Title: Can We Discuss This? the Passing of the Lecture
Abstract: WHEN I WAS YOUNG, when I was daring, I used to stand forth boldly in a college classroom in front of advanced students to lecture--with enthusiasm and assurance, certainly, and (hopefully) also with wit and presence. Every few minutes I used to pause and ask for their comments or questions, a necessary interruption usually with no takers, but with occasional requests for clarification. Sometimes I myself would ask a question or ascertain an opinion, but aside from such interludes, about seventy percent of the class period was lecture. I thought I was very good at the job of professing, bringing insight to literary and film analysis and dissecting the conclusions of others, convinced that my methodology, provided students with materials they could not get from books accessible to them. For graduate students, who were expected to read some of those books, I always felt my lectures provided the framework for the criticism that they read themselves, went beyond it, evaluated a broad range of interpretation, applied relevant textual citations and deciphered difficulties they could not readily resolve for themselves. In fact, with both undergraduate and graduate students, I thought I was educating them. By the 1980s, however, writers on the subject of college teaching were frequently pointing to an opposite conclusion: the authoritarian set-up of the lecture, even under the control of genuine authorities, was an obstacle to learning. According to these critiques, such teaching, whether centered on the discipline or on the instructor, is by definition severely limited in effectiveness. According to Paul L. Dressel and Dora Marcus, The professor's self-image is that of an authority in the discipline or certain of its subphases.... Neither individuality nor creativity is sought because objectivity is prized, and standards of mastery imposed by expert judgment do not accommodate student idiosyncrasies. (4-5) The perceived insistence on objective truth became first suspect and then eventually evolved into error. It was not really a matter of relativists winning a debate--there may not have been one--but of the changing emphasis from product to process in the academic world. It was a very long, gradual acculturation the determined efforts of various theorists, many of them administrators who had not actually taught much in a classroom or at all but had read a great deal--that has almost led me to see not only the error of my ways but the arrogance and immorality of what I did day after day for year after year. It seemed futile to hold out for traditional methodology when the lecture and its effects were becoming more and more a subject of scorn. Rudolph H. Weingartner, for example, points out that Such an enterprise may well conform to the hoary and cynical definition of the college lecture: words going from the notebook of the professor into the notebook of the student without passing through the heads of either.... The effect of lecturer retailing conclusions and of student passively receiving them is temporary memorizing, at best, to serve the need of some test; there will have been little learning. (105) Under such assumptions, most of my colleagues converted before I did, leaving me in company with a few senior stalwarts who wore string ties. I struggled with that association, and in time I converted too, though like many others, with reservations. Replaced these days by various forms of discussion, lecturing is not just out of style. It appears now to have been found out for what it really is: another form of child abuse, aimed at nominal adults, of course, but still young people presumably subjugated and entrapped in an environment controlled by an authoritarian leader for limited periods of time, whose only defense is to fall asleep to escape the painful environment they have paid so dearly to join. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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