Teaching and Democratic Values in Higher Education

28 Teaching and Democratic Values in Higher Education Allen F. Harrison "What you see is what you get — consistency , persistency, and mediocrity in classrooms."1 I. Every Wednesday evening, in the small Southwestern state college where I once taught, I would spend a few minutes at intervals roaming the halls, peering in at classrooms, listening to the drone of professorial voices, trying to get a sense of the process operating in those rooms. My senior students had been set to work in small groups for a half hour or so, sharing the learning of techniques for business policy analysis. It was during those periods that I would wander. After a number of these interludes I began to formulate several observation-based principles, which in time tended toward a generalized hypothesis. My observations were these: 1. In the typical college classroom, very little happens. Professors lecture, occasionally scrawl something on a chalkboard, or show something on a screen with an overhead projector. Students take notes or don't. Apart from minor body adjustments on the parts of all concerned, that is ah that happens in a typical class period of, say, fifty to seventy-five minutes. 2. Students invariably sit in rows and columns of schoolroom chairs. Most of the males slouch. Professors invariably stand at a lectern. No one moves, ever, during a class, except for the occasional random adjustment mentioned above. 3. The affect of the students, even from a rear view of them, is like an emanation. It is palpable. It is of boredom . 4. Virtually every observed classroom communicates, through these phenomena, a quality of generalized, ritualized , formalistic purposelessness, a quality of simply getting something over with. In time, intrigued by all this, I attempted to build a conceptual model of the classroom, using a brainstorming technique that I often employ in model-building workshops.2 Starting with a simple observation, or a set of them such as I had already made, the technique is to generate as many explanations as possible for the observation and then to conceptualize an explanatory or descriptive model that will allow for all the explanations. A complete list of all the possible explanations would be far too long; but here are a few of the more obvious ones: 1. Professors lecture because their responsibility is to cover material and there are precious few alternatives to lecturing for delivery of the material. 2. Professors lecture because to do otherwise would be to lose control. 3. Professors believe students wouldn't understand any classroom procedure other than lecturing. 4. Professors believe they get paid to "teach" (i.e., do all the work) and activities such as small group work or discussions , which cause the students to work, are not fair to them. (A senior professor actually said this to me once.) 5. Students come into class expecting to be bored by lecturing , therefore they are bored and emerge bored, and professors simply play into such expectations. Given these and numerous other possible explanations for my observations, the model that emerges is an obvious one. It squares firmly with much basic learning theory: P = f([Ei + E 2 ] x R ) Here, P stands for professorial performance, E i is professorial experience, E2 is professorial expectations, and R represents student response to the process. In the classrooms I had been observing, student response had been quite passive , which is to say virtually nonexistent, hence as a factor in the formula it had little or no significance. The hypothesis that arises from the model—compellingly , I believe—is this: University classroom teaching practice is in general an artifact of professors having learned to teach under traditional pedagogical regimes. Traditional methods tend to be authoritarian, non-participative, curriculum-centered rather than student- or problem-centered. Hence they stand in opposition to democratic values, paradoxically the foundation of the society in which teaching institutions are embedded. The probability is that such observations, leading to the same hypothesis, could be made as a matter of course through roaming the halls of most other institutions of higher learning . Classroom behavior on the part of professors is not a Education and Culture Fall, 1994 Vol. XI No. 2 TEACHING AND DEMOCRATIC...