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"...we rather glibly say that these
are 'empowering' technologies, but we haven’t really thought
about what 'empowering' means. Think about the French
Revolution!" - Diane Thompson, Northern Virginia
Community College
This essay explains some of the reasons why
problematic TLT case studies - stories of problems faculty
encounter when using technology to alter and improve
teaching and learning in their courses - are a) useful ways
to prepare faculty to deal with problems they may well face
in their courses, b) a way to deepen our understanding of
teaching and learning with technology (TLT), i.e., a
strategy for the scholarship of teaching and learning.
To explain what I mean, I need to describe a
problem that embarrassed the faculty member who had it.
The problem that started this line of thinking for me was
rather spectacular. It occurred early in the life of a
grant-funded project called ENFI (Educational Networking For
Interaction), in the late 1980s.
Visualize the scene: in a classroom you see
a circle of computers with big monitors. Students and a
faculty member are sitting behind computers, not talking to
each other, all typing. The dialogue of the class is
appearing and scrolling up the screen. This was back in the
day when students rarely used email and the terms "chat
room" and "texting" had not yet been coined. For many
students in college, 'academic writing' was an arcane art
that your practiced so that faculty would give you a good
enough grade.
ENFI provided a genre of dialogue that was midway between
informal oral discourse and the formal written academic
discourse that the students were trying to learn. This
mid-level written conversation provided a very different
ground and a different set of instructional possibilities
for the faculty member. It was an exciting new idea at a
time in the mid 1980s when the term chat room was not yet
widely known.
Trent Batson, who had invented this approach, had asked the
Annenberg/CPB project where I worked for money for a
large-scale evaluation of this approach to teaching. He had
assembled a team of faculty members from seven colleges and
universities. When the Annenberg/CPB Project funded the ENFI
project, I, as the monitor of the grant, attended the first
meeting of the faculty after their courses had gotten under
way.
It was about two months into the first semester, and the
discussion among these faculty had been going on, as I
recall, for about an hour and a half, maybe two hours. At
that point Laurie George, an English faculty member at the
New York Institute of Technology, turned to her colleague
Marshall Kremers and said rather quietly, "Marshall, you
should tell your story." He said equally quietly that he
didn’t want to. She elbowed him a little bit and said, "No,
you really should talk about this, it’s very important." So
he reluctantly began.
Kremers said that on the second or third day of class the
students in their writing had suddenly just erupted in
obscenities and profanities that filled up everyone’s
screens. The professor became just one line of text that
kept getting pushed off the screen by the flood of
obscenities coming onto the screen. Kremers kept typing
"Let’s get back on the subject" or "Won’t you quiet down?"
but the flood of student writing always pushed his words off
the screen. Although he thought about pulling the lectern
out from the corner and pounding on it, he decided, "No,
this is an experiment; I’ve got to stick with the paradigm."
So Kremers walked out on his class. He came back later,
either in the same class hour or the next class meeting, but
it happened again: they blew him out of the classroom. It
happened a third time. The fourth time, he told us, he
managed to crush the rebellion. I don’t think I’ve ever seen
a faculty member looking more ashamed or more guilty over
something that had happened in his classroom. He concluded
by saying, "I don’t know what I did wrong." And there was a
long silence. And then somebody else in the room said,
"Well, you know, something like that happened to me."
Someone else added, "Yes, yes, something like that happened
to me, too." It turned out about a quarter of the people in
the room had had an experience something like that.
Diane Thompson, an English faculty member at Northern
Virginia Community College, said, "Yes, something like that
happened to me, too. But this is the third semester I’ve
been teaching in this kind of environment. One of the things
that I’ve learned is that we rather glibly say that these
are 'empowering' technologies, but we haven’t really thought
about what 'empowering' means. Think about the French
Revolution! Think about what happened when those people got
a little bit of power. They started breaking windows and
doing some pretty nasty things testing their power.
“But this is not all bad news. If you want to run a
successful composition course, the really important thing is
to have energy flowing into writing. And that’s what you’ve
got there, Marshall," she said. "The challenge here is not
to crush the rebellion; it’s to channel the energy!"
Well, all of a sudden everybody was talking about how to
channel the energy. Meanwhile I was sitting there thinking
that I’d seen something like this before, at Evergreen. In
fact it happened pretty frequently because Evergreen was
unlike other teaching environments that most faculty had
experienced. Faculty coming to Evergreen often blamed
themselves for something that went wrong, something that
actually happened pretty frequently, although they didn’t
know that because they were new to the institution.
But there were some differences between Evergreen and the
situation in which Kremers found himself. First of all,
Evergreen faculty always taught in teams, new faculty
members being teamed with experienced faculty members.
Experienced faculty would counsel a newcomer, “This is the
kind of thing that happens at Evergreen. You may have done
something particular to pull the trigger, but this kind of
thing goes wrong easily at Evergreen. It’s not a problem
that can be easily eliminated or avoided. You can, however,
build on our past experience. You might try this; you might
try that." That sort of conversation happened a lot at
Evergreen. But Marshall Kremers did not teach in a team. If
he hadn’t been part of our evaluation team and able to learn
with us, he might well have simply stopped using ENFI.
A second difference from Evergreen that also put Kremers at
risk was that he was dealing with new technology. Because
technology and its uses change every year, there isn't much
chance to accumulate a history about what has been going on,
the way that Evergreen's veteran faculty understood the
dilemmas posed for faculty.
I think often about the hair’s breath -- if Laurie George
hadn’t been there to say, twice, to Marshall, "you really
ought to tell your story,"-- whether this experience would
have come out at all. But she did prompt him to share his
story, and I'm told that he has written a couple of valuable
articles about it since then.
Simulators
If we taught people to fly the way that we teach them to use
most educational innovations, we would say to the
not-yet-pilots, "Look. This is an airplane. It’s really
great for going all sorts of places. You could go to
Portales, New Mexico; you could go to Paris; you could go
almost anywhere you want. Now why don’t you step into the
cabin with me, and we’ll take off. We'll fly around a little
bit, and we’ll land back here again. And then I’m going to
hand you the keys to the airplane, and if you want to go to
Paris, it’s east of here. This button on the control panel
is the radio, and if you need a help line just push it
because we usually have somebody on duty and hopefully they
can help you if you run into trouble between here and
Paris!" That’s how we teach most faculty to use technology
in teaching in their disciplines. We sell them on the
technology and teach the rudiments, but we don’t prepare
them for problems they might encounter as part of the
teaching activity. I define that as a career risk.
We ought to give faculty practice in “simulators,” for want
of a better word, that enable them get into and then out of
trouble in situations that are actually safe. One familiar
example of a simulator is a teaching case study that is
discussed by a seminar of faculty, but I don't know of any
teaching case studies that spring from a technology-related
problem like the one that hit Marshall Kremers. And I
suspect there aren’t very many that have to do with really
innovative approaches to teaching generally; the ones I’ve
seen deal with classic problems, not emerging ones. The use
of simulators is awfully important because, number one,
faculty members need to have a reasonably safe experience,
safe to their careers, especially if they’re junior faculty.
It’s very traumatic in technology. Junior faculty members
are often advised not to have anything to do with technology
until after they’ve gotten tenure, which is not exactly the
way for a university or a college to make fast progress.
Using Dilemmas to Shed Light on
Teaching and Learning with Technology
Now I can make my real point, about the good news that can
be hidden in bad news. Remember that first observation that
Diane Thompson made about the French Revolution and about
empowerment. I've never thought about empowerment the same
way since that day. Diane's observation about the dark side
of empowerment gave me a richer, more useful way of
understanding a whole range of phenomena. We gain a fuller
and richer understanding of the strengths of what we are
doing by looking the problems that it causes squarely in the
eye.
Here, too, my experience at Evergreen was helpful. I decided
what core practices and goals to evaluate at Evergreen by
first asking what problems the College couldn't definitively
solve. Those dilemmas were the flip side of its strengths.
It couldn't solve such problems completely without
abandoning the corresponding strengths, so the problems
remained unsolved. For example, a perennial problem at
Evergreen was the student complaint of an insufficient
choice of courses. That stubborn problem helped point my
attention as an evaluator to Evergreen's practice of faculty
teaching only one course at a time, sometimes for a full
academic year, as part of a team. By deploying its effort
that way Evergreen was able to do many valuable things — it
made narrative evaluations much more feasible, for example,
and gave faculty and students the kind of flexibility I
mentioned earlier — but one price that the College could
offer only a tiny fraction of the courses that a college its
size would ordinarily teach. That problem was insoluble
unless the College abandoned one of its core strengths.
That’s why an important part of my evaluation was then
targeted on these full-time teaching and learning practices,
because the insoluble problem had attracted by attention.
So dilemmas and core strengths are often the flip sides of
the same practices. The more stubborn the problem, the more
important is the underlying goal or strategy for the
institution over the long haul.
Any program offers a wide range of practices and values.
Which ones should an evaluator study? You can do worse than
first looking for insoluble problems, and then using them to
identify the most important, long-term goals and values.
Problematic Case Studies as a
Program for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
Let's apply this kind of thinking to the scholarship of
teaching and learning. I have a proposal to make. It comes in four
parts.
A. Research to identify dilemmas
The first part is that I would urge faculty to do more
research aimed at discovering the dark side of the force.
Pick a new instructional situation, teaching courses on the
Web for example. Get people together who have had a little
bit of experience with such teaching. Reassure them,“ This
is not going to get out; it’s not going to destroy your
career; it’s just within this room. Now identify some of the
most embarrassing things that have happened to you as a
result of the thing you’ve tried to do with technology, or
worrisome things, things that really frayed your nerves or
whatever. It’s probably something that never happened to
anybody but you. That’s OK. We want to share the really bad
stuff, though. And then we’ll wait and see whether other
people say, ‘You know, something like that happened to me.’
Because we’re going to be looking for the patterns, not
necessarily universal patterns.” Remember that what happened
to Kremers only happened to a quarter of the people in the
room. But if you’ve got 10 or 15 people there, things that
happened to two or three people would be, I think, quite
enough to be significant.
This important scholarship is something that many faculty
members and institutions ought to do because there are so
many variations in what we do and, thus, so many dilemmas to
discover. Because this research is time-consuming, no
institution is going to be able to do it across the board.
There is, therefore, plenty of room for lots of people to do
this kind of research.
B. Develop "simulators"
Second, based on discovered dilemmas, we then need to
develop "simulators," e.g., teaching case studies, role-plays,
video trigger tapes for discussions, computer simulations.
Although I don’t know what they all might look like, they
would have in common their ability to enable faculty,
teaching assistants and adjunct faculty to encounter these
kinds of situations in a safe setting where they can try out
different sorts of responses. Many of these simulators will
involve group discussion.
If you’ve never used a case study before, don’t
underestimate a case study by just reading it. Case studies
are often not fascinating reading. After describing a
problem, they stop. The case study itself is like the grain
of sand in the oyster. The value is not in what you learn by
reading the case. It’s the pearl that develops as people
say, “Here is why I think the problem occurred and what I
would do about it."
For example, I’ve been in other discussions about the kind
of anarchy that Marshall Kremers discovered, and not
everyone takes off from where Diane Thompson did, about
empowerment. Other folks have different kinds of analyses
about why Kremers’ problem happened and thus different ways
of responding to it. For example, some might say that this
kind of problem happens frequently in groups. Or other
participants might point out that chat rooms can be
fundamentally, subtly annoying because of the difficulty in
timing your comments, so some kind of explosion is likely.
Each different analysis suggests a different set of
indicators to anticipate, and different responses when
trouble begins to develop. Because of the variety of
possible analyses, I favor relatively unstructured
simulators that give participants more freedom to suggest a
variety of analyses of the problem
C. Shedding light on the core ideas
The third step is for investigator (e.g., a seminar of
faculty) to look beneath dilemmas and ask
what strengths they reveal by their intransigence, as Diane
Thompson did when she saw in Marshall Kremers' problem a new
way to understand the empowering use of technology. Each
dilemma can reflect the underside of a goal or strength. After
discussing the case, the
participants all can reflect: "What light does this shed on
the larger situation? How does this change our ideas about
the nature of what we're trying to do? " These kinds of role
plays and simulations can provide a setting for developing
richer, more balanced and nuanced insights into values and
activities that are most important for the education of
students.
D. Using simulators for faculty development on a
national or international scale
Finally we ought to make these kinds of simulators more
widely available. A simulator developed for geography at a
community college in Alaska may well have relevance to an
elite selective private university. The biggest surprise in
my visits to many institutions in this country and abroad is
that while faculty members differ in the specifics of that
they teach and learn, the dilemmas that they face are
comparatively universal, across disciplinary lines, types of
institutions, even national boundaries and language
barriers. For example, Kremers’ experience with anarchy in a
chat room can appear wherever chat rooms are used, which is
in lots of fields and lots of settings. A teaching case
study that had transcripts of how students exploded in a
chat room environment could even be translated into other
languages and be used appropriately in many countries around
the world. Case studies developed in the UK could be
employed in the US.
How to get the simulators into wide use? There are many
possibilities. For example, the TLT Group, of which I am a
part, could be helpful in offering workshops around the
world based on your simulators, face-to-face or online. I’m
hoping we can collect simulators developed in many places
and make the whole collection available internationally.
Disciplinary associations could perform the same
dissemination function within their fields.
I think faculty could write and get funded proposals to
create and disseminate simulators. Faculty could go in
different directions and approach different funders to get
support for doing simulators in their arena.
Excerpted and adapted from Ehrmann, Stephen C.(1999), "What Outcomes
Assessment Misses," in Architecture for Change:
Information as Foundation. Washington, DC: American
Association for Higher Education.
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