I’ve taken a number of classes on pedagogy, and I’ve taken more classes still that involved reading theory.
I now teach classes that use theory, and I sometimes help train people in how to teach.
There’s a reality that so few scholars openly embrace that I just feel the need to put out there today:
There is a theory of teaching, then there’s how you actually teach.
Directly parallel to that, there is writing to share ideas (regardless of how difficult or complex they might be to explain) and there’s writing to attempt to dissuade people from understanding you.
I point these out because I’m the “lunch bucket” version of a scholar. I’m not uneducated. I’ve read Derrida and Foucault and Spivak and I frequently cite Latour and de Certeau and Baudrillard. But I don’t see the need to use complex language just because I can. I know the $100 words of several disciplines. But because I know them, I know that I can describe a terministic screen in a way that doesn’t require using words that a typical high school student wouldn’t know from part and parcel of being a high school student in America.
When you learn pedagogical theory, there are lots of big words. Scads of them. And there are all these theories about how the classroom will work. Most of us enact forms of these theories as we build classes and teach them. There’s just one problem: these theories have been developed for an imaginary idealized classroom where if something seems like it should work, it does work. And these classrooms are often assumed to have certain social and economic (and race and gender) realities. Students defy these logics, and that means that in a real classroom, 75% of what you learn as educational theory is just… theory. It’s fun to think through and discuss, but it’s as practical as having an account balance of $19 when you walk up to the ATM.
My favorite example of a theoretical concept gone wrong is scaffolding. I happen to be a person who scaffolds well. I think it’s because I make games and ran Dungeons & Dragons adventures from an early age, but my brain just happens to think in steps. I’ve been told over and over that I scaffold well.
But in one class I’m teaching right now– and this has happened in other classes, though not the same classes, which I use as my own internal evidence that it isn’t just my technique– it just isn’t working. In spite of me covering how everything goes together and walking students through the assignments slowly and carefully, the linkage is lost on the students. They complain that they can’t see it. They claim to not know what is happening in the class or how to do what is being asked of them.
So today I tried hard to figure out why. I scrutinized the class as they worked. And… I saw it. I’ve seen it before, but not this clearly.
Some of them just didn’t read any of the material. Not even the assignment prompts. They were working from what other students had told them when they asked what we were doing, and the process of telephone had completely destroyed the core of the assignment.
Others hadn’t listened to me explaining in class, at all. To the point that someone asked a question about something I had just stopped saying (almost interrupting me).
This is why those theories don’t work. They presume that students will do the work and pay attention, and only some actually do that. This is not meant to be an attack on my students, either. I know they work hard. I know they make choices. I know that things matter to them in different ways than they do to me. My class isn’t the center of their universe and they make their choices based on that. This is something else theory doesn’t account for: what happens when your class is the one the student is least afraid of failing?
It can turn good students into absolute puzzles. I had a student– an intelligent student I’ve had before, someone I know can do excellent work– confusedly ask me where the PowerPoint notes from the last class were. I opened the class website and said “they’re where they always are. Can you not see them?” I had assumed I made an error and put the file in the wrong place or forgot to hit publish or something.
It turns out that student had never, not once in the course of the semester, gone to the part of the course website that I show the students at the start of each class, where all the files they could ever need are carefully stored. This also meant that student hadn’t read the directions for the activity we were working on, as those instructions were just a few clicks down that same page. This is the screen the class opens to when you click on the course link, with sections for each class meeting, each carefully curated with all the necessary materials. It’s almost elegant, and I rarely compliment myself for making something “elegant.” I’m a duct tape on the rocket ship guy. But here was this easy to access depository of material and instructions. And a student couldn’t seem to see it.
A good student. A student who has gotten As in my other classes. A student who has, to this point, also done A level work in the current class. A student who I am confident, in the end, will hit the project out of the park. I know the student that well.
How can we account for a theory that explains why a good student can’t find stuff that is literally right in front of them? It would have to be a theory of distraction. A theory of split attention. A theory of cat videos on YouTube and Hearthstone matches (to be fair, I played a Hearthstone match in class today myself, but it was for science!). A theory of life stress. A theory of why taking 20 credit hours of class is a bad idea. A theory of how to balance extra-curriculars.
The answer, of course, is that we can’t.
And that’s the hard truth of learning, the thing we rarely express to others. It’s the professional secret we don’t seem to be willing to instill in those who want to do what we do. Class will NEVER go like you planned it until you learn to plan for chaos. I go in with activities, things to say, and goals. I never expect the class to go as I see it in my head. Because it won’t. And if you don’t believe me, ask your chair to put you in two sections of the same class back-to-back. Practice so you know you are doing everything the same way. Watch how often one is great and the other is meh.
Ultimately learning is about being willing to do what you need to do. It’s about the organization skills, the fortitude, the planning, and sometimes the endurance to read incredibly dense texts. Sometimes it’s simply about knowing when to listen and how to target questions. It’s all about student buy-in, though. You can make the perfect class and it will clank to the floor in pieces if the students won’t try to do what you’ve put before them. It’s like a big Lego kit. It can most certainly look amazing at some point, but when you start it’s just a big bunch of foot-piercing colored plastic bits and some instructions. You have to want to make the Legos into the thing, then you have to pay attention and carefully assemble them.
There’s no way to theorize learning into being. In fact if you don’t want to be a theorist yourself, there’s not really much of a place for theory as academics know it in the process of learning. Practice and making are far more valuable to learning than decoding dense scholarly writing.
And I say that as someone who has to publish dense scholarly writing in order to be a scholar.
Maybe that’s a problem.