Teaching in Higher Education

Group work and teamwork. In college courses the terms refer to students working together, often on an assignment or an activity. Group work is the more neutral term, whereas teamwork implies something about how the students are working together.

In a 2002 book the anthropologist David D. Gilmore explored our culture’s fascination with monsters. He noted that most monsters are a sort of hybrid. They defy simple explanation because they tend to straddle categories. They might be part human and part animal (like a werewolf) or part living and part dead (like a vampire). The monster is thus a mutated version of something we are already familiar with; it is both familiar and strange. It’s the monster’s amorphous nature that we find upsetting—it blurs categories, so it upsets the natural order of things, causing chaos.

In my last post I summarized some of the pedagogical issues I’ve been grappling with as a younger teacher, and today I’d like to share a few thoughts on the notion of deep learning and how that concept might affect the goals I set for my classes. Let me begin by recounting the research narrative of two Arizona State University physicists.

As I’ve written, I had registered to take a MOOC through Coursera. Turns out, I’m a bad student. First I got behind, then I just stopped doing anything for the class. Much has been written about MOOCs lately, but I just want to lay out a short list of reasons why I did poorly or, more accurately, why I did mostly nothing for an English Composition I MOOC.

Here’s a great story. A graduate student is attending a lecture being given by one of her intellectual heroes, the Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire. She takes notes furiously, trying to capture as many of his words as possible.