This paper discusses how the growth of technology and its impact on our communication paradigm requires a deconstruction of power and authority in the classroom. It exposes the ways in which faculty expertise in content in a technological environment, that is, being the most skilled and competent computer user in the classroom, negatively informs our understanding of classroom authority and teaching success. It argues that a creative problem-solving process is a more useful measure of successful teaching and calls for flexible pedagogies that focus on community-building while maintaining clear conceptual and theoretical frameworks. This paper also provides a case study of the author's approach to altering classroom authority by examining, for example, such practices as teaching multiple courses concurrently, eliciting student voice, discussing course pedagogy in the classroom, involving students in decision-making about grading and deadlines, giving students peer teaching responsibilities, and focusing on consensus as the classroom decision-making process.
When I stop to reflect on the idea of “radical pedagogy,” it becomes clear to me that to consider naming something radical is heavily dependent on both context and time period. At this moment we are experiencing such rapid changes in technology and access to information that what appears radical in this context may shortly become the norm. Indeed, such rapid change makes it difficult to even imagine what lies ahead.
I don’t think of my pedagogy as radical in the moments when students are engaged in meaningful work and active participation within a classroom dynamic. In that moment, it is simply a methodology that works. It is when my pedagogy isn’t working that I am able to notice again the ways in which deconstructing power and authority in the classroom is radical. When my pedagogy isn’t working it is usually because students have come to the classroom completely unfamiliar with the terrain of exposing the assumptions of classroom authority. It is in this moment that students expect me to mitigate their discomfort and confusion at their unfamiliarity simply because, from their point of reference, I am the classroom authority and it is my job to do so. It is when things are not working that I notice that I have designed quite a different sort of classroom than the ones in which I was a student.
For the most part, it is technology that has called me to develop a pedagogical stance different from that of faculty I experienced as a student. I believe that the evolving state of teaching and learning in contemporary academia is and will be most profoundly affected by a changing communication paradigm developing out of new communication technologies.
To a certain extent, I have come to this understanding out of my discipline, visual communication. Digital influences on communication began as computers were used to enhance print production methods. As the printing industry moved away from letterpress and embraced offset lithography, large, expensive computer systems were developed to be used by the publishing industry. Page layout no longer required careful specifications by the editor and tedious careful craft by a technician as the editor could specify and layout the page in one operation; eventually computer-generated page layout went directly to negatives and then directly to plates. Today, some of our newspapers are printed digitally with toner applied directly to paper from a computer file, avoiding the offset process altogether. It was out of the printing industry and in the newly developing personal computer industry, that desktop publishing evolved.
To publish on the desktop democratized the potential for publishing. Anyone with a text and a computer could create low cost digital output or could use the computer to prepare text and image for less expensive traditional offset printing. True democratization of information was not realized through desktop publishing alone, however, as printed materials still require a method of distribution and those methods of distribution were and still are tied to traditional publishing venues. What desktop publishing did do was create a culture that supported hardware and software development, making the notion of multimedia, desktop presentations, the Internet and the world wide web possible. Such new technologies are already making a significant impact, changing the ways in which we communicate, and, ultimately, changing the culture at large. Hypertext with its capacity to link from a “page” (that is, a screen containing text, image, sound, and/or motion) to other related and potentially useful “pages” suggests radically new possibilities in how we might interact with information and the world around us. It is within the infancy of digital culture that new classrooms, and new pedagogies, must and will emerge.
The shift from print to digital culture—from human beings communicating through the written or printed form, often in multiples due to the capabilities of the printing press, to digital communication in which language is expanded to include image, sound, and motion in an interactive non-linear environment—is, I believe, as significant as the shift from orality to print culture. Walter Ong and others have described the profound change on human culture—indeed, on the human psyche—which occurred in the shift from orality to print. He suggests, for example, that in oral culture, sustained thought is tied to oral communication. “In an oral culture,” he writes, “to think through something in non-formulaic, non-patterned, non- mnemonic terms, even if it were possible, would be a waste of time, for such thought once worked through, could never be recovered with effectiveness, as it could be with the aid of writing. It would not be abiding knowledge but imply a passing thought, however complex.” 1 It is nearly impossible for us, as literate people living in a culture that has thrived for centuries on print, to imagine a world in which everything that is known, is known through oral story telling. Even the use of the word “story” for us implies a print culture definition.
It is equally difficult for us, as literate people living in a culture that has thrived for centuries on print, to imagine who we might become as we move into a digital culture where the line between writer and reader, between artist and viewer, between performer and audience is not so clearly defined, where multiple perspectives and narratives are easily accommodated at the click of a mouse. Recent writers, such as Michael Joyce, J. D. Bolter and others 2 , are attempting in this late age of print to describe the culture, the thought idioms, the kinds of “pictures” that we might be able to make, the kinds of “stories” we might be able to tell once firmly established in digital culture. At the very least, our sense of connectedness, of multiplicity, of organic rather than linear approaches will be enhanced by digital communication. The very most we cannot yet imagine.
Such changes in communication, in the ways in which medium affects and changes how and what we are able to think, require significant changes in how we think about teaching and learning. Our students already come to us with a sophisticated understanding of technology based on experiential learning, and technology is already commonplace in most of their lives; where the previous generation learned as adults to set digital clocks, use the microwave and program the VCR, our students learned to use this technology as children—along with sophisticated video games. Our students are likely to think of the technological solution first—researching on the web rather than in the library, choosing the ATM rather than the bank lobby, utilizing voice mail or email to solve problems rather than asking for a customer service representative. Indeed, the New York Times recently reported that while more than 50% of the 51.6 million homes in the U.S. with TV sets tuned in to the coverage of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, over 45 million people visited NASA’s web site between July 4 and 11 during the Mars Pathfinder mission.3 Teaching and learning in an ever-changing technological environment calls for flexible pedagogies that change to meet the technological demand while maintaining clear conceptual and theoretical frameworks.
Traditional classroom pedagogies based on the “expert” lecturing to “learners” are not effective in the technological classroom. A studio art approach in which the “apprentice” learns under the guidance of the “master” is more appropriate because of the experiential component—a student learns by doing rather than being told how to do. But focusing only on delivery misses the point. Learning in a technological classroom requires more than a reordering of old teaching methodology; effective learning in the technological classroom, unlike the traditional classroom, cannot be organized solely around content. Content learned in today’s computer lab—how to use particular software packages, how to manage systems, how to use the network, how best to technically approach a problem—is quickly outdated, sometimes before the student even leaves the classroom. To be effective technological experts, students must learn how to learn, how to adapt to changing technologies, how to solve conceptual problems with whatever technology is available to them.
Students must also learn how to teach. Over the past decade, I have become acutely aware that because of technological advances for the first time in history roles in the work place between the supervisor and apprentice have changed radically. It is now the apprentice who arrives on the job as an “expert” with technological knowledge and must “teach” up the hierarchy; whereas in the past, it was the supervisor who had the experience and expertise and taught those under him. To negotiate issues of power and authority in the work place is always difficult for those who arrive with little experience. The task becomes much more complex when roles are reversed and the apprentice arrives as the technological expert.
Preparing students to be successful technological team players able to teach up the hierarchy requires that they have opportunities to teach others and be taught by others, to experience, for example, their own discomfort at “bad” teaching which solves a technological problem but does not teach the necessary conceptual steps to solve it again in the future. Similarly, students learn a great deal from the experience of being taught by a peer in a manner that does provide the conceptual framework for addressing a similar problem in the future. This kind of teaching and learning requires a pedagogical focus on community-building in the computer lab and fostering a willingness of all members of the class, no matter what their level of technological expertise, to seek and accept help from other members of the class without fear of losing face. At times I deliberately deconstruct myself as “master” and student as “apprentice,” validating the ways in which a student may have surpassed me in a particular technological arena. In doing so, I provide students with an opportunity to practice negotiating issues of power and authority when teaching up the hierarchy. Because I am a quick learner and an experienced teacher, I often have a great deal to “teach” in this moment of “learning” from students—most often the learning for the student is about effective teaching.
But to position myself as using my authority to deliberately choose to learn from students who have surpassed me in a particular technological arena speaks more to our expectations of classroom, teacher, student than it does the reality of working with technology. There is simply no way to be expert in all aspects of the technology, and even as one does “master” a particular piece of software, shortly the newest version arriving on the market quickly repositions such a master as novice. To position oneself at the head of the classroom, as the source of technological expertise, not only places the faculty member in danger of being unmasked and shown up by a more technologically savvy student, but it teaches students the absolutely wrong thing about what it means to be a “technological expert.” That is, such a model puts the emphasis on having “mastered” material rather than being able to creatively solve problems with whatever technology is at hand. It promises false success.
Yet the concept of such success is at the heart of our current definitions of classroom, teacher, student. Even at the end of the 1980’s, the National Education Association found that only 15 percent of American teachers were using a computer-based curriculum. “Poor training led to teacher’s perceptions that their students were more competent, skillful computer users than they were. Therefore, resistance to computer use became a characteristic of a majority of teachers. The resulting negative attitude towards computing may be the most significant factor that teachers are communicating to their female students,” one article reported. 4 The unwritten assumption about classroom authority here is that the teacher must be more a more competent and skilled computer user than the students to be able to adequately teach. What these teachers have been taught about teaching and their own experiences as students tells them that teaching means being expert and to have that expertise challenged by students is to have failed as a teacher. Clearly these definitions of classroom, teacher, and student will serve neither teacher nor student as our classrooms are transformed into technological environments. I predict that for many years into the future, a number of students will always be more competent and skilled computer users than their teachers because their relationship with technology began at a younger age and at a more sophisticated level than that experienced by their teachers. It does not follow, however, that teachers who may be less competent or skillful computer users have nothing to teach these students, even in a technological environment. Indeed, presenting oneself as a learner in a technological environment may be one of the most significant things that a teacher can do, for if a teacher must seek help from the computing community then seeking such help is normalized as part of the computing experience.
However, presenting oneself as a learner in front of students can be a very threatening experience for teachers. bell hooks in an essay titled “towards a revolutionary feminist pedagogy” writes: “. . . we must first focus on the teacher-student relationship and the issue of power . . . We must acknowledge that our role as teacher is a position of power over others. We can use that power in ways that diminish or in ways that enrich . . . One simple way to alter the way one’s “power” as a teacher is experienced in the classroom is to elect not to assume the posture of all-knowing professors. This is also difficult. When we acknowledge that we do not know everything, that we do not have all the answers, we risk students leaving our classrooms and telling others that we are not prepared. . .” 5 Because students come into the technological classroom with the assumption that it will mirror the traditional classroom, it is important—if students are to learn how to learn in this environment—that faculty are actively and openly deconstructing those assumptions. Later in the same essay hooks continues: “ . . . it is important to define the terms of engagement, to identify what we mean . . . Often the initial explanations about pedagogy will have a serious impact on the way students experience a course. It is important to talk about pedagogical strategy. For a time, I assumed that students would just get the hang of it, would see that I was trying to teach in a different way and accept it without explanation. Often, that meant I explained after being criticized . . .” 6 When faculty illuminate for students the need to be both teachers and learners in a computing environment, not only is the pedagogy validated despite the ways it doesn’t meet student expectation, but students are given permission to seek help and offer it to other members of the class. Again, if the teacher can normalize seeking help from the computing community by doing so his or herself, then seeking such help is normalized as part of the computing experience.
This past year, I supervised graduate assistants teaching an entry-level course titled Introduction to Computer Graphics. Although these fine art graduate students had some background in using the technology in their own artwork, they were not experienced teachers, especially in a technological environment. One young woman had the unfortunate experience of discovering several “computer nerds” enrolled in her section—male students who presented themselves as expert in all matters related to computing and for whom the computer was a central focus of their lives. Like many other teachers, relying on her own experience as student, this graduate assistant attempted to mitigate her discomfort at being less a competent and skilled computer user than some of her students by spending endless hours working on software tutorials. Nothing in the software tutorials, however, prepared her for the problems she faced related to memory shortages, printing problems, and systems management errors. In other words, even after taking extraordinary measures to learn the “content” related to the software, there was still “content” she had not mastered. As long as her focus was on computer competency, she could not claim the kind of success as a teacher modeled by her own educational experience. However, the curriculum that I designed for this course focuses on a strong conceptual and theoretical design framework in which the computer is only a tool (the best tool, to be sure!) for solving design problems. In this regard, the graduate assistant, having completed an undergraduate degree in studio art, was expert. My work as her supervisor was to slowly deconstruct her notion of authority and success in the classroom while allowing the classroom dynamic to inform her of other possibilities.
Just after midterm the graduate assistant was delighted to report that the “computer nerds don’t know everything” and were, in many ways, less prepared to deal with the course content than other students. Because of their own defensive stances related to being expert which did not allow for their active engagement with a “less expert” teacher, these students were not able to fully engage in the conceptual and theoretical course material that went beyond using the computer in the manner to which they were accustomed. Their sense of being expert isolated them from the rest of the class. Through such classroom experiences, this graduate assistant may be able to unmask her own assumptions about being expert as related to having authority in the classroom, and, out of that deconstruction, she may develop a more effective pedagogy to prevent such isolation from occurring in her classrooms in the future. As a teacher becomes less afraid of being shown up by some technologically savvy student, s/he is better able to validate what it is the “computer nerd” has to offer the class. Indeed, often the faculty member’s strongest teaching occurs when s/he serves as a kind of “translator” between the expert student who has valuable technical knowledge and the novice computer user who not only needs the knowledge, but needs to understand the conceptual steps that go into solving the problem. Negotiating such an interaction between students often means intervening in the communication to assure that the expert provides the novice user with all the steps that go into solving the problem at a speed that allows for the novice to comprehend the problem-solving process, and, in doing so, teaches the expert quite a bit about teaching.
In the face of student expectation that I am the expert and that if I am not, I must not be much of a teacher, designing pedagogy that includes me as a member of a technological learning community is challenging. But because design is my discipline, such a challenge only engages me in a design process related to pedagogy: define the problem, ideate and develop multiple possibilities, revise and refine solutions. Learning how to learn, how to adapt to changing technologies, how to solve conceptual problems with whatever technology is available are basic design skills that translate well in technological classrooms, and these skills are the “content” of my teaching. Student anxiety and discomfort created by my deliberate pedagogical insistence that we are all equal members of a learning community and unmet student expectations of my role as technological expert is mitigated as students experience my creative problem-solving abilities. In other words, it is my experience as a teacher, designer, researcher, and a long-time member of the computing community that provides me with a kind of expertise—not just of content, but of process—allowing students to mitigate their own discomfort with a classroom pedagogy that does not meet their expectations as they become familiar with the process and find it valuable. Indeed, my primary pedagogical goal is to create an environment conducive to students developing their own working, successful creative problem-solving process, and in doing so, becoming competent and skilled computer users and designers.
So what does such a pedagogical stance mean in daily practice? First, it does not mean that I am unprepared or unable to use the computer to solve conceptual problems. It also does not mean that I pretend to more or less computer expertise than I have. I am a long-time computer user who purchased my first personal computer in 1983—a CPM machine with 64K of RAM that cost more than $3,000 and prompted me with “Abandon Modified Buffers?” when I was to choose whether or not to save a file. Computing was difficult then, and results were not particularly spectacular. (Indeed, at 132K, the text file for this paper surpasses the memory capabilities of that machine.) Yet despite my long-time computer use and my professional focus on computer graphics for print and digital reproduction, I am the first to admit that I do not thoroughly know all of the software packages of even my discipline.
It was by confronting my own discomfort at student questions I couldn’t answer and my own questions that students answered, that I began to question my own assumptions about being expert in the classroom, and, out of that deconstruction, developed more effective pedagogy. In the early days, it was because of my defensive stance with students and my desire to be the most competent and skilled computer user in the classroom that I became invested in discovering how best to learn. Although I met with some success in workshops where I could “follow along” with the instructor on an overhead that projected his (women were rarely engaged in teaching computing at that time) desktop, I found that such delivery only taught me particular tasks in a particular order which only became useful at a later date if I could adapt that task sequence to solve my own problems. I met with a much higher level of success when I had the opportunity to work one-on-one at a computer with a more expert computer user, where, for the most part, I controlled the mouse and keyboard. It was in this one-on-one environment, that I could question, try variations on command sequences, be rescued if I got lost, and grasp the overall concept behind the task sequence. This, however, is not a practical teaching method in a classroom with one teacher and up to 25 students.
Ground rules:In any class that I teach which involves using technology, I lay down ground rules for teaching others in the computer lab. I state categorically at the beginning of the semester that every computer user not only has the right, but the responsibility, to physically reclaim the mouse or keyboard from a “teacher” if the teacher, including me, is solving the problem rather than teaching the solution. I explain that a good teacher in the computer lab is not a problem-solver but a solution-teacher, a good teacher empowers the learner by explaining slowly and clearly rather than taking over the keyboard or mouse, and a good teacher demystifies the process by seeking common language rather than mystifies it by speaking jargon.
Workshop model. Because I had met with some success at workshops, in the late 1980’s, I often used that model in teaching computer- related courses. In the classroom during workshop-like demonstrations, preferably projected on an overhead, I would investigate the many ways in which a problem could be solved—validating even the longest and most round- about methods—and thereby celebrating the versatility of the Macintosh environment in which I teach. I would often begin a classroom “research” session by asking a less expert student to attempt a solution to the problem and then, after arriving at a satisfactory, working solution, I would call on a more expert student to describe what short cuts might have been taken or what other approaches might have worked. In this way, students were exposed to the thinking processes of other members of the learning community and developed a “how to learn” approach to computing.
Oral reports.During the time I was using the workshop model, I always assigned oral reports in any computer-related course I taught. I would generate a list of possible topics and ask students to choose one that was not familiar to them. Often the topic was not one that was easily researched using conventional methods such as reviewing periodicals or books in the library. Although I asked for a bibliography, I encouraged students to use oral interviews as a source, including interviews with professionals at computer hardware and software retail stores. Each student was required to include a computer demonstration as part of their report and to prepare a document as reference material for the rest of the class on the topic.
The oral reports were a good method for emphasizing the benefits of a computer learning community. Because traditional research methods were often of little help, students were required to take a more active role as learners. This active role helped to break down perceptions of the student as a receptacle for knowledge and the experts, or the body of computing knowledge, as something separate from the student. Instead, students learned that we are all learners in the computing environment and the expert is usually a living, breathing, accessible person who has merely logged more computer hours than the student. This is often an empowering moment in teaching students how to learn.
In addition, the computer demonstration forced students to take an active role as teachers in the classroom. The biggest surprise for the class usually came when the student expected to do well—the student who came to the class with the most computer skill—was often the least successful in the computer demonstration. Also pleasantly surprising, the less expert student was often the most successful in presenting a useful computer demonstration because s/he had thought through the demonstration with a great deal of care, practicing unfamiliar commands and sequences until s/he was certain of them. This experience was often pivotal for the more expert student and encouraged him to take more responsibility for learning to teach well. It was equally pivotal for the less expert student as a techno-confidence builder.
Multiple courses taught concurrently. In the 1990’s, I abandoned the workshop model when teaching at a small liberal arts college provided me with an opportunity to think about curriculum development more globally. Rather than being responsible for the content of specific courses, in the liberal arts environment I was responsible for the entire curriculum in graphic design. In addressing the need for more courses to be taught despite finite faculty resources in available teaching load, I began to consider how I might teach multiple levels of courses concurrently in the same computer classroom. Over time this became a very valuable teaching strategy for creating a computing learning community in the classroom.
Although there are many challenges in teaching multiple levels of course content in the same classroom—most related to the logistics of organizing and presenting course material on multiple levels in a sequence in which students don’t spending class time waiting instead of working—the result is an increasing technological sophistication of all students. The workshop model in this environment, however, does not work well because advanced students have already mastered the material that would be relevant to beginning or intermediate students. Although occasionally there is a reason to demonstrate a new technique to the entire class, for the most part, because the students are not working on the same level of class project, workshop demonstrations are not an effective use of everyone’s time.
Indeed, it is in this sort of environment where focusing on the one-on-one tutor is an effective teaching strategy. Because advanced students have completed the same problems that the beginning or intermediate students in the course are working on, they are inclined to have an empathetic response to beginning and intermediate students based on their own experience. Offering and accepting help from others is normalized for them early in their classroom experience when they complete class problems with the help of more experienced students, and they continue this process by normalizing the experience for others.
Of course, as bell hooks reminds us, “It is important to talk about pedagogical strategy.”7 Students are more willing to spend their course time helping others when they understand the benefit in the work place that they serve to gain by being good “teachers.” This is a benefit that must be clearly articulated for students, due to the investment of their time in performing tutoring that, from their point of reference, is usually expected of the teacher.
I have found that such teaching of concurrent multiple course levels exponentially increases the level of technical sophistication as well as conceptual and theoretical engagement in the course material. Technically, as beginning and intermediate students see new technical ideas integrated in the work of the most advanced students, such possibilities inform their own work. Overall, the technical sophistication and ideation of all members of the class slowly increases to the level where the strongest student is working. Of course, by the time that these students, then, become the advanced students in the class, they are able to ideate and achieve at a much more sophisticated level of technical expertise than the previous advanced students did. Similarly, the modeling provided by advanced students heightens engagement in the conceptual and theoretical content of the course. Beginning students have an opportunity to watch the creative-problem solving processes of intermediate and advanced students related to particular course projects and learn from the mistakes and successes of others before they must, themselves, engage in the project.
Group projects:Group projects are an effective strategy for building a computing learning community in the classroom. As any faculty member who has included group work in a course knows, however, students work better in groups when they have some social affinity with other group members. A wise faculty member will use a variety of methods in the class at- large and in small groups to provide a comfortable environment for group work before students are asked to expose themselves through their work, which is in process, to other members of the class with whom they have not developed some kind of relationship. In a technological classroom the need for laying such groundwork is heightened by the issue of technological anxiety. Even the most expert of students is often afraid of being shown up as less expert by someone else. Therefore, before beginning group work, I ask the class to identify themselves with regard to their technological skill as beginners, competent users, and experts. Although these categories are more fluid than they appear to students, the identification process lowers everyone’s anxiety by taking away an element of surprise. I then ask students to organize themselves in groups that include some students from each category, intervening only if there are social groups already dominating a portion of the classroom and inhibiting community- building at-large. I might also intervene on behalf of non-traditional students who sometimes experience heightened anxiety due to a lack of previous computing experience, or the social stigma of generational or other cultural differences.
Practicing consensus-building in the class at-large is one method I use to prepare students to work in smaller groups because it strengthens community in the classroom. I use this method to solve many problems, from assigning deadlines to deciding on grade percentages (see below). The use of consensus- building that is most relevant to student career preparation, however, is deciding on topics for group projects such as content for a web site. These decision- making skills are not only relevant to working in a design or advertising setting, but in almost any professional environment in which peers collaborate or work in teams. In arriving at consensus, I model processes for group decision-making, articulating various roles being performed by particular students as we work towards making a decision. It is important that roles are not unmasked too early in the process, however, as students will sometimes become self-conscious and withdraw from participating. I also often use a roll-call method of polling each student in the class to assure that all ideas are out on the table and everyone has had an equal chance to speak. In larger, more formal courses, I have prepared documents that outline the process that groups must follow for arriving at a decision, including many ideation and revision steps, and then require documentation of the process be turned in for a group grade at the completion of the project.
It is essential in developing consensus, that either/or options be avoided, as they tend to polarize the group and stymie decision-making. Instead, an and/and/and stance is more useful. I begin with a brainstorming session in which the class tries to list at least 100 unevaluated ideas on the board. Then as a class we engage in some discussion about what constitutes a “good” idea using the list to compare and contrast. After criteria have been developed, each student selects six to ten of the “best” ideas. Ideas not selected in this stage are erased, and we engage in more discussion that usually results in students withdrawing their selections that are not receiving strong support. Sometimes, however, an idea that was not an overwhelming favorite, when advocated for, becomes a contender. As ideas are narrowed to a few, I attempt to discover ways in which ideas can be combined or in which multiple perspectives can be accommodated under a new idea. Whenever an either/or situation starts to develop, I work to include other alternatives (and/and/and) as a way to broaden positions and uncover points of agreement. Occasionally the solution has been to explore more than one topic; only once did a group become so polarized in the decision-making process that intervention was required. In that case, I suggested that the group explore the nuances of their polarization as a topic, and, in the end, this was a successful group project.
Building web sites is a particularly useful task for engaging students in collaborative, community-building because web sites easily accommodate both individual and group ownership. That is, the concept, visual strategy, splash page and navigational tools of the site are an appropriate location of group work and decision-making, while individual students develop and produce their own pages within this larger context. For this reason, I provide students with two grades on group web site development: a group grade and an individual grade. Students who have not had experience working in groups report that the group grade was a useful motivator around which to organize consensus and encouraged them to avoid the isolation of working solely on their own pages.
Coming to voice: Before there can be any real sense of community in a classroom, however, there must be an environment in which all members of the class feel free to speak. The issue of voice is especially important in exposing the assumptions of classroom authority as the teacher’s voice has been traditionally positioned as the only voice that matters in the classroom. Yet it is not an easy thing to encourage those who are not interested in or accustomed to speaking to speak. When we acknowledge that our role as teacher is a position of power over others, it may be tempting to try to negate that power by maintaining a passive voice in the classroom, or to “allow” students to speak by not taking up much aural space ourselves. I have not found these to be successful models in creating an environment where all students come to voice.
bell hooks again: “My classroom style is very confrontational. It is a model of pedagogy that is based on the assumption that many students will take courses from me who are afraid to assert themselves as critical thinkers, who are afraid to speak (especially students from oppressed and exploited groups). The revolutionary hope that I bring to the classroom is that it will become a space where they can come to voice. Unlike the stereotypical feminist model that suggests women best come to voice in an atmosphere of safety (one in which we are all going to be kind and nurturing), I encourage students to work at coming to voice in an atmosphere where they may be afraid or see themselves at risk. The goal is to enable all students, not just an assertive few, to feel empowered in a rigorous, critical discussion.” 8 When all students are empowered in rigorous, critical discussion, hooks has prepared them to voice their ideas and opinions in many different kinds of environments, whereas students who come to voice in a “kind and nurturing” environment still may not be able or willing to speak in less hospitable environments. The key measure of success here, of course, is that all students are empowered. If an environment is hostile, no matter the faculty intentions, all students are not able come to voice.
I have found, for me, that it is useful to model speech which begs to be challenged, speech which is straight-forward and sometimes brutally honest. Such honesty becomes something that students quickly come to count on and be invested in. It cuts through polite social constructions and gets to the heart of the matter at hand—most often the student’s work. When ample opportunity for revision is also provided by the course pedagogy (see below), students become invested in being able to see their work clearly in order to improve upon it. Similarly, such speech also elicits and provides opportunity for “back talk” and such “back talk” is often an effective route for students unaccustomed to speaking to find voice. I believe that I make my most powerful contribution to students when I create a classroom environment that is safe for myself, where I can speak openly and without reservation. For many students, it will be the first such classroom they have experienced and the first time they have been invited to think about their own personal and cultural definitions of classroom, teacher, and student. When all students can speak, if only to “talk back,” it is much easier to get the honest responses so essential to community-building in the classroom.
Of course, what is a safe environment for me or for bell hooks may not be a safe environment for other faculty. Indeed, my discipline requires a kind of openly critical speech to prepare students for the highly competitive advertising field that may not be appropriate in other disciplines; as designers, students must learn to separate their sense of self from their emotional investment in their work so as not to be wounded by critical response to the work. My point is not to offer one model of “correct pedagogical speech,” but to suggest that finding an authentic voice in the classroom is essential in expecting the same of students.
Deadlines and the revision process: When I can count on students to speak freely in the classroom, it is easier to locate authority for class decision-making with the students. In most of my courses, students decide on assignment deadlines, using a shortened version the consensus-building process described above. My goal is to provide an extensive revision process to facilitate all members of the class being empowered to produce their best work. I grade the rough drafts, usually on a weekly basis as a portion of the final grade that I call daily assignments, and we, as a class, critique work-in-progress almost as frequently. Because of my focus on revision, I have designed multiple parts in many of my class assignments, so that students who have successfully revised their work can move on without others feeling as they have fallen behind. Multiple parts to an assignment also provide students with a flexibility to solve conceptual problems from another angle; often the solution to one part of the assignment informs the solutions to other parts. By moving the responsibility of setting deadlines from me to the students, deadlines become more integrated into the revision process and students become more aware of their own creative problem-solving processes.
This method of setting deadlines means that there is no set schedule for the course, only a certain amount of work to complete, and some students are not comfortable with what they perceive as a lack of course structure. It is important, therefore, that I frequently address the amount of work to be completed over the course of the semester along with some accounting of where the class stands at that particular moment. Without such frequent assessments, many students unpracticed in taking responsibility for their own work would flounder without focus until the end of the semester deadline forced closure. Because students are not experienced in creating their own deadlines, it is also important that I break down larger tasks into smaller ones often, sometimes privately with particular students and sometimes publicly with the class at-large.
The end result of students taking responsibility for deadlines, however, is a more serious engagement and greater investment in the revision process, a stronger identification with the assignment as meaningful work, and, through revision, an increased self-confidence at having achieved at a higher level than initially seemed possible.
Student generated grade percentages: Similarly, I use the same process for deciding on the weight of course assignments in arriving at the final course grade. The syllabus reads: “The final grade will be based on the average of the assignments and project grades with some assignments being weighted more heavily than others. Students in the course will collaborate with the faculty member to generate the final grading formula. Daily assignments will constitute a minimum of 30% of the final grade.”
When building consensus on this issue (which doesn’t happen until the last week of class), I outline the various categories requiring grade weights on the board and invite students to offer possibilities of various percentages. As with other consensus-building processes, we discuss criteria for making decisions by comparing and contrasting the various possibilities and then work at narrowing them. I have found that this is often the most productive decision-making exercise over the course of the semester for illuminating roles that individuals play in group problem-solving. For example, in one exchange this past semester, a student finally stated categorically that he would not agree to one project being weighted more heavily than another. This was an excellent opportunity to point out the benefits to the group and to the individual of setting boundaries—and was also an opportunity to illuminate the risks of setting boundaries in professional environments when others do not like the boundary and therefore harbor negative feelings about the boundary-setter. In this particular instance, the group decided on all projects being weighted equally to avoid any “winners” or “losers”. It has been my experience, however, that usually there is a strong sense on the part of all class members regarding which assignment has most challenged the class, and even the “loser,” the student with the lowest grade, agrees to a higher percentage based on the level of that challenge. This particular class, however, was not a course where multiple levels were taught concurrently and community was achieved more by passive agreement than active engagement.
Because this experience comes at the end of the semester, it is less useful in building community than it is in assessing what kind of community has been formed in the class. It is a valuable exercise for students, however, in that it provides a forum for students to individually and collectively reflect on and evaluate their semester and the work they accomplished over the course of the semester. It is also perhaps the clearest and most powerful example, from a student point of view, of sharing classroom authority.
Although I have cast this discussion in relation to teaching in my discipline where technology is already commonplace, I believe that over the next decade we will see computerized classrooms in most disciplines as computers become indispensable communication tools and our students come to us prepared and expecting to use them. Although I believe there is a market for and will be growth in on-line course delivery, I don’t see the future of education moving entirely away from location-based courses because of the ways in which social interaction contributes to learning and the nature of what future students will want and need to learn.
On-line delivery as it is currently constructed, focuses on content above all else and I do not believe the future of education lies in teaching “information.” In all disciplines, not just those with a strong technological component, such a content-based focus will not serve the learners of tomorrow. Technology has already provided us with access to more information than we can possibly assimilate and interprete; we can no longer expect to “master” entire bodies of information in our disciplines. Rather, we must look to our expertise as researchers and teachers to manage how we access relevant information as we need it and apply it to solving conceptual and theoretical problems. On-line course delivery is just one more facet (an important one, to be sure) of the Internet’s capability to provide access to information. Yet, in these early stages, the capability itself does not teach us how to distinguish useful information from less useful information or how to apply information to solve conceptual and theoretical problems. Throughout at least the next few decades, students will not come into our classrooms skilled in doing so and will have a great need to learn how to be effective users of technology, that is, a need to learn how to learn.
Indeed, one of our greatest challenges is to discover and refine how to best present information in this new medium so that it might be effectively used. As we begin to investigate within our specific disciplines how to best present information in this new medium, we may find that what is effective will vary from discipline to discipline. It is likely, however, that most disciplines will begin to use hypertext because of its capacity to link from a “page” (a screen containing text, image, sound, and/or motion) to other related and potentially useful “pages” and, therefore, to the whole “library” of digital information. Such links hold the possibility of interesting cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary investigations. When we work with image, sound, or motion, for example, for most of us, we are working outside our discipline. Paying attention to the meaning of these audio and visual “texts” may require cross-disciplinary work and collaboration if we are to apply the same critical standards to this work—communicating with image, sound and/or motion—as we apply to communicating the “content” of our disciplines.
But where do we begin? We begin with whatever expertise we have and we begin as members of a computing community. We look for teachers wherever we can find them—even if that means our sixteen year old son, a graduate student who is researching ancient Hebrew texts, a stock broker we meet on-line in a discussion group, or colleagues from outside our discipline who can be found in cyberspace as well as in the classroom. I would recommend two such colleagues. One is Professor Don Warman, who has been on the history faculty at a small midwestern liberal arts college for over thirty years. In recent years, his students have been publishing their research papers, rich with links, on his site, Professor Gigabyte’s Gateway to Infinity. His method of engaging students in on- line research and publishing is elegant in its simplicity and profound it its implications. It is also an extremely good model for use in Humanities courses. In addition, Professor Gigabyte’s Gateway to Infinity is an excellent portal for exploring cyberspace from the vantage point of a highly educated and curious mind with a high regard for teaching others, and unencumbered with commercial concerns. The other colleague is Michael Joyce, English faculty at Vassar College, who has been teaching writing in a hypertext environment for many years and is co-developer of Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment. His syllabi are designed to be accessed on the web and, although they do not include student work as Professor Warman’s site does, they are rich sources to be mined for classroom possibilities.
But even as we discover new and engaging possibilities in our own forays into cyberspace, it is important to be aware that what we experience in this moment has more to do with the late age of print than the dawning digital age. We see only dimly who we are becoming. Yet each of us is a part of what that might be, and each of us has a stake in teaching us to get there.
Bolter, Jay David with Grusin, Richard, 1998. Remediation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bolter, Jay David, 1991. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.
Heim, Michael, 1987. Electronic Writing: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
hooks, bell, 1989. “towards a revolutionary feminist pedagogy,” in Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston: South End Press.
Joyce, Michael, 1999 (forthcoming). Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture. Ann Arbor, Michigan University of Michigan Press.
Joyce, Michael, 1995. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.
Nelson, Carole S. and Watson, J. Allen, 1990-91. “The Computer Gender Gap: Children’s Attitudes, Performance and Socialization,” Pp. 345-253 in J. Educational Technology Systems, Vol. 19(4).
Ong, Walter, 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. London and New York: Methuen & Co.
1. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World (London and New York: Methuen & Co., 1982) pp.34- 6.
2. for more information see: Michael Joyce, Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture, (Ann Arbor, Michigan University of Michigan Press, forthcoming, 1999). Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1995). Jay David Bolter with Richard Grusin, Remediation, (MIT Press, 1998)., Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 1991). Michael Heim, Electronic Writing: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987).
3. “Mars Landing Signals Moment for Web Use,” New York Times, July 14, 1997, Section D, p. 1
4. Carole S. Nelson and J. Allen Watson, Ph.D., “The Computer Gender Gap: Children’s Attitudes, Performance and Socialization,” J. Educational Technology Systems, Vol. 19(4) 345-253, 1990- 91.
5. bell hooks, “towards a revolutionary feminist pedagogy,” Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black (Boston: South End Press, 1989) p. 52.
6. bell hooks, p. 53.
7. bell hooks, p. 52.
8. bell hooks, p. 53.
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