Over the summer, just before the University semester started, I took the Graduate Teaching and Learning Program, Level 1. I missed one pre-session quiz, so I will have to retake that, but beyond that, it was in my path towards being an educator.
One of the things taught was trying to teach people how to prepare for lectures. To prepare for the classic perception of what teaching is, or what most people perceive as being teaching. The professor at the front of the class lectured.1 Unfortunately, education is sold to kids, and I mean that quite literally. It’s sold to kids as a path to a career. In one of my classes the professor asked: “Why is everyone here?” and the vast majority of them said: “I want to be a teacher.” To answer the real question, they were answering: They wanted a job.
The trouble I think was that’s not what academic degrees are supposed to be about. Through the years of liberal education models in which post-secondary education was equated to merit,2 they are. One professor said to us: “I’m teaching you to be managers, to have the vocabulary to communicate effectively.” That’s what the writing was, right? Sort of.
What they want, the big secret that they hide behind administration and grading: They want to know what you’re thinking, and we really suck at telling people what we’re thinking.
The big secret though is: So, did/do they. I mean it’s not a secret. I read an entire book about it. The struggle so many academics (sociologists in the book’s case) struggle with writing. They’re scared of getting it wrong. They’re scared of meeting expectations.3 The thing I read out of that was: They are having the same struggles we are seeing today.
Based on my learning at GTL, there is a struggle in teachers trying to get students to care about their work. I mean, they’ve identified the problem: Students are stuck in a stage of learning where they see learning as a contest. A scenario of right and wrong answers. Black and white. That the professor is the keeper of secrets4 but, the professor is a human being who is oftentimes just as lost and confused as to their students. Sometimes they turn to their students to solve problems, or they brainstorm problems with their students to come to new conclusions. That’s often what graduate seminars are for.
My first hint of that was a set of my professors who tried a new thing in their class:5 Teaching the course through a roleplaying game. It was a fourth-year course, but it was designed around a really cool subject: Pirates. Honestly, it was a great class and I think people on average students were more engaged than they normally would have been.6 The trouble is, that class was out of the norm. I reached out to my supervisor to ask him about the course, and he told me he’d get back to me, and that there was a draft of the paper they were writing on that course.
Nonetheless, we get to the problem: Students by default are disengaged. The average student in a class will not be trying to accomplish anything from the class beyond the attempt to fulfill the rubric requirements of the course’s graded material. Which gets us back to the previous point: students see learning as black and white. As completing goals.
What our professors want to develop are strong thinkers with well-developed vocabularies that can communicate complex thoughts with developed syntax and a sufficient knowledge of grammar that we can make assertions about why some grammar rules are bullshit.
They don’t tell us that, because they don’t know how to teach that. How do I know this? The GTL program is not the norm. Graduate students are thrust into teaching with zero instruction.
Their solution for education was proposing a “Universal Model.” I may misinterpret or paraphrase things in a way that might misconstrue their intentions but fundamentally they wanted to construct education models based on making sure that their pedagogy (method of teaching) is accessible to all students, no matter where they come from.
On paper, this sounds wonderful. But like most utopian literature, it’s a fantasy. There is no way to predict the globally diverse set of barriers that may approach any potential student that walks into a class. It is a rhetoric that aims to console an anxious mind that is deeply concerned with doing right.
I am one of those minds, but that answer doesn’t appeal to me. I wish to do right, but I wish to do right from an Indigenous framework. I see the Universalist model of education as a reinterpretation and reimposition of the military-industrial complex of Western Powers in the 19th-century education system.7 It runs in contrary to Indigenous epistemology which centers learning on the self. The mistake is to start from the top, the broadest subset of people, an indiscriminate group with whom has no boundaries or no limits. In other words, the universal human being. Ideally in a universalist model, any student can take a class, no matter their intersectionality.
It is an impossible fantasy. It is not to suggest we should not try to make our courses accessible, but what we can do is design the course on the individual level. Some think this is harder than it is; most teachers that I hear talk about engagement with students desperately want to see their students take a real interest in their work. They are so busy fulfilling what they feel they need to do to get people “caught up,” but entirely fail to catch people up. Because for the last forty years students are still struggling with the same anxieties.
Students are afraid to write because they are stuck in the wrong stage of learning. Learning which is right and wrong. Writing, the major output of a humanities degree is subsumed as a quest of self-discovery. Instead of teaching us tools for writing and arguing, content fills our precious shared hours together with our instructors. Ideally, courses want to throw students into a seminar but without the correct engagement, seminar learning flops.
And thus, my education was built upon a model in which attempts to monkey bar me through, teaching me how by trial and error, how to perform, to meet the standards of expectations
I hypothesize this is partly why we run into the modern epidemic of imposter syndrome. At the stage where you must see your work as a continuous project that people are interested in, we often feel unprepared for the task before us. Coupled with an epidemic of depression and anxiety with students, our educational system has been co-opted by a for-profit corporatist model that doesn’t prepare students for the true purpose of academic inquiry.
Originally, during the rise of liberal education, the theory goes that if they open up post-secondary, from a very sectarian model to a model designed to support rising American Industry. This system has harboured and supported great academic advances, but it runs into a conflict: Its structure is confined to supporting the Industrial-complex of western society.
The struggle is, if GTL is any indication, our leaders in pedagogy see that the way forward is Universality.
Our current education system is derivative of a system that was designed for the needs of Taylorism. During the time in which American higher education shifted from a sectarian to a more liberal model, the demands upon it were trying to match the needs of society: The needs of a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing society. Education was designed to reflect the factory, with rows of desks, bells to signal class(shift) changes. Taylorism, otherwise known as Scientific Management, named after Frederick Winslow Taylor, sought to design intuitive workflows which demanded minimal skill from manual labour to operate.
Our education system was turned to meet the needs of industry, which managers presumed they can design procedures to circumvent user-related skill barriers. Scientific Management is often thought of alongside the development of Fordism, those production line factory systems. Something we presume in all factories today was something that requires skilled engineers and designers to develop. Our education system became reflected the needs of that system of production: take orders, read manuals, repeat simple actions, follow the bell, adhere to hierarchy.
Universality attempts to produce a course that can support any and all student’s success. Within this is a wonderful belief that our courses can be designed so that anyone can take them; no matter their intersectionality.
And so, we ran into an attempt to rehash a design that has already been tried. The only difference is the century of western liberalism that we live in. Today we live in an age of reconciliation. We already know that Indigenous ways of knowing and ways of being have been not only excluded but purposely over-written and destroyed. It’s not to say that today’s universities are guilty of that, but a perception towards Western modes of education built upon the same goals and expectations… that’s not reconciliation.
As opposed to universality there are models attempted by others: Individuality. Havard Professor of Education Todd Rose was a student who struggled but eventually came to contribute to a theory built on a web of competencies. Which in a convoluted way brings us to Indigenous pedagogy or at least a flavour of it. Understand what I’ve said in my previous post about Indigenous epistemology it centers on the self (on the individual) then works outwards. Sylix Scholar, Bill Cohen developed a similar model to Todd Rose: The spider’s web. A model of education in which centers the student inside a learning community.
Now in the spirit of reconciliation, I want to say neither model is incompatible. In fact, I believe they acknowledge the same problem: Our current education system is not built for the sake of the learner, but a mixture of the interests of the governments, industry interests, and worse yet, the interests of the teacher.
Two of my favourite teachers in highschool played a huge role in my progression to this point.
One tried to achieve something: A student getting 100% on the Socials Studies 11 provincial exam. I got a 98, and I wasn’t alone. Lord Morghast was exceptional though; in fact, he was an editor for our textbook. He taught our class with skill and passion that inspired me to pursue studies in history.
The other was the truly revolutionary educator though. He uploaded his lectures online and our homework was to watch his calculus lectures, and in-class worked with us helping us individually or working through problems we collectively had.
Now in my university classes, built into the degree, is a certain “breadth” requirement. I must have a certain coverage of history. Within my choices and it was a bit flexible but you are expected, as a graduate, to be a content creator. Except, we aren’t taught the process. Unlike math, there is no systematic way to work through problems.
But there is, historians have tools, methods, and products. We have to develop these things to write and engage in the historical discussions we hold so highly.
While in history, what brings us together is content fields. We must build a collective foundation, but instead of encouraging passions, we set up goal post systems and hope some of the undergraduates shake out with potential.
We can turn to Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies and center our model of education on students and bring together a holistic understanding of student success. One which allows students to develop mastery with the support of their community. If we develop systems around the student (as an individual) rather than around an unknown, unrealistic universal student, and develop education around mastery rather than retention of content, I hypothesize we’ll see greater student engagement and success.
I may be misguided, misinformed, but I hold no malicious intentions. If you disagree with anything I say, in the spirit of reconciliation, let’s have a discussion.
Miigwetch,
Alex
[1] Microhistory lesson: Lectures used to be literally reading from a book. Your lecturer would have the one book in the class, and the students would have to copy… or depending on what point in history probably, they might have their own copy that they would annotate as the professor spoke.
Today some professors lecture in this way, in which their lectures are almost modelled verbatim after a textbook. There is sometimes the option to either read the textbook or listen to the lecture. The truly brilliant professors were the ones who built upon that content with their expertise, and often humour.
[2] Michel Sandel, Tyranny of Meritocracy. Dr. Sandel has a number of publically available discussions and lectures about this book, I haven’t had the opportunity to read it yet, but in the lectures I’ve watched, he discussed how liberal politicians equate university educations with the merit of the middle class. It is situated inside a discussion of the hubris of the middle class in which it does not realize its own privilege in how it sees social mobility; it does not realize how even with all the pieces they tell other people they need to have, A university degree namely, will always necessarily equate to social mobility.
[3] Howard Becker, Writing in Social Sciences. In particular Chapters 1-2 discusses his seminars with students ranging from new graduate students to post-doctoral researchers who need help with writing.
[4] Microhistory lesson: One of the greatest “crimes” of history. Any history nerd will cringe at this: The burning of the Libraries of Alexandria. The thing that often isn’t said about the libraries at Alexandria (although so much knowledge was lost) is that their “Librarians” were at least known as Keepers of Secrets.
[5] One of them was my undergraduate supervisor and it was weird roleplaying with my supervisor. There was a point where we were talking about his wife and kids and he was talking about some sort of venereal diseases I might have. Something about treatments of quicksilver if I recall correctly (a cure for syphilis).
[6] Having been in classes with many of the students from College first-year courses all the way to this fourth-year course, I think people really got into it. There was often a competitive element, which drove people to perform, even if they weren’t as prepared as they should have been. To be fair, few of us knew how to prepare, but we all did our best, and nominally I think people had a good time. Which is more important I think in this discussion.
[7] Our current university system is the descendent of sectarian(religious) schools aimed at training religious scholars. Schools that taught mathematics, physics, chemistry (or their historical derivatives) were actually an exception. (This is one of the themes in my undergraduate thesis.)
