Two online articles spoke to me today spurring me to articulate how I approach my courses. The one by Ryan Boyd is an essay review of Josh Eyler's recent book How Humans Learn and the other by Kevin Gannon considers how to manage survey courses. Both consider what interferes with student learning and suggest that part of the issue is how some university courses are taught: large passive lectures with too much content. I am finally reading Paolo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book I have been meaning to read for many years, in which one of the sources of oppression he suggests is the volume of content that is found in some courses. This is what Gannon refers to as the fire hose approach to teaching and learning: students open their brains wide and teachers rapidly pour the content in. I think this is akin to Freire's articulation of the banking model of education in which teachers transmit the information and students receive it banking it for later use in their brains. What Freire articulates in his book is that this is a form of oppression because it prevents students from thinking, it represses their ability to develop their cognition.
A few of weeks ago at the University of Alberta's Festival of Teaching and Learning, Dr Jeanette Norden gave the keynote address in which she advocated educators to teach less, better. (Notice the key placement of the comma in that phrase: it reminds me of Eats, Shoots & Leaves.) She urged educators to teach less content but to support students' learning of that content to a deeper level.
All of these recent sources that I have been thinking about suggest the same thing: in our courses, give students the room to think about what they are learning. Otherwise, students will only learn what we are teaching on a superficial level. Content heavy courses will not nurture our students' cognitive abilities.
Now, granted, there is a continuum here that is dependent upon how advanced a course is, students' previous experiences, and the goal of the course. Some courses will be more content heavy than others depending upon this constellation of factors. So how do we design our courses to take this into account?
The way I do it is similar to how I orient my overall assessment of a students' essay: what is the thesis of this paper and is that thesis well supported and articulated? The same question can be applied to any course we teach: what is the thesis of my course and does its design support that thesis? When approached this way, we are encouraged to curate the course content as suggested by Gannon - no longer is a fire hose needed to deliver an abundance of course content if only a few examples will support the course's thesis. Similarly, if we well articulate our thesis, then, as suggested by Boyd, we can begin to ask the salient questions that our course seeks to answer in order to resolve or support the thesis.
Resources
Boyd, R. (2019). Beautiful questions: “How Humans Learn” and the future of education. Los Angeles Review of Books. May 27.Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed (50th anniv). New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.
Gannon, K. (2019). How to Fix the Dreaded Survey Course. The Chronicle of Higher Education. May 7.
