Reflections on culture change in teaching and learning

Look out: this one gets a bit academic. This weekend I am going to Connemara with the Outdoor Pursuits Club for the whole weekend, and Saturday night will be a "night out for a bit of craic (fun)" so I will do my Oscar Wilde post on that one Monday night. However, this one gets a bit dry with all the metacognitive ruminations on pedagogy. (just a little taste of what's come, that last phrase is. hope you liked it.)

Evidently the Irish education system is in the process of change. The older system involved a lot of independent reading. You attended a lecture, and you read the extra sources, and you read more if you wanted a good grade. Then you went to a final exam and wrote an essay based on a series of rhetorical questions that functioned as essay titles. At least that’s my impression so far. The whole grade for the class was out of that final exam for which you only got a score as feedback. It was also a tradition of complete specialization where if you “read history” that was all you read. The whole general education thing did not exist. The University of Limerick was founded in 1971 out of a technical school, and its strength is still in science and technology, for which it is enthusiastically funded. The newest endeavor is the World Academy of Irish Music and Dance, which was partially funded and supported by some U.S. cooperative agreements. The Sports science, equine science, and engineering are the most attended programs here, but the World Academy of Music is catching up, I think.

So, since this is a young school and based on technology, so it hasn’t got a lot historical baggage, not like Trinity whose pace of change could only be glacial. So the University of Limerick has just acquired a new President who promised to have a new focus on, what else, Teaching and Learning. The cool new vogue at the U. of L. is “continuous assessment” and “feedback”. The new president is also threatening a move towards general education requirements. What this means is that they are trying to make courses more interactive. Thus, for every two hours of Lecture, there is a one hour of “tutorial”. The tutorial is supposed to be the interactive time where the instructor has some kind of discussion with the students. The tutorial is supposed to be part of the “continuous” assessment where the students get course points for showing up at the tutorial. Another part of the continuous assessment is to have essays assigned during the term instead of just at the end of the term. You are supposed to get feedback on these essays, but it is unclear what form the feedback takes.

However, institutional culture change is really hard. Now in week 4, I have seen attendance at the lectures dwindle significantly. Even now in week 4, the instructors still beg for students to attend the tutorials. Already students have missed a great deal of the “continuous assessment” which is part of their grade. However, they may not fully realize this. The history department has publicized a PTA scale that they use for their feedback on essays. It is not clear how other departments deal with this. A new proposal for more fairness in grading here is to have people from outside the school (or department? I’m not sure) grade the essays so that the students are “graded for what they know, not who they are.” Now that seems like a controversial proposal! As a professor, I’m not sure how I would feel about that. There is a general complaint about grade inflation, and this would be one way to address it. The rating scales would have to be really clear. I would want to teach to a good test, if I had to teach to externally judged standards. The UL student newspaper is not happy with this, and one of its writers published an editorial stating that the students did not support this external assessment.

So, students are accustomed to a system where attendance in lecture is of no consequence, the tutorials are novel and incomprehensible (thus not taken seriously), and the culture of cramming for exams is deeply ingrained. As for the professors, the lecture-and-leave-‘em mentality is strong. In one tutorial one of the professors tried to have a conversation with the chairs in a circle, but it was a one way interview between the student nominated and the professor, which was witnessed by other members of the circle. In another tutorial, the professor had groups discuss a poem and report back, but he did not have enough time for real interaction and the students were so unfamiliar with group work that in all four groups it was one dominant student who took on the role of professor. The professor turned the reporting into an interview with the student, witnessed by the others, and the students were so buffaloed by the concept of having an opinion, that the professor had to interview them to get it. Both professors were trying, but clearly it was early in the system, and everybody was learning how to do it. I have not attended a class in which there has been a give and take of ideas. Well, the Irish language class has an instructor who is younger than the majority of the older women in the class, and he has been bullied by these powerful crones into a give and take of ideas during the “lecture” (the poor dear reading his notes off a word document displayed on the class screen). Powerpoint has arrived at UL with a vengeance, but many people seem to merely read from the slides that are packed with text. Two of the lectures I attend have more sophisticated use of PPT, which makes the lectures much more interesting. One lecturer appears to have just typed paragraphs of the reference text into her slides which she read to us. I discoverd this when I read the text and found that it had been read to me in class. Poor thing: she was young enough to wear low rider pants and a tiny t-shirt that framed her fat. I believe she is still learning about what it is to give a lecture. Maybe this was her first one. Someone has to talk to her about the costume, or is this me getting all Victorian again?

I know that I have done the “witnessed interview” discussion in my own classes, and now I better understand that I need to facilitate better student to student participation, and teach the class how to do this kind of discussion. I also poignantly realize how much time is necessary to support a real discussion. Many of these lecturers use the tutorial as more lecture time with some rhetorical questions blended in (which makes me fume). I understand that if I want to have a real conversation about a topic, then the whole 50 minutes has to be devoted to that. There is not appropriate time for anything else. Gosh. I’m learning so much, and all this metacognition of paying attention both to WHAT is going on (all this new content) as well as HOW it is going on (the teaching and learning) is really intense. I am fueled by McVitties Digestive Biscuits.