After my recent post on the uselessness of Schools of Education, I’m getting a feeling that people are starting to see me as somebody who hates pedagogy, which could not be further from the truth. I believe that pedagogy is extremely useful. It is a great mistake that college professors who are not in foreign languages receive zero training in the art of teaching. I took years of courses in the methodology of teaching (in foreign languages, we all do), and they were enormously helpful. I started reading books on the pedagogical theory before I was 10 years old and I still remember parts of them by heart because I read them many times. And as a result I’m now an extremely effective teacher. So I’m definitely not a pedagogy basher.
The reason why I find the School of Education model problematic is that there isn’t enough there to justify an entire field. A field needs to grow, develop, and produce useful NEW content all the time. If a discipline cannot produce new knowledge, it is a not a field of scholarship. There is absolutely no room in pedagogy to produce anything new that would have value. Teaching is a set of skills that do not and cannot change in a significant way on a constant basis.
Schools and Departments of Education struggle to justify their existence as independent fields of knowledge (and not purveyors of a limited set of mechanical skills, which they really are) by coming up with tons of faddy and useless “innovations” that have zero substance. They try to move forward in an area of human endeavor where there is no place to move. Have you ever wondered why the extremely important art of hair-dressing cannot be a field of scholarship? Because aside from a set of specific practices, scholarship needs theory. That theory should be, by its nature, endlessly renewable and capable of transformation. And until human beings learn to sprout something radically different than hair on their heads, there can be no theory in hair-cutting.
To avoid recognizing that there is nothing but a set of (hugely important and valuable) mechanical skills in education, the “scholars” in this “field” attach themselves to fads that they hype up to the skies in vain attempts to pretend that it is possible to contribute anything radically new. Take, for instance, online learning. As I’m planning to say at my conference in a couple of hours, the current online learning fad is so old that it is nothing short of boring. Distance learning has existed in a variety of forms for over a century. In the late 1800s, there was an obsession with correspondence courses that were hailed as the radically new and transformative direction of pedagogy. In the 1930s, there was a similar wave of interest in teaching through radio. Then, there were courses offered through television. Now, it’s the Internet. Time and again, these fads fail to offer a valuable alternative to teaching by a live human being in an actual physical classroom. Departments of Education pretend to be unaware of the long history of failure behind distance learning, hoping that this new fad will save them from their own vacuity.
It would be great if all graduate students who are planning to teach took at least one skill course offered by a professor with a long experience of successful teaching in this particular field. Every department has such people, and it makes sense to share skills that are native to a specific discipline. Obviously, the teaching of languages is somewhat (although not hugely) different from the teaching of math or chemistry. But there is no need of whole Schools and Departments to provide this form of instruction.
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Hi Clarissa, I wonder what you think of the distance learning methods of the UK’s Open University? The OU has opened up degree level learning to many people who simply haven’t been able, for whatever reason, to access higher education via the conventional route. It’s been very successful for fifty years now.
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I think it’s brilliant that OU exists. I heard tons of great things about it from people who use it.
What we have to keep in mind, however, is that it’s not an alternative to a regular college learning. Take public libraries, for instance. They are absolutely crucial and need to exist. But they exist on a different plane from college learning. Both are great things but they are fundamentally different.
The current attempts to radically limit the access to regular learning of everybody but the rich under the guise of distance learning bother me. Evidence shows that the people who are not already well-educated suffer a lot more in distance learning than the college-educated and financially comfortable. The leisure classes of society can, indeed, benefit from distance learning. But for the underprivileged, as studies show, distance learning enhances educational inequity. I can offer my bibliography later on to prove this.
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I agree – the OU proves only that distance learning works for a particular highly motivated subset of students. These are generally mature students with a high level of self discipline and the OU serves those students very well. The vast majority of the 18 to 25-year-olds I teach would really struggle with the OU…
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The OU is great, but it is hardly ‘online learning’ in the sense that idiot administrators use the term. The OU doesn’t use MOOCs, for one thing, and its course mateiral has been meticulously prepared by experts over the course of many years. All OU courses also have an in-person component and there is tonnes and tonnes of personal interaction between tutor and student. In recent years, the OU has put a lot of money and effort into its research side, as well, and funds a large number of PhD students and excellent multi-disciplinary projects. I collaborate with more than a few of these people and they are brilliant. That’s why the OU works and is awesome – because it isn’t the mindless idiocy that most people associate with online learning.
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I basically agree that distance stuff is at most an occasional complement to brick and mortar and face to face learning.
But also, just taking disadvantaged kids, even very intelligent ones, and plumping them down in the university environment doesn’t always work either.
Have you heard this week’s This American Life? It’s heartbreaking and emphasizes just how much of what’s needed to thrive at a university comes not just from intelligence and classes and well-meaning people but life skills and cultural knowledge and meta-knowledge of how systems work that is systematically kept from the disadvantaged.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/550/three-miles
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Gosh, believe me, I’m beyond aware of this because this is what we struggle with here all the time. We have a special series of courses aimed at Freshmen teaching them how to be college students. The first time I taught that course, I totally bombed. I will teach it again in a year, and now I will be better prepared for how basic that teaching has to be. Stay tuned. 🙂
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We have a special series of courses aimed at Freshmen teaching them how to be college students.
This is in addition to orientation? What kind of things do they learn? Is it things like, “Speak up earlier than later if you’re having a problem in your courses” and “These are the people you talk to if you have this kind of problem?” and “block out x hours of study for y hours of class”?
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“What kind of things do they learn? Is it things like, “Speak up earlier than later if you’re having a problem in your courses” and “These are the people you talk to if you have this kind of problem?” and “block out x hours of study for y hours of class”?”
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea.
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And, of course, my all time favorite: what is a file? And that you need to save a file or it will disappear. You can’t just write something on a public computer, then leave, then come back 3 days later and expect your document to sit there, opened at the place where you left it. The first time I taught that course, I had no idea I needed to teach the concept of a file and we ended up with several situations where students were trying to take me to the computers at the lab where their files were supposed to sit waiting for them. So there is also the whole thing of, “You can carry the file with you. It is not permanently attached to a piece of hardware.” And, “you have to name a file.” And what is “the extension.” And what does that extension mean (.doc, .docx, .ppt, .rtf), etc.
Man, I was so unprepared to deal with all that.
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I’m thinking of basic non-tech stuff too.
In the radio program I linked to, the saddest cases are when nothing in the students’ lives has prepared them for the idea that …. different options exist and that any part of any official system would ever actually try to help them or want them to succeed.
Dealing with (as opposed to avoiding and/or getting kicked around by) a bureaucracy is a life skill that too many underprivileged kids don’t even realize exists.
It occurs to me that this is also an issue with your favorite topic, homeschooling. How do homeschooled kids learn to deal with bureaucracies?
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The same life skills, cultural knowledge and meta knowledge of how systems works that students who’d have a problem with the traditional university environment lack also hinder their success in any online classroom.
Questions such as “Who do I talk to when I have a problem and how do I go about it?” are more difficult when you never see anyone.
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Exactly, that was partly my (perhaps obtuse) point. It’s tough enough in the traditional environment where there is some help in place (even if it’s often inadequate).
Online? There’s no way. MOOC’s are the elite’s way of farting in everyone’s faces and trying to convince them it’s perfume.
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“Online? There’s no way. MOOC’s are the elite’s way of farting in everyone’s faces and trying to convince them it’s perfume.”
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“The same life skills, cultural knowledge and meta knowledge of how systems works that students who’d have a problem with the traditional university environment lack also hinder their success in any online classroom.”
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In the UK, we are required to take a teaching credential in order to teach at the university level. You can get a job without the credential, but in order to progress it is compulsory. I think it is generally a good thing, and I am always surprised that there is no similar requirement for HE in the US.
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The absence of such a requirement produces situations where people are horribly inept at teaching and everybody suffers. And it would be so easy to repair that with just a single skills course.
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I also believe that programs in Hotel and Restaurant Management fall into the same category as schools of education, for the reason you described.
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“I also believe that programs in Hotel and Restaurant Management fall into the same category as schools of education, for the reason you described.”
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So much for hoping that the likes of Paulo Freire would have by now have left schools of education cleansed of their ills, and that the hawkers of past-expiry pedagogical advice would have been thrown out of the temples of education …
Still, I think his model was instructive (pun intended), and that having meaningful projects as the focus for learning helps considerably more than relying on specific models of pedagogy.
If someone wants to learn toward a specific set of ends, they’ll accomplish those goals anyway, but it would be much more helpful if systems of instruction and their keepers would help get the bulk of these systems out of the way of learners.
I think that’s where you’re going with this, that the systems that are in place are awful because they’re not terribly useful in terms of the ends the learners are seeking.
I use the term “learner” instead of “student” because of an active role: I believe that many “students” are in universities to study binge drinking, how to fake the way to a top grade, how to pursue the acquisition of a quite possibly questionable credential, and to manipulate other artefacts of systems that are still in the way …
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I got told yesterday by a professor I’m doing an R.A for at the moment that I was wasting my time by going to grad school in Gender Studies, and that I’d be better suited having a Master’s in Education because it was more practical. This articulates exactly why I was so insulted, especially since I’m a known theory lover.
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Of course, it’s your decision to make, but I would not advise anybody to do an MA in Education, especially not a bright a curious person who is interested in learning and challenging herself. You’d die of boredom, seriously. In Gender Studies, you’ll get to argue, debate, explore conflicting opinions, discover something radically new. And isn’t that the whole point, you know?
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\ And, of course, my all time favorite: what is a file? And that you need to save a file or it will disappear.
Clarissa, don’t those students have computers in their houses? I thought even poor people in USA had computers. 😦
Aren’t they asked to do anything on the computer during high school years? Even search something on Google or use Wiki as a source for a paper?
Seems to me that in Israel schools do differ, but there are neither super-rich nor super-poor schools, unlike in US. Everybody is closer to average. Interesting whether I am right, and, if yes, whether Europe is closer to the situation in Israel or to the one in America.
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Could you tell about books / articles / sites in English or Russian which would help one to learn this “a set of (hugely important and valuable) mechanical skills in education” ? Both about teaching English as a second language and about math.
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\ Could you tell about books / articles / sites
I meant books I could access via Internet, especially. In Russian, one can find many books on Internet. In English – less so, imo.
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