Anxieties
My students are an anxious lot. In the first week we discussed all the things that they might need to do to learn successfully in the subject, and then they were to write a list of their own which were to be blogged. This is their own participation matrix and will form the basis for how they assess their participation in the subject through the semester. Looking at their blogs some common early issues have arisen.
The first is that many have listed things that are teacher centred. These are things that they either think I want done, so if they do them then they’ll go better (I really don’t get this at all since it really is self assessed). This, for me, is evidence of just how acculturated to teacher centred learning and assessment some of these students are. The other popular one is “do all the set readings”. Now, we spoke a lot in the first classes about the point of the self assessment, of choosing a couple of things in there that would stretch yourself, and the things that if you did them well would really make a difference to your learning. Doing the set readings isn’t one of these things. Finding additional references and sources. Reading or finding out about terms not understood in class or readings, or something along that line I’d accept. But doing the set readings? It is easy to argue that this should be a minimum, but at the moment most students do not read all they are asked to (you can take that as a given, but as an academic I think the phrase about people in glass houses should be kept in mind here), but to put it down is just a teacher centric logic. The teacher knows what I should read. I’ll read what they tell me. It’s an invitation for mediocrity, and confuses the role of knowledge discovery in an internet age. (The problem once was where to find out about stuff, so universities had impressive libraries and lots of experts, now the problem is how to understand and sift all the information, which is trivial to find, anywhere – we’re awash in it.)