by Ruth Benander, PhD and Ruth Kletzander, PhD

We often hear complaints from colleagues that students want to be “spoon fed;”  clearly, we reason, if students would only carefully read the assignment, they would know what to do without our having to spoon feed them! However, what may be clear as day to us may be clear as mud to our students. To understand this, we may need a little refresher regarding compassion.  One way to refresh our compassion is to become a student again.  This cold-water bath of experiencing what it’s like to learn something new can be quite powerful.  When we professors, accustomed to the power and expertise of our position, re-experience the student condition of powerlessness and novice incompetence and ignorance, it forces us to a fresh perspective on the student experience. This experiment can help us think more creatively about how we can support our students’ learning. What professors might consider “spoon feeding,” students may actually perceive as helping them achieve what we’ve asked of them.

 We do not suggest, Gentle Reader, that you go out and enroll in one of your colleague’s classes. We are suggesting that you spend some time outside the box of your expertise.  What about signing up for that juggling class offered by the Communiversity?  By spending just three hours learning to juggle, you will experience a crash course in how novices feel when presented with an apparently impossible task that the instructor insists is easy. “Just watch me do it….” he says, effortlessly sending three balls into the air while you mutter under your breath to yourself, “Yeah, right,” and your juggling balls fly away in three directions across the room, pointedly not in the air, but inextricably earthbound.  This is an important wake-up call: Your students are trying to metaphorically juggle your discipline, your syllabus, and your expectations.  It is oddly refreshing to revisit learning from the learner’s point of view.

“A Vision of Students Today” was the collaborative creation of Professor Michael Wesch and 200 of his students from his 2007 “ANTH 200: Introduction to Anthropology” course at Kansas State University.

You can follow Wesch at his “Digital Ethnography” blog or via his Twitter feed.

by John E. (Ned) Donnelly

Academic advising is (or should be) considered central to the mission of higher education just as teaching always has been. And I think we need to move away from considering advising as a marginal service and toward recognizing its importance in accomplishing the college or university mission—we need to consider advising as important as we consider the roles and outcomes of teaching and learning.

But equating (or even comparing) advising to teaching raises a lot of questions—both for professors who perform the teaching role and for professional staff who perform the academic-advising role.  For instance, are all good teachers by default also good advisors? Is advising something all professors are prepared to do (like teaching), or is it only for those who are professionally prepared in the advising specialty? Are all advisors prepared to be teachers?  Should advising-as-teaching be required for tenure, promotion, or annual staff review?

by the anonymous author of “The Raised Hand”

 Question:

I’ve heard it’s advisable for professors to arrive at class early in order to greet students, especially on the first day of the term. However, most of my colleagues arrive at class right on time and immediately begin teaching. I admit that I often arrive exactly on time, too, because it makes me look more “professorial.” Sometimes I feel like a high-school teacher when I’m in my room early. Which is best?

Signed,

Confused Junior Faculty        

by Tom Haines, MM

Today’s traditional-age students who are now entering colleges and universities never have known life without the internet. They consider access to technology essential to life, learning, and leisure. These digital natives have different behaviors, attitudes, and aptitudes that have been amplified as a result of their daily exposure to technology and the internet. In sum, they have become “transliterate”—familiar if not fluent with multiple media and platforms, able to communicate, gather information, and group problem solve across populations and disciplines. It’s safe to assume that these Net Generation electronic learners have developed expectations about what learning can and perhaps should be. To begin to understand these unspoken educational values, educators must be willing to augment their teaching and their students’ learning styles to meet the expectations of neomillennial learners.

Harnessing the power of technology and the internet can be a daunting task. At best, technology and the internet offer only partial solutions—they add another piece to the education puzzle. Research suggests that active-learning pedagogies based on real and simulated experiences that also include frequent opportunities for embedded reflection offers the greatest hope for capturing the student’s attention and motivating the learner. Active learning can best be realized by embedding multiple-media course content that creates immersive frames of reference. Unless the student is in the proper mind frame to undertake the challenges of learning, the vast potential of these bourgeoning technologies and pedagogies will continue to be underutilized. There remains an often-neglected aspect in learning—students must prepare their minds and their bodies to learn. Current research supports that music greatly affects and enhances our learning and living. The intentional use of music in classroom and online settings can create an atmosphere that enhances all learning activities. In short, music can supercharge the entire learning experience.

by Kevin Oberlin, PhD

The gap in expectations between teachers and students in the classroom appears to be widening.  As a first-year composition teacher, I most frequently perceive this gap as an unearned sense of entitlement on the students’ part.  On the whole, this perception is not incorrect.  Generation Me, one of the common text selections for beginning composition courses, provides mounting evidence to support the argument that today’s teens to twenty-somethings have been reared to expect that the world owes them success because they are each special and unique, a logical impossibility.

Indeed, first-year composition students on the whole seem to approach the classroom with the sense that course content will be presented to them at best, and inflicted upon them at worst.  In either case, they will walk away from the course having learned something they didn’t particularly care to learn, and something they don’t particularly need to know.  Even teachers attuned to this attitude, who often rightly emphasize to their students that they must earn their education rather than expect it to be given to them, often continue to use language that unwittingly reinforces students’ sense of entitlement.  While such teachers might never say that they are forcing their students to learn, they will often still explain what a particular assignment “forces” students to do so that students will develop a certain skill set.