Persona

What do we really know about our students' needs and motivations?  

We talk a lot, in higher education, about the role of the teacher. What are we going to do to engage the students...enhance their experience...prepare them for their careers...support their learning journey. 

I find much of this discourse increasingly unreal. I wonder if anyone, anywhere, thinks that the college lecturer can accomplish all of this for their class of students. Do you meet 8 students in a seminar? 80 students in a lecture room? 420 students in a converted cinema? If you challenged me to ENGAGE all 420 of them, I could produce a plan - but it would require changed ways of working in my course, my department, and my institution (after all...the atomised teacher does not control things like timetables, room bookings, the permissions for IT)

Several colleagues in my ONL group ask their students in the first session 'what are you hoping to accomplish on this course?' This is not a trick question. Some students have unrealistic expectations. Some students have reasonable goals, that will nonetheless change during their studies. Some students were good at XYZ in high school and so a degree in XYZ is the next step. Some students have a vague sense that they want to reach the end of the first year. Others are very career focused. Most, probably, have no idea why they are there. Or they may have reasons that do not seem 'respectable'.   

Learned helplessness and how it works to our advantage

How would I have answered the question? I was driven by curiosity to do a BSc in Astrophysics. There were two components to this curiosity. i) I wanted to intervene in the controversies about human significance in the universe. If I was going to keep up my end of a debate about the human centre of the world, I had better know about relativity and cosmology (or so I thought at the time). ii) I was very bad at maths and physics at high school, and I wanted to prove that I could catch up.  These sound like 'good' reasons to me - but I might have been afraid to express them in front of a severe old professor of quantum physics, on day 1 of the course. 

But here's the point. I DID know why I was there even if I couldn't say it out loud. Paradoxically, in England, the more we charge for university study, the more we meet students who - I suspect - have no reason based on curiosity.  By raising the COST of a degree, we have created a sense that the degree, in itself, is its own VALUE.  Once the course becomes a transaction, then the student has surrendered. A rather impoverished contract is now in place. You pay the fees, I will Deliver a Course. It's up to you whether you acquire mental furniture or not. This is not, ideally, how to teach biology ... or Latin ... or archaeology ... but it hands all the power back to the teacher.  We can treat the students as if they were blank slates. 

The teacher cannot be responsible for the student experience 

We can create the milieu - the SPLACE - and we can fill it with affordances for the students to use, adapt, and so on. We can initiate students into the rules of splace and how to navigate it. We can do this in the best way we know for an apprentice to acquire expert behaviours. But we ask too much of teachers when we neglect the other side of the bargain. The students have to bring something to the splace, and they have to find a way of living inside it. 

Does this mean that all the students need highly developed skills of e-literacy, metacognition and reflection? All of these aptitudes we project onto them (mainly when we find that they haven't learned what we hoped?)  Not necessarily. I do not mind if a student can do the assignment, even after minimal engagement. They must have found a way to the intended outcome without the scaffolding I made. This student is a success. The students who boycott splace, and then under-perform, and then complain that it was a bad experience...I regret the time they have wasted, but I cannot learn the course for them - this has to be their work. They have to adapt to what they find, and make the best use of it. I cannot personalise the learning of 420 students - it is not possible, as mathematics, pedagogy or morality. The students can, on the other hand, personalise their own learning journey.