teaching

Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Wed, 29 May 1996 08:19:17 -0700 (PDT)

To answer Tim Koschmann's questions. I'm talking about upper-division
undergraduate classes. The classes are structured in various ways.
All include lectures; some of the lectures are methodological, others
explain the conceptual framework of the class, and others (mostly in
the sociolinguistics class) are substantive expositions of the theory
in the class readings. In the lectures I often say, I understand that
this is probably all very abstract right now; try your best to understand
it in this form and then don't worry because we'll be applying it to
real cases pretty soon. Sometimes, though, there's no substitute for an
old-fashioned lecture on something basic and theoretical, e.g., Herder's
theory of culture or Sapir's theory of language. I tend to give these
lectures at the top of my lungs, with slogans and colloquial language
and an outline and vocabulary list that I draw on the board, with a few
examples whose point I beat home repeatedly (e.g., Herder's explanation of
the conditions under which he, as a European, is in a position to render
an aesthetic judgement on an African mask, this in the context of Europe's
experience, still new at that time, of large-scale encounters with
alterity), and (as I mentioned) endless sales pitches for the importance
and usefulness of the material.

Students don't do formal presentations in these classes. They just talk
informally for a few minutes about what's going on with their projects.
I open the floor to other students to say what they want, and then I offer
my own comments, which I always try to formulate in a way that is likely
to apply to other students' projects as well. Sometimes I'll have to ask
a long series of questions, always explaining why I'm asking them, to get
the class concepts applied to the particular case at hand. In the most
intensive of the classes, the ethnographic methods class, we do nothing
except these discussions of particular projects for the last third of the
term. I try to get the students themselves to run the discussion, though
I haven't tried yet to invent a structure for this; some students are
naturals at it and others are speechless. The basic principle here is
that many of the students find it utterly intimidating to speak in class
at all, so what they need is a simple, clear structure, some good models,
and no judgements. I often sit in the corner during these discussions
and raise my hand along with the others; I encourage them to address their
remarks to the class and not to me, and I look at the ceiling much of the
time to cut myself out of the participation framework for a while. This
only works, though, once we've established a mediating framework for the
interaction.

This framework is made of simple procedural structures and a set of what I
call "orienting concepts": concepts that help us orient to our experience
of the relationships with other people within which our research materials
can be found. (This is not an easy idea, and many of the students never
do get it, so I explain it over and over, applying it to many examples
that come up in class.) Every such concept has a name, and I use the
names relentlessly. One such concept is the "fantasy" (a term that's
not meant to mock anyone, I explain): the idea you have, before you begin
your research, about what you are going to find. It's natural, normal,
and inevitable to have a fantasy when you start your project, and it's
important to be aware of what it is. Go ahead and let it influence who
you talk to, what you ask them, etc. But then you'll know that your
project is going to succeed once you discover -- and I guarantee that you
will -- that your fantasy was misguided in some way. That's the point
when you enter the necessary phase of chaos and confusion -- the dark that
comes before the dawn.

The students write drafts of their papers on a definite schedule. I tell
them, I'm going to make you write a draft before you feel ready, because
there's nothing like writing a draft to make it clear what your research
priorities need to be. Either they put these drafts on the Web (still a
major hassle) or they bring in three paper copies and I redistribute these
copies to other students whose interests seem relevant in some way. Then
they write comments on one another's papers; I provide a handout with a
structure for this process. (One rule is that the paper you're commenting
on is already fine, and you're just looking for ways to make it even
better. It has proven necessary to grade the comments, which range from
excellent to bullshit. This is clumsy, since we're usually crunched for
time by this point and the grading lengthens the critical path.)

About group work. I can't stand group projects. They are invariably
a total hassle because of free-rider problems: the students I work with
don't have enough solidarity to be able to count on one another to do
their share. I keep remembering the group programming class at MIT, in
which every group included a couple of students who flaked out, another
average student, and a manically driven overachiever type who tried to
do everyone's work and ended up going off the deep end. I think they
moderated this course when one of these students finally jumped off a
building. This latter, except for the jumping part, was always my own
role in group projects when I was a student. So instead I structure the
classes so that everyone is responsible for their own fate, but so that
they're going to fail unless they learn how to get help from other people.
I tell the class: while we're talking about someone else's project, you
need to be using the two halves of your brain differently. With one half
of your brain, I want you to learn all about that person's project, really
imagining your way into it, and figure out how you can be helpful, e.g.,
with social connections or relevant readings from your coursework or ways
of applying the orienting concepts from the class. With the other half of
your brain, I want you to pretend that everything we're saying is really
about *your* project, and figure out what it is we're saying about your
project. One purpose of a conceptual framework for the class is to permit
us to discuss seemingly very different projects using the same vocabulary,
thus causing us to notice analogies that stimulate analysis. That's a
better way of doing "group work" than setting up group projects, in my
opinion, because it permits me to scaffold the application of mediating
concepts in the joint construction of the projects. I tell them, if
you're bored while we're talking about someone else's project then you're
not doing your job. They sometimes profess to being bored anyway, though,
and this is the main drawback of the method.

Phil Agre