Space Enough, and Time

A couple of weeks ago, Molly Worthen of UNC-Chapel Hill posted an op-ed piece to the New York Times that got a nice bit of traction in some education circles.  “Lecture Me. Really.” was a reminder of the significance of the lecture as a means to an education.  Anyone who spends anytime in the classroom or keeping up with teacher talk knows that the lecture format is a highly-debated thing (who wants bored students?). From the essay:

In many quarters, the active learning craze is only the latest development in a long tradition of complaining about boring professors, flavored with a dash of that other great American pastime, populist resentment of experts. But there is an ominous note in the most recent chorus of calls to replace the “sage on the stage” with student-led discussion. These criticisms intersect with a broader crisis of confidence in the humanities. They are an attempt to further assimilate history, philosophy, literature and their sister disciplines to the goals and methods of the hard sciences — fields whose stars are rising in the eyes of administrators, politicians and higher-education entrepreneurs.

I like what Worthen has to say about “lecture as argument.”  She goes on to say:

Those who want to abolish the lecture course do not understand what a lecture is. A lecture is not the declamation of an encyclopedia article. In the humanities, a lecture “places a premium on the connections between individual facts,” Monessa Cummins, the chairwoman of the classics department and a popular lecturer at Grinnell College, told me. “It is not a recitation of facts, but the building of an argument.”

Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize and react as they listen. In our time, when any reading assignment longer than a Facebook post seems ponderous, students have little experience doing this. Some research suggests that minority and low-income students struggle even more. But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult, we do them a disservice. Moreover, we capitulate to the worst features of the customer-service mentality that has seeped into the university from the business world. The solution, instead, is to teach those students how to gain all a great lecture course has to give them.

The Week‘s Damon Linker liked the essay but felt like Worthen didn’t go far enough.  He suggests that something more should be added (but that it’s something that humanities professors are ill-at-east to do):

A more powerful and compelling defense of the humanities lecture course would have to proceed differently — into terrain that professors of history, philosophy, and literature often find exceedingly uncomfortable these days. Such a defense would require that they confidently assert that professors in the humanities possess knowledge, that this knowledge is valuable, and that the most effective way of conveying it to unknowledgeable students is to explain it to them in a lecture format.

He goes on to list reasons why this can be a difficult stand to take (thanks, post-modernism, verifiability, and certain aspects of democracy).  But then:

Why do students of history need teachers who will stand at the front of a classroom and lecture? Because history is hard. It presupposes the knowledge of thousands of facts (names, dates, events) and how they fit together into an enormously complicated, multi-dimensional causal sequence. Until the students absorb those facts and grasp that causal sequence, “group work” and other forms of interactive learning are premature.

That’s why lecture-based courses that do the introductory work of explaining the past must come first — and why such courses are typically followed by smaller, more advanced seminars that foster conversation and debate and raise questions of historiography (competing and conflicting interpretive traditions about the past). By that point, students have learned enough — they know enough — to begin participating more actively in their own education.

That’s not easy for many to read or hear: we’ve become a culture of academic instant gratification.  But Linker is definitely on to something.  You should read the rest of the article here.  The question of “best practices” is a real and powerful conversation taking place in schools all over the country.  Because lecturing well isn’t something that everyone can do, it’s much easier to promote a “coach from the side” mentality.  It’s to our loss, though.  And in the long run, to the loss of our children.