verging_on_random

Teaching and learning

January 9, 2007 on 7:24 am | In Uncategorized |

Academics seem to have a bad rep in the blogosphere. I’ve lost count of the number of comments I’ve read that sneer at uni lecturers and the crap that they teach. Lucky I have a thick skin.

Some of these comments however illustrate the fundamental misconception that many people have about the university experience. They talk about ‘what kids get taught’ (they usually talk about ‘kids’, thereby revealing their ignorance of contemporary university life. At the uni where I do most of my teaching, half the students are well beyond the ‘kid’ stage). It’s this ‘get taught’ expression that discloses how people misunderstand the purpose of studying at uni.

People shouldn’t go to university to ‘get taught’; they should go there to learn. There’s a huge difference. Universities are staffed by academics who are extremely knowledgeable in a very narrow field. Those academics have to guide the learning of students in areas much, much wider than their own narrow specialities. Therefore it’s not a matter of professors saying “Sit there while I teach you what you need to know”, it’s more a matter of saying “Here’s a bunch of things that you need to understand and I’m here to help you do it.”

Lots of uni students never grasp that simple principle. It’s too hard; makes them take too much responsibility for their own learning. They tend to be the ones who regard education as just another market transaction: “Here’s my money, now transfer that knowledge I’ve paid for.” A lot of MBA students think like that … “Hey you accepted my enrolment so obviously I’m clever enough so if I’m not getting good grades it’s obviously your fault for being a crap teacher.”

Take my own field of employment relations. I used to ‘teach’ it at TAFE sometimes and felt like a fraud because I was telling students how to recruit and select staff and so on when I knew that these mainstream practices had all sorts of problems not mentioned in the approved textbook. At uni, I present basically the same material but emphasise how much we don’t know, and how important it is for managers to understand their own unique workplace and develop their HRM policies and procedures accordingly.

Most students never get it. They want the ‘correct’ answer so they can pass assignments and get their B Bus or whatever. And good luck to them, I’m not knocking them. That’s exactly how I behaved when I did my first degree. But it’s a bit much when they start whining afterwards that they never learnt anything ‘practical’ at uni. And when doddery old dickheads start citing their grandkids’ experiences to claim that unis ‘teach’ a lot of nonsense … well it’s a bit sad is all.

The good news is that maybe 10% of students do get what it’s all about. They make the whole thing worthwhile.