Maybe oral transmission of ideas requires some flesh. The parable. The chalkboard, or maybe these days a set of graphics – the sort of “lecture by powerpoint” in which technology aids but can also dominate. The Wordle at the top of this blog as I post is another case in point: a picture – even, like a Wordle, a picture composed of words – can be more powerful than a paragraph or two of prose. We need to embody our ideas (and this link takes you to something I’ve just started reading about).
But I was challenged yesterday in a conversation with Tom Tyler (check out also his cyberchimp site, and the resources, for example, attached to various Brookes modules such as this) about how one might use or could use or should use personal anecdote in a teaching situation. How does the word become flesh?
First of all, a warning from a marking perspective: it is very hard to fill up a lecture with personal insight (and it could be argued that that is the most useful thing about a lecture!) and then to discourage the unsubstantiated “I feel” comments that I’m ranting about in a previous post. I need to be very clear about how academic writing explains an academic position, and how that might be illuminated by a personal anecdote but that the anecdote is, in some ways, a marginalium, a side-line.
But then to three different examples, all of which I have used in classes this year or last, presented at this point (until I return to them) without much comment:
A child from one particular ethnic group has come to school with the clear message that getting dirty is inappropriate. Planting seeds in a Spring project presents difficulties, and his key worker – who belongs to the same ethnic and religious group – spends time modelling working with compost, then putting some on the child’s hand, and so on, until the child is confident enough to participate in a seed-planting activity with a group.
I am with Maisy, my granddaughter, who takes a wooden knight from the castle and picks up his sword saying “I snip you bed, Papa. A knight snip you bed with sword.”
I am with a group of children going on a Forest School trip. One of the children, then more of them, spot a deer over on one side of the wood. It is standing quite still, chewing at some leaves it has just pulled from a bush. When it sees it, it pauses, then jumps – not quite ‘prongs’ – off into the undergrowth. I say to the child that first spotted the deer (rather foolishly) “Did you see that?” and then “What do you think it was?” He replies, “A kangaroo.” Not a bad guess: this is a deer without the antlers he expects a deer to have.
So the questions are: can I present any of these as valid illustrations of pedagogical points? Is this “inaccurate research” really useful for my students – and if it is, how do they use it? And when it comes to NSS survey results what makes a tutor “interesting,” or “enthusiastic” and a course “intellectually stimulating”? What is fun – and what part does it play in learning in HE?
We tutors might have different views from our students, of course. It might be good to know…
nicktomjoe 