Learning, Hype and Engagement

These are unfinished ideas – I keep writing notes on this subject in different ways, hoping something brilliant will come together… It’s becoming a prism through which I’m seeing this course, so I thought I should share it even in rough form.

I am not a believer in standardized testing, No Child Left Behind, or assessments of teachers that rely on student evaluations or student test scores.

I am a fan of John Holt, unschooling, experiential learning. And reading. Books. Lots of them.

We have a cultural premise going, promoted by a lot of hype, that student engagement is poor, at all levels. Students tune out things because they aren’t relevant. The vision of students today is that they are bored, and see no relevance in their schooling to their own lives.

I was recently subjected to a video by the Cal State system called “Why Are We Doing This?” featuring undergraduates who have no clue why they’re taking General Education courses. Presumably its point is to argue that our GE system needs reform, toward a Learn-to-Balance-Your-Checkbook “Life Skills” sort of curriculum (at least, that’s how it was used at the curriculum meeting I was in).

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach writes: “Studies show that by their senior year, barely one-fourth of today’s students agree that school is meaningful or their courses are interesting—and less than half believe what they learn in school will have any bearing on their success in life.”

Well, I didn’t either. I didn’t find courses interesting that taught subjects I didn’t like. I didn’t care for teachers who were not performers. If I could have gotten out of math (beyond algebra) and Spanish and earth science, I would have. What did I learn from these subjects?

Actually, I learned a lot, just not trig or Spanish or science. I learned how to think effectively in subjects I dislike. How to manage life in situations I don’t care for. How to take stupid assignments in subjects I abhor and make them mean something to me.

Is the trend now away from the boring and toward the exciting? It seems there’s also a trend away from what we used to call “academics” and “general education”, toward a New Way of Thinking about education. (It’s not new, of course – I seem to recall something about a guy named Dewey…) Do we let how students feel about school determine the curriculum?

Now enter the social media argument, that use of social media will engage our students. They will become enthusiastic in their classes, eager to learn new material, and then…..

Then what? That’s where most of the research seems to stop. In Rita Kop‘s Chapter 14 of Emerging Technologies in Distance Education (indeed, in the whole book by implication), the argument is again made that engagement is the point. We must engage our students. The big problem is that we are not engaging our students.

I think the issue needs reframing.

When I asked my Personal Learning Network (Twitter) about studies showing that engagement leads to academic success, the only response I got was an article showing it didn’t, but that was only about the use of clickers. (I have no idea whether students find clickers engaging – as with everything, it would be in how you use it.)

I am not dystopian. I don’t look at examples of children teaching themselves to use computers in India (see Sugata Mitra’s TED talk) and students engaged in simulations that really teach anthropology and social responsibility (Michael Wesch) and go, “Oh, no, that will never do.” It’s wonderful and exciting. In Nussbaum-Beach’s article, she writes that a teacher’s students “use their creativity and voice to send a message of hope to the rest of the world”. That’s totally cool.

I just wonder about whether the students are learning the subjects, or whether they are only learning to learn about things they like, and what the implications might be if it’s the latter. We are using social media to teach to a particular learning style, which prefers snippets, multimedia mashups and short-form text. Let’s say, just for a moment, that the negative studies about learning styles are correct, and that catering to learning styles doesn’t actually improve learning. (See, for example, Learning Styles; Concepts and Evidence from 2008). Let’s say that the dystopians (Nicholas Carr, Jason Lanier) are right, and that the mental habits produced in today’s distracted culture are poor for deep thinking. What if we are encouraging students to use methods that are personally satisfying but intellectually vacuous? what if we are creating a new system where no one learns subjects they don’t already care about?

The payoff for catering to students’ preferred learning modes is enormous. “If we want to remain relevant in the lives of students, then we must use strategies and materials—such as global networking—that fit the learning styles of the digital native,” writes Nussbaum-Beach. I noted the language: “if we want to remain relevant”. Maybe that’s what it is. Not only affective satisfaction for our students, but afffective satisfaction for us. Students who like and admire us. No more teachers hated for teaching boring classes. Chili peppers and 5.0 for all at RateMyProfessors.com.

We say we want to create learners for the issues of today. Without studying subjects they’ve never heard of, or don’t care for? Without the pressure cooker that encourages some students (not all) to do their best academically? Without a curriculum that has traditional content? Rick Schwier put it best in his slide for our presentation: “How do we take advantage of informal learning, without screwing up the stuff we want to accomplish?” I have things I want to accomplish in my discipline that are quickly being considered irrelevant, such as historical context and cultural literacy.

A similar discussion took place a generation ago. Students were protesting the traditional subjects, and it changed curriculum. What we got out of that had both good and bad qualities. We got scholars who were able to research minority cultures and trends. But we also got fragmentation of traditional disciplines, where the same people we were trying to include went off somewhere else. One example in history was the creation of women’s history. It brought to light the extraordinary, and ordinary, contributions of women. But it also fragmented history, breaking it off into histories of men and histories of women. Even now, if I teach anything about women (which I do in an integrated way as an element of social history), I always have a few students who call me interesting names, some of which are as mild as “feminist” but others which aren’t.

We are already living in a narcissistic culture via social media, though certainly social media can also bring people together to do great things. We must be aware of the risk we are running. Almost all of the hype so far has been created by people who had traditional schooling, people who see the connections to Socrates, Gutenberg, and McLuhan. I find it interesting that the biggest hype-sters were traditionally trained.

So, if we continue on this path of enthusiasm, the question is: Will the next generation know anything? Or will they just be engaged?