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Using
Technology to Create a Safe, Humanistic Classroom
by Tom Marino, Ph.D., Professor of Anatomy and Cell
Biology, Temple University
Part I
Background
Over the past six years I have been in the process of trying to
understand what I want to do with my classroom. In the late eighties and
early nineties I realized that my classroom was not the place that I
really wanted it to be. It was not hospitable. It was not fun. It was not
really challenging. It was filled with fear. I vividly recall when this
became very real to me. I was teaching embryology to medical students and
they were about to take a mid-term exam. A couple of students came up to
me and demanded to know what was going to be covered on the examination.
"What are we responsible for?" is a familiar demand in many
classrooms. At the same time, as I had started my lecture, I knew my
mother was about to undergo an operation several hundred miles away. As I
looked at these students, all I could think about was whether the
physician that was to operate on my mother had asked the same questions.
He probably did. What I knew was that since his days in medical school,
the exams he faced daily were never from the book, nor multiple-choice. He
must be ready for more.
But for now all I could do was look at my students and realize that there was this pervasive sense of fear in the classroom. And most of my students were learning for the examination. They were not learning for their patients of the future – for people like my mother. They were not learning for their backgrounds, so that they could understand the fundamentals of disease. No they were learning to pass my test. For many, all they wanted to do was give back the facts that I had given them. And what was their basic motivating emotion? Fear.
Fear. I think about fear in the classroom. I think about Columbine High School. And I think of other places where students have been shot. The local paper ran a story about lockdown drills: "The lockdown drill is being practiced by schoolchildren here and around the country to plan for a new nightmare: the possibility that someone is walking the hallways with a gun.
"In the aftermath of the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado nearly a year ago, schools have developed the drill along with increased security measures and elaborate emergency-response plans.
"It's an update of the old duck-and-cover drill from the civil defense days," said Sherwood Taylor, who is in charge of security for the Pennsbury School District in Bucks County, where the drills are mandated at all 16 schools.
"In the months after Columbine, state officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania recommended that schools develop and drill for situations where students would be safer locked in their classrooms." (In the Schools / Maureen Fitzgerald, April 3, 2000 Philadelphia Inquirer)
But what kind of drills do we do for students who are afraid for other
reasons - students afraid of failure or students afraid of the classroom?
I have a friend in a local school district who once said to me that she
wished teachers liked children. It was something that I had never thought
of. Yet as I looked around I certainly saw colleagues who 
viewed students
as inferior or as stupid or as unwilling to learn. They really did not
like students. They really did not like to teach. But what my friend said
next really struck me. She said that she wished that all teachers liked
all children. Now I really was taken back. All children. If some teachers
don’t like children, and some those that do only like some children,
what was left? It seemed a rather dismal picture.
But look at some of our teachers. Parker Palmer in The Courage to Teach accurately characterizes many of the classrooms and teachers we have faced. He says, "If we regard truth as something handed down from authority on high, the classroom will look like a dictatorship. If we regard truth as a fiction determined by personal whim, the classroom will look like anarchy." So if you are a child with a teacher who doesn’t like children or acts like a dictator or even worse who teaches by whimsy, what would you expect except fear?
Should I have been surprised? I think of the writings of Mary Rose O’Reilley and I see that others would not be. O’Reilly in The Peaceable Classroom says, "It became more and more clear to me that, indeed most of our traditional teaching methods…fuel our students’ anger, destroy student’s confidence and respect - in effect, shunt the very reflective powers that alone make the individual able to resist the dominion of force. War (like grades) is not part of the system, it is the system." So maybe this was a war. And maybe that’s why they were afraid. That made me the enemy, the opposition. They viewed me as the one they had to conquer.
And, in turn could I blame them? For you see, I had been a very negative teacher for a long time. I taught with a fearful persona. We called it "ego-trauma." It was our way of "forcing them to learn – to master the material." We would intimidate the students so that they would sit in fear of us as we asked questions. John Houseman in The Paper Chase would have been proud.
Again, if we turn to Mary Rose O’Reilly in The Peaceable Classroom, we see that we were simply part of the culture. O’Reilly says, "In academic cultures, the one who is the most negative is often considered the most intellectual. What is going on here? We are rewarding sick, perverse, poisonous behavior." And in retrospect that was true. The more negative and the more critical faculty were considered the intellects of the department. And often it was by the students too!
Our students respond to our methods by not only reacting in fear, but also by learning how to survive. To survive they need to learn what they need to do and how they need to do it. So they ask us what is important. And they get so wrapped up in trying to figure out what they need to learn that they forget who they are learning for and why they are learning the material in the first place.
I like to look at it in the following way. Every spring I get ready to plant my vegetable garden. I till the soil, I plant the seeds, I weed, and I water, and I try to grow my own vegetables. It is a spring and summer of hard work and of great joy. It is fun and I learn much every year (this year I learned I have to stop trying to plant my peas so early). However, when I look at many classrooms I do not see gardens. Instead I see Burpee Seed catalogues. And we ask our students to memorize the seed catalogue and we test them on it to see if they know enough about gardens. We give them an A in gardening, when often they have never even touched the soil. Instead what we have managed to do is create a mass of fearful students who are educational bulimics. They binge and purge information really well and regularly but never make that information their own.
Some days I think I may be a little too harsh in this assessment. I think maybe I am overreacting. Then I get a student evaluation like the following one. I do not know which of my students wrote it because evaluations are anonymous. However, the sentiment is one that discourages me. This student said, "Most people in medical school got there by "writing it all blessedly down," studying it fanatically and then being tested on it and doing extremely well on those tests. In fact, this is what the American educational system teaches us to do for the most part. Do you honestly think you are going to change that? In fact, I question whether or not it needs to be changed. I learn wonderfully in a lecture/study/test setting and I learn not at all in a workshop setting."
And while some may want to agree with this student of mine, I have to turn to the words of Paul Ramsden in Improving Learning. Ramsden says, "In an important sense these learners have not learned at all. In the view of the authors represented in this book, if learning in an educational setting means anything, it means a movement towards being able to solve unfamiliar problems, towards recognizing the power and elegance of concepts in a subject area, and towards being able to apply what one has learned in class to problems outside class. It means a realization that ‘academic’ learning is useful for interpreting the world we live in. It means having changed one’s understanding." It reminds me of a story several years ago. I had a friend who was a radiologist. We were on our school’s Curriculum Committee together. A distinguished radiologist, she turned to me one day and asked why we did not teach our students the bones in the hand. I was teaching anatomy at the time and insisted that we did. I could even tell her that we examined the students on these bones. The sad part of the story is that by the time they got from my course to her radiology rotation they had forgotten what they had learned.