time requiring students to read the text and take the quizzes before coming to class. Originally I gave students two chances on the quizzes thinking it was better to use this “stick” sparingly and hopefully make it a learning experience. I quickly found that my students were simply opening the quiz to find the questions, going to the text to find the answers, and then taking the second quiz. In response, I now split the 10 questions into two different quizzes and take the higher of the two scores, again requiring students to read the text if they wish to gain a decent score on the quizzes.

To grade my group activities, I began to require students to grade their own efforts and those of their group mates using a criteria that didn’t provide a passing score until the student had come to class with the assignment completed, prepared to discuss it. I also began to grade their evaluations themselves, looking for the slackers who simply gave themselves and everyone in the group 10/10 with cursory comments like “Good job!” and little else.

I often say that my students have trained me well. They have taught me many tricks on how to get around assignments and how to avoid the responsibilities students by definition assume when they become a part of any learning community. But the most important lesson they have taught me is simply that my presumptions about their adulthood were, in many cases, at best premature.

At some level, our students are a reflection of the values they have been taught. Noel James Entwistle has provided an interesting assessment of approaches to learning which students take. His research found that a few students used a deep approach to learning in which the intention to understand material learned, to interact vigorously with the content, to apply it to one’s lifeworld all marking an intrinsic value of learning. More students were likely to take a strategic approach which features a focus on grades, organization of time and effort for the greatest effect with the least effort, use previous exam papers to predict questions and are alert to cues about marking schemes. Then there are the bottom liners who use the surface approach, relying on rote memorization and regurgitation of data they believe instructors are seeking, tend to stick closely to course bare minimum requirements and are generally motivated by a fear of failure. As I often say to my bottom liners, “The problem with bottom lining is that it requires perfection. The only thing below the bottom line is failure.”

Clearly there are potential problems with the deep approach to learning. Do students necessarily have time to deeply reflect upon every single idea posed in their college careers? Could this not become a means of avoidance, by focusing on a limited set of ideas deeply while neglecting others? But, truth be told, most instructors cherish the deep learners who come to them seeking not just to know what’s on the test but its significance, why it was assigned in the first place. Sadly, I believe the entire class-driven, factory approach to most higher education today both engenders the surface and strategic approaches as well as evidences the values that students perceive they should hold regarding higher education.

Strategic learning focused on the highest grades for the least amount of effort readily reveals itself as egocentrism at work. The perception that “It’s all about me” is charming in 8 year olds. It is less so in 18 year olds. Moreover, the notion that one simply has to learn a set of skills taken out of a bag of tricks as a means of entry into the “real world,” which inevitably means the work world lurks around in the background of this approach. One might ask themselves why the work world should be seen as any more real than any other aspect of our socially constructed world, What is any less “real” about education, a valued part of every culture known to human beings?

The darker implications of the surface approach speak to the role that class plays in the United States, that dirty secret we Americans avoid acknowledging at all costs. A surface learner is driven by fear of failure. But, for the most part, many of these students didn’t want to be in college in the first place, at least not at this point in their lives. Parental fear of falling drives many low motivated middle class kids into colleges as Barbara Ehrenreich’s research readily demonstrates. Then there are the students who don’t know what they want to do with their lives who simply go with the flow of classmates into college, many for lack of any other perceivable alternatives. In both cases, these are students who make good arguments for mandatory national service programs right out of high school followed by life-experienced adults thereafter attending college on a GI Bill type scholarship.

Strategic approaches to learning can readily produce certifiably degreed workers. My university stamps them out by the thousands each year. But do such approaches produce educated human beings? One of the students in Wesch’s video accurately notes that “When I graduate I will have a job that probably doesn’t exist today.” It’s a critical observation of today’s work market. It’s also a striking indictment of strategic, vocation skills-driven approaches to college educations.

Job skills learned in colleges today have remarkably short shelf lives. What the worker who will survive and adapt in this work market requires cannot be taught, it can only be developed. That includes the ability to communicate clearly in writing and verbally using standardized (and thus comprehensible to all) language skills; the ability to concentrate long enough to read, digest and critically reflect upon material; the ability to apply ideas to factual scenarios posed; the ability to creatively develop new ideas based upon that which is already known; and the ability to work with other human beings in small and large groups. And it requires a student who actively engages their own learning process, not a consumer with an enormous sense of entitlement to be entertained while memorizing enough data to be regurgitated on command like Pavlov’s dog on a test to achieve a passing score. In short, it requires becoming the educated human being that liberal arts curricula have always promoted.

I find it odd that in my middle age I have developed what some might readily call conservative values regarding pedagogy, particularly given my generally radical approaches to the other areas of interest in my life – law, religion and society. I suppose that as a fifth generation educator and third generation college educator, I have always had some tendencies toward being establishment in my thinking about education. But more and more I find myself looking back on my own college experience which stretched over 17 years in total and asking myself what worked and what did not. What I find is that it was from the classes in which much was demanded of me, small enough classes that teachers knew my name and missed my face when I was absent, classes which required me to bring work to class with me to discuss intelligently and in an informed manner - thus insuring my preparation for class - that I learned the most. And it was precisely the classes where a laissez-faire “you’re an adult, you can choose whether to come or not” approach was used that I floundered. In retrospect, I think I interpreted those messages as simply “I don’t care about you or your learning.” And I sense my students today hear those messages the same way.

I have much more to say about Wesch’s provocative video. Stay tuned.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

To Grow or Not to Grow

In the current edition of Evangelicals for Social Action online, a Masters of Theological Studies student at Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, PA poses the question: To Pray or Not to Pray, That is the Question. She goes on to compare the worldly concerns that president-elect Obama will face with the tempest in a teapot brewing over megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s invitation to pray at Obama’s inauguration. She rightly notes that Warren has been criticized by religious conservatives for praying for a President who favors abortion and some limited gay rights (though hardly full equality) as well as by LBGT people who rightly object to Warren’s homophobic statements and his support of Proposition 8 in California.

Sadly, the writer concludes her otherwise fairly balanced column by focusing on the conservative concerns: whether prayers must be addressed to G-d in the name of Jesus (or they don’t work) and whether one should pray for people who don’t hold one’s own religio-political agenda. I drafted the following response and sent it to the site’s contact link. I am not holding my breath it will be published online but I do think it deserves to be considered. Here are my thoughts on the subject:

Lori Baynard asks “What do you think?” about Rick Warren offering a prayer in president-elect Obama’s inauguration. She focuses on what I sense are non-issues – praying in the name of Jesus, praying for a president who doesn’t share a conservative evangelical agenda. In doing so, I believe she misses the point.

As an openly Christian gay man, I have defended Mr. Obama’s choice of Rick Warren even though I found his behavior in California surrounding Proposition 8 shameful to the Christian faith of which I am an ordained minister and deeply hurtful as an individual. What I sense is that Pastor Warren’s invitation and the resulting controversy has provided him a wonderful opportunity to grow a little more into the divine likeness of the G-d who created – and loves - all living beings. He has been given a chance to see that defaulting to a faith practiced as an abstract legalistic construct has consequences – human consequences. He has been given an opportunity to see that beliefs often impact human beings bearing the image of G-d, sometimes destructively. Finally, he has the been given a means to come to actually understand those he would judge from a distance – to share a tiny fraction of the pain and hardship that beliefs translated into political power can have by becoming the target of those believers himself.

Rick Warren has been given a rare opportunity to recognize his own myopia, a myopia that proves destructive to the lives of many children of G-d and plays out in many ways. The question is not whether he should offer the prayer at the inaugural, it’s whether he will learn from this rare calling by G-d to grow.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Less Than Helpful Student Evaluation

Every semester I receive my four manila envelopes containing student evaluations including the computerized numerical assessments by which instructors are compared to each other within departments, colleges and university wide. Unlike the Secret Agent Man of the 1960s, this is a process of takin’ away one’s name and givin’ you a number. In addition to the official university evaluations and the additional honors college evaluations, there are various online sites where anyone can come and leave comments about instructors. They range from the obscene (myprofessorsucks.com) to the perfunctory (rateyourprofessor.com).

I tend to stay away from these sites for a number of reasons. While my scores are in the good range on all of them, (much like my official evaluations on which I am among the highest rated instructors in the department and in the College of Arts and Humanities) the information is ultimately not terribly useful. One doesn’t necessarily have to be a student in the class they evaluate online nor do they have to actually complete the classes if actually enrolled. And, much like the official evaluations used by the university, these comments occur in a complete contextual vacuum. One has no idea of the student’s major in General Education courses. One has no idea whether the student took the class merely for convenience of schedule or other reasons unrelated to academic concerns. One has no idea what the students’ work schedule might be. One has no idea what expectations the student brought to the course ranging from grade expectations to workload.

Finally, one has no idea what kind of student the evaluators actually are. The fundamental attribution error is alive and well in the minds of most undergraduates: “I earned an A,” “S/he gave me a C,” “I made my A through hard work,” “They didn’t make a good grade because they are lazy.”

Jesse Jackson once observed that “A text without a context is a pretext.” And, of course, that is particularly true of the online evaluation sites. Those who come to the sites are inevitably self-selected and motivated generally by one of three concerns:

1. To take out anger at instructors who did not meet the expectations the reviewer brought to the course, no matter how reasonable, discernable by the instructor or possible to achieve;

2. To serve as loyalists defending instructors targeted by the first group; and

3. To create a consumerist rating for an instructor designed for other student who see themselves in consumer terms and who choose classes based on such ratings without regard for reliability.

It’s precisely the consumerist premise that is problematic here. Education is not a good or service consumed by those with enough money to purchase them, as the example of our soon to be ex-president readily demonstrates. Higher education is an opportunity and a means for human beings to become educated. Paying one’s fees, which actually covers a relatively small portion of the total cost of the production of higher education, does not guarantee a grade, an understanding of the material such courses cover or even a perfunctory grasp of the data presented. Payment of fees does not make one an educated human being or even a minimally trained potential employee. To put it into strictly consumerist terms, it’s a bit like buying a computer and expecting it to run itself. If one wants email, one must get an account, become familiar with its operation, check the mail and follow the rules of the ISP as well as the rules of netiquette in its use. Similarly, one must engage the educational process if one wants to benefit from it.

The comments I get from my students are predictable and consistent. Two consecutive entries from students in my completely online Humanistic Traditions II summer courses registering their comments at MyProfessorSucks.com well illustrate that pattern:

• 
  Yes, he requires a lot of work and effort by the student, but I thought it was well worth it. He is exceptionally learned and often has insightful things to say about humanities and current events. Not an easy A, but you can actually learn. Alot (sic) of critical thinking and self reflection, if that make you uneasy then this class is not for you.

I admit to being a demanding teacher. I operate under the premise that the average college class requires two hours outside the classroom (or class activity for online courses) for any hope of successful mastery of the course. I calculate the amount of time required for reading using a low ball average reading speed multiplied by the number of total pages assigned. I calculate the high ball time students tell me they spend on assignments and exams. I account for group presentation preparation and evaluation time. I total all that time and subtract it from the total number of class hours per semester times two. The result? None of my classes come close to requiring the average time necessary for successful mastery of the average college course.

I also admit to being challenging if not provocative. I readily confess my belief and consistent observation that cognitive dissonance is a helpful element in creating the learnable moment. That’s not comfortable for some students as the next comment will observe. But if one leaves college thinking the same things they thought when they entered, it really has been a waste of everyone’s time, money and energy.

The only aspects missing here from the historical pattern of my evaluations is the comment I often get about the instructor’s concern for the student and his/her learning. I am fairly religious about office hours and trying to work with students when problems arise. I spend hours listening to students talk about class concerns, career plans, personal life melt downs, even spiritual life existential crises both in person and online. Sometimes that is not enough but most of my students agree that I make an effort to put a human face on what can otherwise be a highly impersonal, factory model process.

So that’s the good news. Here’s the bad:

• 
  A ridiculous amount of work with very vague explanations if any explanations at all. Too much work for a Gordon Rule class but if you devote your life to the class like I did and pretend to be a flaming liberal, you should get an A

Too much work? Perhaps. Of course, that presumes a comparative standard that is not here articulated. How much is enough? Enough for whom? Enough for what? How much work should an intensive writing Gordon Rule course demand? And, perhaps more importantly, who should decide that based upon what criteria and experience? Much like the rejoinder “That’s just your opinion” I get from students whose understandings have been challenged, pedagogical decisions are neither matters of opinion nor merely (just) anything.

My pedagogy is decidedly different in many ways from when I began teaching college students 17 years ago. In some cases, I have learned new approaches to teaching that I employ while retaining many tried and true methods. In other cases, like content quizzes to insure the material is actually read, my students have taught me well through their attitudes about learning and their behaviors. I use a wide variety of educational approaches ranging from lecture/discussion to film reviews to observation/analysis. I am conscious of learning styles and seek to accomodate them. But, ultimately, my decisions about coursework are based upon my education, experience and a consistency with an articulable educational philosophy. Student opinions about pedagogy are based largely in comparison between classes and an often unconscious confusion of appropriate work load with the amount of work students want to do. So even if it were a mere clash of opinions, student opinions on pedagogy would generally not be much of a match.

I don’t mind being described as a demanding instructor. Indeed, I see sites like MyProfessorSucks.com as doing me a major favor if it prevents those who don’t want to work hard from enrolling. And I’m not particularly willing to allow students with no instructional experience, limited education and a tendency to confuse the amount of work they want to complete with the amount needed to effectively learn a given course’s material to be the final judge on appropriate workload. Lawyers who allow their clients to tell them how to practice are often headed for disbarment. Doctors who allow their patients to tell them how to conduct their surgery are headed for malpractice court. While both can benefit from the feedback of those who employ them, ultimately the professional decisions remain the province of the professional. Professional educators are no different.

As for this poor soul’s sense that s/he needed to pretend to be a flaming liberal to survive the course, she has my sympathy. Sadly, intellectual cowardice is the mark of many students who come with rigid, often authoritarian perspectives, particularly about politics and religion. Accusations of political bias generally mean that one has challenged the thinking the student brought with him or her to the course and thus drawn into question the authority figures from whom they inherited those ideas generally with little critical reflection. Where this becomes obvious is in observing that those who agree with an instructor’s perspective never complain about it. Interestingly, another student at this site noted that while s/he did not agree with some of my positions articulated in responses to discussion posts, it did not affect his/her grade and that students should not be afraid to state their opinion in this class. Let’s hear it for intellectual confidence!

Besides work load and bias, the other complaint that I get on my observations is about group work. Requiring students to work together for a common cause really does fly in the face of a hyperindividualist culture and a consumerist, vocational skills approach to higher education. The reality is that most students who complain about this simply don’t want to do the work required to be a responsible member of a group, both in preparation of materials for presentation and in working with classmates. And yet, as I often ask my students, in which job will you never have to work with other human beings?

Perhaps the worst element of this entire “evaluation” process is that it is a squandered opportunity for providing instructors with valuable feedback. In all honesty, I do care what my students think, not only about the course materials but also about the pedagogy. Asking questions to establish context about a student’s expectations, relevant life circumstances (such as working) and educational experience can go a long way toward creating a matrix for valuable feedback. A self-conscious eschewal of the consumerist “how did you like it?” premise with its nearly inescapable concomitant confusion of engaged education with passive entertainment would be vital for useful feedback. While I don’t expect that critically considered evaluations will become a regular part of academia anytime soon, we can always hope. And in the meantime, please pardon me and many, many other instructors if we don’t take the current consumerist “evaluations” seriously. I never totally ignore them, but as my students often preface nasty remarks, I am more than willing to give them “all due respect.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Celebration at the Education Factory

From today’s paper comes the story of a 32 year old woman who “decided to pursue her dream of becoming a marriage and family counselor by earning a bachelor's degree in psychology. She did it entirely online, because her home is too far to commute to [campus]. Monday's graduation ceremony was only her second visit to campus. For the past four years, she has held down a full-time job, doing most of her studying nights and weekends.”

I find it troubling that a marriage and family counselor would be able to earn a degree certifying her competency to help human beings deal with some of their most difficult and intimate life issues through a program which did not require her to ever have to engage another human being directly. I would guess that the department helped the student arrange for some kind of practical applications of the information she was able to access online in the form of internships or observations where she lived. And I would guess that truncated “discussions” online were used to replace classroom discussions with real live human beings whose body language and vocal inflections are needed to fully communicate words that otherwise appear as mere letters on a screen in the online format.

But who are these people whose words simply appear on our screens? Who are the instructors? What do they look like? What background do they bring to this process? What makes them laugh? What causes them concern? How much can anyone ever know about another human being in the first place and how much less once one is relieved of the obligation of ever actually physically encountering them? And how can such a limited engagement of other human beings provide an adequate means of counseling them?

What is telling in this description is the priority that education held in this woman’s life. She said she couldn’t attend classes on campus because it was “too far.” While a regular two hour commute to the university through city traffic would probably not have been feasible, there is a fine state university a mere 45 minutes by interstate north of the city where the student lives with an excellent psychology program and ample parking garages. No doubt, it provides part of its curriculum online as well. But the proximity of the campus would allow for class attendance as well. Clearly, distance was not the issue.

Perhaps more telling is the revelation about school and work. This is a woman who worked full-time and took full-time course loads. If we assume that online courses replicate classroom experience and that for every hour of class one should spend an average of two hours outside class to prepare, that would mean that this woman was spending 36 hours per week in class-related work in addition to a 40 hour work week. Clearly, that can be done, particularly for the short haul, but the idea that this pattern could become the norm raises no small amount of concerns for higher education.

First, the approach to online courses is, by the self-description of at least one university’s course development staff, a “delivery of services.” It sees the educational process in consumerist terms – the provision of goods and services to consumers willing to buy them. Lost in that understanding is any notion that human beings are involved, that educational institutions represent an opportunity to develop oneself into an educated – and thus more fully human - being and that this is the ultimate end for a university education. College degrees in consumerist terms are reduced to working papers (a truncated vision of life which reduces the “real world” to business) and the means of a rather shallow self-affirmation for the nervous middle class with its fear of falling.

Also lost is the notion that education is a process that requires engagement. Online courses, in my experience of four years now as instructor, easily lend themselves to reductionism and minimization. While online courses were originally designed to be “distance learning,” an evolution out of independent studies conducted by correspondence for students with special circumstances in years gone by, they have long since come to be used for much more immediate and much less noble concerns.

For universities which admit more students than they can house in classrooms, it’s a means of dealing with managerial imperatives. By cutting the cost of cooling, lighting and cleaning classrooms and through the inexorable trend toward farming out online classes to adjuncts who don’t have to be paid benefits as a condition of their employment, colleges are able to reduce their costs and continue to enroll more students than they have infrastructure to handle, at least until the online web services crash because they have been stretched beyond their capacities.

What results is a slippery slope for student engagement. Many of my online section students have admitted that they enroll in online classes because these sections do not require them to actually have to show up in person in class. No need for preparation of materials, no need to have anything intelligent to say, no worries that one might be too hung over to leave one’s frat house or dorm room.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that this logic is quickly extended to content. If there are no demands to attend class and participate, there must be no real demands in terms of what the course will require. Besides, it’s online, the computer does much of the work for you - which is precisely why many students end up crashing and burning in online classes, the exception of our heroine of the day duly noted.

Online classes also have a major impact on instructors. They represent the perfect storm of management, whose primary concern is to spend as little money as is necessary, and computer programmers and technicians whose primary concern is the quickest way to get things done, regardless of their impact on human users (who almost inevitably get blamed for technological failures). The results are programs which are rarely self-evident (read: “user friendly”) to non-computer technician users.

This requires increasing amounts of instructor time in dealing with technical problems, time stolen from development of content or grading and communicating with students. Instructors become the bureaucratic middle man between the nameless and faceless “they” who create and maintain course technology and the consumer students who complain when the programs dump them off in the middle of quizzes, don’t allow them to upload their various word processing programs or prevent images from showing up in their presentations.

Of course, all this works in the favor of minimization, or “dumbing down” as a friend at another local college describes it. At my own training for online teaching, held in a two week summer course which required instructors attend in person (obviously NOT modeling the very behaviors online courses foster), the mantra of the week was the 12 Steps favorite KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid! Of course, in almost every invocation of that mantra in our culture today, the word “I’m” should probably be inserted between Simple and Stupid. But, at a very basic level, keeping it simple in online classes is increasingly not just an option.

If one is expected to handle the ongoing deluge of problems with technology, particularly when trying to incorporate art or music files into class materials (and what humanities class wouldn’t?), and answer the flood of student emails complaining of the same, the less one has to keep track of and maintain, the better. Indeed, after four years of teaching online, I have concluded that truncating course materials – and thus course requirements - to the point of being simplistic may be the only real means of surviving online instruction, particularly if one has a full-time teaching load.

Where does this trajectory point? I see an increasing use of online courses which demand less and less from students in a collegiate factory assembly line which will provide them with a certificate at the end of that process (providing they’ve paid all their fees and fines) that says they are now sufficiently trained to go get a job in the “real world.” Less engagement with other human beings. Less demands on students to think, write, discuss. More instructional time spent playing technical tinker toys and serving as a 24 hour on-call help desk than in pedagogical preparation. All of the credit, none of the demands. College lite.

Today, we raise our glasses to higher education’s version of the first test-tube baby, a college diploma achieved entirely in the artificial gravity of cyberspace. We toast the triumph of consumerism and the minimization of higher education and the trivialization of our humanity that it fosters. We celebrate the triumph of managerial and technocratic imperatives over the needs of a democratic society for an educated citizenry.

Finally we note with no small amount of irony that the student of the hour who found the distance too far to drive to campus to actually attend classes did find a way to get there yesterday to participate in commencement, receive her diploma in person from another human being and claim her 15 minutes of fame in her interview with the newspaper reporter. Apparently the download function for attachments to her email wasn't working.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++