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Tag: Teaching & Learning

Published on Leave a comment on Spooky Learning

Tis the season, for me at least, of haunted houses and scary movies. I like to engage in what psychologists have recently termed recreational fear. This is the fun of being scared. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Sarah Rose Cavanagh applies this research to the classroom. She argues that there are four pedagogical lessons we can learn from haunted houses.

  1. We never go into haunted houses alone. In times of anxiety and threat we tend to find safety in others. The same holds for the anxiety produced in learning environments. Creating collaboration opportunities with classmates and communal class environments can enhance learning.
  2. Pleasurable arousal happens when we are scared, but not too scared. Cavanagh calls this “pleasurable disquietude,” and it's the appropriately uncomfortable spaces in our classrooms and disciplines that allow students to progress to the next level in their learning.
  3. Fear and motivation have physiological similarities. As instructors we can harness student anxiety to move them forward and deepen their learning.
  4. Finally, we grow stronger by facing our fears. Students must confront challenges in the classroom in order to grow. So instructors need to provide appropriate challenges for them.

Cavanagh provides some nice examples of what this might look like in our classrooms. Teach well, and enjoy spooky season!

Published on Leave a comment on Critical Versus Traditional Service-Learning

A recent article in the Journal of Service-Learning in Higher Education makes an interesting case about differences in efficacy between "traditional" and "critical" service learning courses. In the article, authors Debra A. Harkins, Kathryn Kozak, and Sukanya Ray, of Suffolk University, draw on past definitions to distinguish between the two models. Traditional service-learning would involve activities such as working in a soup kitchen and reflecting on the conditions of homelessness and food scarcity, while a critical approach would make its primary goal to work toward dismantling and reconfiguring the underlying structures that create the conditions of homelessness and food scarcity. The work involved with this approach could be with an advocacy group working toward policy changes.

The authors go on to argue that critical benefits are difficult to measure in part because many service-learning faculty mistakenly believe they are engaging in critical models, while their own discourse about their projects reveals that they are actually employing traditional models. The authors cite as evidence language that situates faculty as authorities and students and community members as beneficiaries. A critical approach would instead situate all participants as stakeholders who stand to benefit from a transformative experience.

One reason the authors present for this lack of true critical models is an overall lack of institutional commitment to service-learning. Even within the relatively small number of schools committed to service-learning (Campus Compact, a leading service-learning advocacy group, reports around 1100 member schools, around 17% of higher learning institutions in the U.S.), service-learning offerings may be spotty, and many students complete their undergraduate education without taking service-learning courses. Many faculty, even those committed to the pedagogy, still cite concerns about time commitments and lack of recognition of service-learning toward tenure and promotion.

The authors then narrow their focus to an examination of one service-learning program at a mid-sized, urban university in New England. Their goal becomes to look at student outcomes and to "tease apart" those that promote improvement of student ability from those that promote transforming students' worldview and encourage participation in social change. Toward this they analyzed 487 student surveys collected over six semesters. (The review was of a program, and not of one particular course.) They conducted two phases of inquiry, the first being quantitative, which found a discrepancy between service-learning stated outcomes and actual impacts. The second, a qualitative study, sought evidence of transformative outcomes.

In the quantitative analysis, the authors found that while students indicated personal growth in responses to the Likert-type items, their narrative responses to the open-ended questions revealed the limited and specific nature of their individual experiences, without evidence connecting the experience to broader societal outcomes. As mitigating factors, the authors included service hours completed, professor, and service site. They found strong correlations between these factors and student responses to the Likert-type questions. But despite overall positive student outcomes, they found little evidence of change in world view or commitment to social change.

How do these conclusions relate to service-learning efforts here at Xavier? Our status as a school working to increase its service-learning efforts certainly results in some of the institutional challenges found by the study. A small percentage of faculty teach service-learning, although another segment also practices engaged pedagogy that includes work in the community, which is but one small step removed from formalized service-learning.

Yet Xavier has several factors working in its favor toward the desired, transformative model of service-learning - the major one being the school's historical mission of social justice, which situates the school squarely in the center of many past and present social justice movements within New Orleans, including the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The presence of Xavier graduates within many of the city's grassroots organizations, such as those working against mass incarceration and for neighborhood and cultural sustainability, not to mention the city's mayor, Latoya Cantrell, attests to the degree to which a Xavier education instills civic responsibility.

Also an exciting new core curriculum has opened the door for service-learning, already having produced new service-learning courses, which will grow in number. The move toward these courses, and student demand for them, which has been significant, will certainly contribute to a more rigorous culture of service-learning throughout the university going forward. And as we grow, it's important to remember studies such as this one from Suffolk, so that our efforts are toward the critical model, one in which students, faculty, and community members all benefit, and in which the students of today become the social change agents of tomorrow.

Published on Leave a comment on Happy New Year #2

One of my favorite things about being in academics is that we have two “new years.” The beginning of the academic year and the beginning of the calendar year provide two opportunities to make resolutions, set intentions, start over, try again, or start anew. This month, as you are thinking about your own 2019 resolutions to establish an exercise routine, eat healthier, or write more regularly, I encourage you to consider a pedagogical intention.

Perhaps you want to have a more engaging first day of class. Lang (2019) offers some great, practical suggestions.

Perhaps you’d like to energize your class discussions. Gooblar (2018) provides some excellent advice.

Maybe, if you have procrastinated like me, you might want to revamp your approach to your syllabi. If so, check out Gannon (2018).

And the list of potential pedagogical intentions goes on…

Me? In addition to attending yoga class, I intend to (try to) make learning more meaningful for my XCOR 1011 students. What’s your pedagogical intention?

Published on Leave a comment on The Xavier Experience and the New Orleans Experience

This year Xavier rolls out a new core curriculum designed to give students more options to pursue their interests and to explore the breadth of a liberal arts education. While the overall core curriculum hours have been reduced, several new categories of core classes have given faculty an opportunity to create exciting new courses, several of which employ engaged pedagogy, civic-engagement outcomes, and service-learning.

At the 1000 level, two new categories, the Xavier Experience and the New Orleans Experience, offer students unique opportunities to explore themes of Xavier's historic mission within the context of New Orleans and the particular social and economic histories of the communities that make up the city. While the categories are distinct in that one focuses on concepts of social justice and the other on reading New Orleans as text, they also overlap in that both ask students to think critically about connections between their education, their professional goals, and their communities. Xavier and its purpose as a place of learning for many future doctors and scientists, many from historically underserved populations, are not separate from, but rather are a part of, New Orleans and its history of socioeconomic segregation and oppression.  It's impossible to think of the history and success of Xavier without the context of the bitter struggle to integrate New Orleans schools in the 1950s and '60s, and the lasting effects of redlining and selective economic neglect that mark the city's poorest neighborhoods today. While Xavier has been noted as an engine of socioeconomic mobility, as in this study from 2017, New Orleans as a whole remains a hub of multigenerational poverty, as revealed in this 2018 report on "income diversity" in which New Orleans ranked 51st out of 60 large cities.

These courses in and of themselves may do little to close this gap, as I've written in the past about the limits of service-learning. But while many of the students will go on to live and work in other communities, many others will live and work in New Orleans, and in this regard, these courses can absolutely make a difference. For some of the students, addressing the city's needs in health care, education, housing, and employment will become their life's work. And these students may look back on the connections drawn in these courses between their education and their community as a major step stone along their path, if not their starting block.

Below are titles and descriptions of some of these courses:

FREEDOM DREAMS: SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE AFRICAN
AMERICAN IMAGINATION
Social justice in the African American imagination looks at the historical, ideological, and literary expressions of black liberation throughout their history in the US. We will seek to answer the question: How have people of African descent expressed their dreams for freedom, justice, and equality throughout their history in the US? We will answer this question by examining themes and movements, such as: African American acts of resistance, Black Christianity, African American emancipation, black anticolonialism and Negritude, black feminism, Black Power, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the historically black college and university.

COMMUNICATING SOCIAL JUSTICE
Communicating Social Justice examines selected social justice issues (theme to vary
each semester) in relation to communication activism. Using interdisciplinary
approaches, students will analyze the history, theory, and practice of communication activism. Students participate in a series of communication-based activities. Whenever possible, the course incorporates a service-learning project that directly engages students in a communication activism campaign.

PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF MARDI GRAS
Students will get hands-on and go behind the scenes to develop a deeper
understanding of diverse Mardi Gras practices and the corporations, cottage industries, professional and amateur artists, and clubs, krewes, gangs, and tribes that produce the Mardi Gras events that help New Orleanians celebrate traditions as well as drawing tourists from all over the world. In this context, students will conduct their own interview research to explore questions of Mardi Gras and parading culture participants' understanding of their roles as artists, producers, and consumers.

HOMELESSNESS IN NEW ORLEANS
New Orleans is one of many cities featuring a significant and visible homeless
population. Working from the premise that homelessness represents both a personal “trouble” and a public “issue”, this service- learning course will give students the opportunity to study the multi-faceted causes and consequences of homelessness in New Orleans. We will work to understand homelessness as not only a condition, but as a social concept and process, including its meaning in other U.S. and global contexts. Through service, reflection, discussion, selected readings, data analysis, and guest speakers, students will learn about and reflect upon a range of individual and collective choices and actions that might reduce homelessness. Students enrolled in this course should be prepared for trips off campus outside class time and be eager to serve and to engage in a respectful manner individuals at service learning sites.

Published on Leave a comment on Attitude Adjustment

Writing in the Journal of Service Learning in Higher Education in January of 2018, Dr. T. Andrew Carswell of Gannon University, a Catholic university in Erie, Pennsylvania, describes a research project undertaken to discover the capacity of service-learning courses to change student attitudes about poverty. His premise is that we know through other research that Americans are as likely to attribute poverty to lack of effort among the poor as to circumstances beyond their control. Attitudes of attribution also affect views of social programs to address poverty.

Meanwhile service-learning courses have been shown through research to improve student outcomes for citizenship, empathy, compassion, and understanding of social problems. Students are more likely to exhibit greater "efficacy to make the world a better place" (Carswell). Though this type of goal makes sense for a course at a Catholic university such as Gannon, or Xavier, and many liberal arts schools do include such goals in their missions, traditional-classroom courses often bypass such goals in favor of more academically assessable outcomes.

Students in Dr. Carswell's upper-level capstone psychology class engaged in 30 hours of community service working alongside underprivileged people, while studying poverty in the classroom. One of the outcomes of the course was that students would have a more positive view of people living in poverty, and Dr. Carswell set out to measure whether this was achieved.

Students in the course chose from four community groups to work with, including an after-school program, a food bank, a group that worked with immigrants and refugees, and a group that worked with recently released criminal offenders. The option let students decide what type of work they wanted to do, and many worked with more than one group. Classroom contact hours were reduced, (perhaps a luxury of a senior capstone course) and writing assignments asked students to draw connections between scholarly articles on poverty and experiences at the sites. Attitudes were gauged using pre and post-course completion of what's called the Undergraduate Perceptions of Poverty Tacking Survey.

Dr. Carswell found that student attitudes improved toward social welfare programs, and toward their own willingness to take action to help those in poverty. Student belief that people in poverty have limited access to valuable resources also increased. However, there was no real change in student attitudes toward perceived differences between the poor and non-poor. Nor was there an increase in belief in rights to basic necessities. Dr. Carswell discusses several possible reasons for the non-change in perceptions of in-group/out-group differences, including research that suggests this type of intergroup contact best affects intergroup attitudes when the groups are of equal status and the contact is cooperative in nature.

This last point relates to the ongoing movement within service-learning to effect meaningful change and to avoid perpetuating a classist, "service"-based hierarchy. This broad goal may prove service-learning's most elusive. (See my interview with Dr. Randy Stoecker on this problem http://cat.xula.edu/food/conversation-63/.) And we should also keep in mind that Dr. Carswell's sample was 18 students in one class. Yet, his results are encouraging when we consider the degree to which misperceptions about the poor permeate our society and drive public policy. Dr. Carswell's students and many others who complete courses like these will go on to shape policy and help shift perceptions as they move into professional society.

Though there is much work to be done, examples like these affirm the vital work of service-learning and higher education.

Published on Leave a comment on Election Day Obligations

vote

Today is election day in the U.S. On college campuses across the country we see a direct connection between the purposes of universities and active and engaged citizenship, as many campuses serve as polling places, and many semester-long student, faculty, and university initiatives to increase knowledge of and participation in our democratic process today bear fruit. But even though a day like today clearly reminds of this connection, today also reminds us that this connection is not meant to be a one-time event, every four years. Our universities do have obligations to contribute to a healthy, functioning democracy, and to prepare students to become active citizens and knowledgeable leaders and participants in our democracy. While these obligations are met in many ways across the campus, nowhere is this role fulfilled more directly and effectively than in service learning.

Secretary of Education John B. King recently noted a need for a, "broader definition of civic duty.... I ask teachers and principals and superintendents to help your students learn to be problem solvers who can grapple with challenging issues, such as how to improve their schools, homelessness, air and water pollution, or the tensions between police and communities of color."

Thus, we see the need for one's education to contribute meaningfully to the betterment of our communities and our national society codified in our national discourse, from the top down, in ways perhaps unprecedented in our history of education. While these purposes may have been imbedded in our educational system at some point long ago, we see now a renewed focus and urgency, as the challenges presented by globalization, wealth and income inequality, systemic racism and oppression, mass incarceration, and climate change are recognized as the existential threats they are.

Yet at this time of renewed focus and conviction, we are faced with a decline in the civic knowledge of of our incoming freshmen. Heather Loewecke, a senior manager at Global Learning Beyond School, notes in a recent blog on the website Education Week, that Only 24 percent of high school seniors scored proficient or higher on the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) civics exam. What's more, a college education isn't necessarily rectifying the deficiency. Loewecke also points out that "a 2016 Annenberg Public Policy poll reflected that American adults know very little about the US government, with the majority of respondents unable to answer basic questions. For example, only 26 percent of respondents could correctly identify all three branches of the government."

In a way these disparities between our goals for civic education and our results mirror, or perhaps are just another indicator of, the myriad social inequities we now face. Either way, the situation is cast into stark relief on a day like today, when what seems to be a high-functioning democracy is observed in the bustling and frenetic energy of a presidential election day on college campuses nationwide. And while the spectacle and pageantry of Election Day can fill even the most cynical among us with a certain sense of hope, we must hold fast and remember the difficult challenges that lay ahead once the confetti settles. Today is a time to participate, but also a time for we as educators to recommit ourselves to the civic education of our students, and to fully teaching the critical skills in thinking, communicating, reasoning, and problem solving such an education entails.

-Jeremy Tuman

Published on Leave a comment on A Tool to Solve Your Teaching Problems

by Tiera S. Coston

As teachers, we all want to encourage the development and enhancement of the problem-solving skills of our students.  However, we may have to tap into some problem-solving skill of our own when attempting to create a classroom environment that is engaging, informational and effective in meeting the objectives of our courses.  Many times, this is easier said than done.  But, fear not.  The Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon University has created an excellent resource that may help you to effectively address teaching issues that are commonly encountered in the classroom.  This Solve a Teaching Problem tool works as an easy-to-use, three-step process.  First, you identify the problem that is occurring in your teaching from a listing of issues that are divided into broadly-themed categories.  These categories include: Attitudes & Motivation; Prerequisite Knowledge and Preparedness; Critical Thinking & Applying Knowledge; Group Skills and Dynamics; Classroom Behavior & Etiquette; and Grading and Assessment.

Step 1.

Step 1

Once you identify the problem, the second step is to identify the possible reasons that the problem is occurring.

Step 2.

Step 2

Once you understand why the problem may be occurring, the final step is to explore the strategies provided to determine what may be effective in addressing the problem.

Step 3.

Step 3

It is important to note that these strategies are both evidence-based and practical.  However, as with any strategies, certain ones may work for some while being ineffective for others.  The idea is to think critically about what is happening in your particular class and use the strategies as a guide to create a plan of action for your specific situation.  Happy problem-solving.

Published on Leave a comment on Service Learning and Student “Buy-In.”
Having students decide on what type of community action they wish to engage in is a great way to generate that elusive "buy-in." Student-designed community actions instill a sense of ownership in the project for students, and the learning outcomes for the course may become more deeply instilled, more effective, and longer-lasting. But even in the best-designed service-learning courses, the degree of student involvement, of student choice, in the shape and nature of the community action may be limited. Somewhat counterintuitively, as service-learning courses get refined after numerous semesters, the degree of student involvement in the design of the project may decline, the parameters of the action becoming more rigid and prescribed. This phenomenon presents a key conundrum in service-learning: As our courses strengthen over time and our relationships with community partners smooth, students may become more excluded from the thinking and the process that led to the initial design of the course. As each year we as teachers want for students to understand the purpose behind the actions we design, students become further removed from early days of the course, when our passion for causes melded seamlessly with the design of the project as it took shape.
Students coming into a well-honed service-learning course may find an organized and efficient experience, with community partners who are familiar with the purpose of the course and who know exactly how to funnel service-learners into areas of greatest community need. As any of us who have built courses, and particularly have cultivated community relationships from the ground up, know, students in early versions of a course may have felt a great sense of excitement, but community sites may have been scenes of chaos, with partners busy doing good work, and students left feeling confused, under-utilized, or ineffective in contributing toward that work.
Thus, it's important that we as teachers revisit our initial thinking behind a course each time that we teach it. I recall an early teaching experience (not service-learning) as a graduate teaching assistant, working under a brilliant mentor and teacher, in a literature class. My mentor had a keen sense of the purpose in the course, but I did not. And when I asked him one day what it was that he wanted students to take from the readings, he said that that was a question whose answer he hadn't thought about in a long time. Of course he knew the answer, and over the course the answer would become clear to students as well. But the point is, he hadn't thought about the answer at the outset, and thus hadn't elucidated it to either himself or the students. The purpose was there, just as it almost always is there in these courses that we put our hearts and minds into designing. But without active revisitation, the purpose can fade from its place of centrality. And with a successful service-learning course, the relation between the community action and the course content must be present throughout.
While much literature on service-learning is written toward an audience of teachers, administrators, even community groups, there is less written toward an audience of college students on what service-learning means. One excellent text toward this end is by Christine M. Cress (et al), called Learning through Servi

by Jeremy Tuman

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Having students decide on what type of community action they wish to engage in is a great way to generate that elusive "buy-in." Student-designed community actions instill a sense of ownership in the project for students, and the learning outcomes for the course may become more deeply instilled, more effective, and longer-lasting. But even in the best-designed service-learning courses, the degree of student involvement, of student choice, in the shape and nature of the community action may be limited. Somewhat counterintuitively, as service-learning courses get refined after numerous semesters, the degree of student involvement in the design of the project may decline, the parameters of the action becoming more rigid and prescribed. This phenomenon presents a key conundrum in service-learning: As our courses strengthen over time and our relationships with community partners smooth, students may become more excluded from the thinking and the process that led to the initial design of the course. As each year we as teachers want for students to understand the purpose behind the actions we design, students become further removed from early days of the course, when our passion for causes melded seamlessly with the design of the project as it took shape.

Students coming into a well-honed service-learning course may find an organized and efficient experience, with community partners who are familiar with the purpose of the course and who know exactly how to funnel service-learners into areas of greatest community need. As any of us who have built courses, and particularly have cultivated community relationships from the ground up, know, students in early versions of a course may have felt a great sense of excitement, but community sites may have been scenes of chaos, with partners busy doing good work, and students left feeling confused, under-utilized, or ineffective in contributing toward that work.

Thus, it's important that we as teachers revisit our initial thinking behind a course each time that we teach it. I recall an early teaching experience (not service-learning) as a graduate teaching assistant, working under a brilliant mentor and teacher, in a literature class. My mentor had a keen sense of the purpose in the course, but I did not. And when I asked him one day what it was that he wanted students to take from the readings, he said that that was a question whose answer he hadn't thought about in a long time. Of course he knew the answer, and over the course the answer would become clear to students as well. But the point is, he hadn't thought about the answer at the outset, and thus hadn't elucidated it to either himself or the students. The purpose was there, just as it almost always is there in these courses that we put our hearts and minds into designing. But without active revisitation, the purpose can fade from its place of centrality. And with a successful service-learning course, the relation between the community action and the course content must be present throughout.

While much literature on service-learning is written toward an audience of teachers, administrators, even community groups, there is less written toward an audience of college students on what service-learning means. One excellent text toward this end is by Christine M. Cress (et al), called Learning through Serving. I've included a section of this book as a link here. The book speaks plainly to students about key concepts in service-learning including notions of civic responsibility, reciprocity, global citizenship, and how service-learning differs from volunteerism and other forms of community engagement. Assigning this text or one like it at the beginning of a course might prompt us to revisit our thinking behind the design and purpose of the course from all those years ago. And the more of this information that we share with students, the better chance we have of getting that "buy-in" that we so covet and is so crucial to the success of our course. As a teacher of rhetoric and composition, I stress the importance of clear thinking to my students and the reciprocal relationship between clear thinking and clear writing. As a service-learning teacher, my students may benefit from me applying this idea to myself and to the course, and to sharing the results at the outset.

Published on Leave a comment on Research on Teaching & Learning Summit 2015

Click on the summit logo above for more information, to submit a proposal or to register for the conference.
Click on the summit logo above for more information, to submit a proposal or to register for the conference.

Looking for a conference that is exciting, collegial and a great value? Consider submitting a proposal to the Research on Teaching and Learning Summit. Formerly known as The Georgia Conference on College & University Teaching, the Research on Teaching and Learning Summit has been renamed to underscore the commitment to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, with an emphasis on research and evidence. Now in its third decade, the Summit is designed to provide college and university faculty the opportunity to discuss and share experiences and innovative teaching techniques. It offers concurrent sessions on cutting-edge issues in pedagogy and higher education in a relaxed, congenial atmosphere. There are also opportunities for participants to network with fellow educators.

The deadline for proposals has been extended to December 12, 2014, and the conference will be held on February 20-21, 2015, at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, GA.

Published on Leave a comment on The Common Read, Service Learning, and Social Justice: Forging Connections

There's a harrowing scene in chapter 1 of this year's common read, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, in which young, shaloq-weilding Taliban "enforcers" beat a woman in the street for appearing in public without a proper chadri, the full-length garment that covers the head and face. This and other descriptions of the Taliban in the early parts of the book bring to mind images of an oppressive totalitarian regime more similar to 1984 or Farenheit 451 than to the free society in which most of our freshmen have grown up. That is, these images should remind students of the vast gulf between life in the U.S. and that in a strange, far-away place halfway around the globe. Unfortunately, these images instead bring to mind other images that happen to be saturating the news at the start of the semester: those of heavily armed and armored police confronting protestors in Ferguson, Missouri. Timing here proves to be everything, as a poll of my Freshman Seminar students on what they feel are our most pressing social problems reveals police brutality, racial profiling, and racial bias in our law enforcement and criminal justice systems at the top of the list. And with numbers like 1 in 12 black males age 18-64 spending time in prison, compared to 1 in 87 whites, blacks overall incarcerated at a rate of 6 times that of whites, and blacks comprising 40% of the total prison population, while making up 12% of the U.S. population, it's easy to see why our students are concerned.

In order to work toward social justice, we must first identify where social injustice exists. And with disparities based on race, gender, class, ethnicity existing across the spectrum of our social systems, from education to health care to employment to criminal justice, identifying injustice is as easy now as at any point in our history, and, unfortunately, as easy as idetifying it under systems like the Taliban. But while these gaps are easy to see, to those who simply wish to open their eyes, they also remain equally difficult to address, to reconcile, to alleviate, to end. For every pious organization out on the streets fighting to alleviate suffering, to mend communities, to help people, there are powerful historical realities, political forces, and financial interests at work to keep the status quo in place, to keep reality fixed and unchangeable.

A discussion of life under the Taliban is a perfectly suitable way to begin a dialogue with students about the society in which we are preparing them to inhabit roles of leadership, our own society. And as we move toward our service learning projects in the sping, it's worth remebering the underlying imbalances at the heart of any attempt to help improve our community. Ultimately, if our service is effective, then we will have eliminated the very need for our services. Those being "served" will inhabit their rightful place as equals in our society, wanting for nothing that others have only because of the conditions of their birth. This type of transformation, both of our society and within the mindset our students, can never come solely from doing, but through thinking as well. Hence, the learning in service learning. Learning comes through teaching, and fortunately for them, that is what we are here to do.

J. Tuman