University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: December 24, 1999
Faculty on the Site.
A Jeanne SiteCalifornia State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: December 24, 1999
Faculty on the Site.
Abstract
Review of the Literature
Case Studies
Outline Notes
Discussion
Evaluation of the first semester of a team-taught project taught in two universities several thousand miles apart. This paper is the culmination of two years of creating a virtual academic community for students at two state universities. The project began with a fiction grounded in our classroom experiences and a search for ways to adapt the curriculum to the fleeting goal of providing higher education at reasonable cost to everyone. Over the next two years that fiction became a reality that far surpassed any fiction we could have summoned. This paper tells that story.
Dear Habermas is founded on Habermas' hope that we can achieve some sort of peaceful existence through public discourse. Habermas says that we must hear every validity claim in good faith. But we would add, that as academic experts we are obligated to help those less trained and sophisticated to so word, articulate their claims that communication may be facilitated and some kind of agreed-upon solution to the sharing of resources may be found.
Most important thing we learned: to hear them. They do have something to say, but they often misappropriate our very words to say it.
"What happened to my poem?"
"I need to graduate."
"You have to pass me."
we found them truculent, impatient, demanding, funny, sweet, caring, and just plain human. But we were often the ones who had to find the words.
The answer lay in refusiing to respond in structural violence to even what felt like structural violence to us. By assuming that they did have good faith demands, we found ways to help them see their own demands in a different light. Ways around the violence of a structure that lags behind the social world.
Oddly, today we have come full circle, to draw more consciously upon Pogrow's work in teaching the "dinner table," a concept we rarely discuss at the university level. But a concept we need to discuss.
"But I asked for it." Said in the tone of an answer, a definitive answer at that. Yes, I got more than you did, I got a better grade than you did, or I got a higher salary, or more vacation, whatever. "But I asked for it." Marlene said that. I accepted it. But she said it just before I spent days struggling with the records, trying to design a template for putting them on the site. Over that next week, three students were trying to make up for life crises during the semester.
Limtin Thao's Non-Violent Response to Structural Violence
One took 21 units, worked, and had been absent a lot. He recognized that he had undertaken too much, and began weeks before the end of the semester to try to make up the damage. He began work with another student who found himself in the same dilemma. But soon, it became evident that the other student had other commitments, so this one struggled on alone, which meant without the use of computer access except in our lab. At each stage of crisis, he kept me informed, and he continued to work away at sending in the missed material. I was aware of his struggle.
He also was seriously intrigued by the work, and had been present enough to ask informed questions about the concepts and their application. (in paper, insert some of the data) He did not suggest that the praxis in which he engaged was part of his submission for the courses. I'm pretty sure he did not think of it in that way, which suggests that there is often a serious discontinuity in students' minds between what they do to learn something they need to know and what they do to get a grade.
This student carried on an entire dialog with me, both in e-mail and in face-to-face interaction. He was personally touched by the social situation he was trying to correct, and was totally engaged in it. Together, we analyzed it theoretically, and I made some practical suggestions. He kept me abreast of the meetings that would offer him a chance to intervene. He intervened, and he altered the structural violence of the context.
When he asked for consideration in having fallen behind in assignments, he asked for my help against this authentication of his learning, and he did not yet see the connection between these consistent and competent efforts and his learning. Yet his work this semester has made it possible for me to describe in practiceable form "I asked for it." Yes, he did. He asked for special consideration. And he brought evidence of his learning in exchange.
Our real dilemma is that today's students are often not well schooled in recognizing their own learning, and are not in the habit of voicing such learning in a rational argument. These are some of the lacunae we must begin to fill in.
Tie in the "dinner table" as the place where the middle class child learns to ask for, be refused, negotiate the exchange, and eventually be rewarded. I still don't know whether there is just one set of rules, applied across contexts which challenge the transfer of learning, or whether we've just missed many of the young children, and so need to do some remedial training in this area, or whether there are some who transfer such knowledge easily and others who need practice in transfer. In any event, we have found the need for the "dinner table" in a variety of contexts. Law office, universities, elementary schools.
How do we keep our lectures together? We don't.
So what do we keep together?
Cases: student who turned in a term paper - then announced that jeanne probably hadn't read it to two research team members who were bound to repeat the message: how to interpret this? Could have justifiably failed student for failure to demonstrate learning. Term paper was really bad, and before the official grades were reported a detailed description of the problems with it was up on the site. So the student didn't even read jeanne's response. Moreover, the student made clear to both research team members that a C- was a satisfactory grade to him, when, in fact, he had given many of us to understand that he was intensely motivated to "do well."
First, I would call his daring to leave the paper in the instructor's mailbox a violent response to what I believe was a context that he perceived to be structurally violent. The violence of his response consisted in the confrontational denial of the instructor's refusal to accept what he had learned was an adequate measure of his learning: a term paper. But we would like to analyze that response in terms of the structural violence of an institutional system that continues to use the "term paper" despite evidence that many students are not properly trained in writing skills to manage an effective term paper, and that the process promotes plagiarism. The problem arises when the student has learned some sort of survival response with the existing structurally violent system, and then encounters a situation in which his well-developed survival response not only doesn't work but is openly rejected as invalid and ineffective. Does that mean he has not learned? And what does that mean if he has managed in the past to survive the system by an invalid process? Is that his fault? Or the non-learning sub-system's fault?