IN
DEFENSE OF THE COLLEGE LECTURE
The
posting below looks at the continuing importance of the college
lecture and the role that good
students listening can play in its
success. It is by Fred D. White is an associate
professor of English
at
Copyright © 2001 mercurynews
and wire service sources. All Rights
Reserved. http://www.bayarea.com
Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick
Reis
reis@stanford.edu
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IN DEFENSE OF THE COLLEGE LECTURE
By
Fred D. White
Why
has the college lecture been getting such a bad rap recently?
William
Honan, in a recent New York Times piece, ``The
College
Lecture,
Long Derided, May Be Fading,'' argues that students and
faculty alike are cheerily sending
the lecture down its road to
extinction. No less august an authority
than
President
Judith Rodin insists that the ``computerization of
intellectual life'' has made the lecture
obsolete.
I
could not disagree more.
As
a university professor, I am aware that a sizable number of
students will lapse into instant
narcosis the moment their professors
take the podium. There are
usually two reasons for this: poor
lecturing or poor listening.
Poor
lecturing results from unskilled delivery or from material that
fails to engage -- such as
rehashing of what's already in the
textbooks. Colleges, alas, have their
share of poor lecturers, which
is a shame because a training program
could help otherwise gifted new
faculty hone up on this venerable and
powerful pedagogical tool.
But
poor listening habits are most responsible for bringing down the
lecture as a learning tool. The
situation is paradoxical, because
lecturing is one of the finest ways I
know of for developing
listening skills in the first place.
First-year
college students need to regard listening as a skill (or
an art) that must be exercised daily,
and with deliberation. One of
the keenest experiences derived from
the lecture is that of a rich
audio-visual interplay: The lecturer
presents an insight; engaged
students will not only understand it
but also assimilate it, make it
their own.
Dr.
Rodin pits lecturing against mentoring, but why not see these
modes of teaching as
complementary, mutually reinforcing? And if
you're going to pit the lecture
against the Internet, you'd best
begin with the classroom itself.
Four walls, linear seating and its
resulting protocols (raising your hand
to speak, not speaking unless
spoken to) -- how
a gifted lecturer stimulates
multi-sensorial response.
It
is beyond dispute that educators should search for new ways to
engage young minds, just as it is
beyond dispute that the Internet is
a revolutionary learning tool. But
let me mention just a few things
about the old-fashioned lecture
that I consider equally indispensable.
As
an undergraduate at the U of Minnesota in the '60s, most of my
courses were lecture-based -- and I
almost always loved them, even
when the lectures were tedious,
even when the professor droned. More
often than not, they set off
intellectual fireworks in my head. I
would write notes excitedly -- not
taking dictation (the most useless
kind of note taking), but trying
to capture insights that were
spewing forth from my nascent
critical consciousness. This is what it
means to listen well in college.
What
is more, I knew that I was in the presence of a scholar -- not
just a teacher, but someone who
actually contributed to the body of
knowledge being studied. That is a
powerful ethos for an educator to
project onto a young adult,
especially when the professor, in the
course of her lecture, explains to
students what her research
specifically hopes to accomplish, what
the dissenters have had to
say, and so on.
Ironically,
the least useful classes for me at the time were the
discussion sections, conducted by
teaching assistants who were
knowledgeable for the most part, but
lacked the gravitas of
professors.
The
lecturing professor also conveys a personality and is not just an
oral conduit for information that
could have been obtained from a
website or book. Even in formal,
no-feedback-from-class lectures
inside cavernous auditoriums, a
skilled lecturer often is quirky,
charismatic, surprisingly inventive; in
short, memorable.
To
give just one example: My anthropology professor, E. Adamson
Hoebel, lecturing in a 500-seat
auditorium, used to sing tribal songs
to us in their respective native
languages; would enact a ritual
dance; would augment his lecture
with slides and recordings. Three
lectures a week, and every one of
them ended with applause from us
brain-bedazzled sophomores.
All
of the newer strategies (mentoring, conferencing, small-group
interaction) are valuable, but that is
no excuse for abandoning the
lecture, which humanizes learning in
a way that computerized learning
cannot.
Listening
to lectures is not passive -- it is active, and it is
interactive, to use the arch-buzzword of
computerdom. We interface
with the lecturer's brain to
assimilate understanding in our own
brains. Note-taking is an excellent
strategy for linking one with the
other.
The
name of the game is intellectual excitement: That isn't just a
teacher up there lecturing, but a
shaper of knowledge itself.
Students
are not just the passive, plebian receptors of this
knowledge but a new breed of
assimilators -- and soon it is going to
be their turn.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred
D. White is an associate professor of English at
University. In 1997, he received the
Louis and Dorina Brutocao
Award
for Teaching Excellence, and his
textbook, ``The Well-Crafted
Argument,''
was published earlier this year.