Today’s students

1. Today’s students How do they learn? Composed by Lucie Johnson, 6/4/00, revised 10/18/00 Next

2. SECTION I • STUDENT CULTURE AND TEACHER CULTURE

3. The student learning culture: • Multiprocessing • Image and screen literacy • Bricolage approach, bias toward action • Flexibility • Concrete, applied bend

4. What the teacher culture sees in students: • Short attention span, demand for edutainment • Little interest in reading • Tendency to stay at the surface, weak theoretical understanding • Weak integration of the self • Weak synthesis and abstraction

5. What might be the teachers’ learning styles? The students? • Look at the websites below, what learning style characteristics are yours? Your students’? • Take the Keirsey temperament sorter at http://www.keirsey.com/scripts/newkts.cgi (an MBTI equivalent). • Explore the “Theory into Practice” database at http://www.gwu.edu/~tip/

6. Multiprocessing Dominance of image and screen media Bricolage approach, bias toward action Used to rapid change Concrete, applied bend One-point concentration Dominance of reading Stresses theoretical coherence Values tradition Values abstract thinking What learning strategies might be favored by these two groups?

7. Learning as acculturation • The teacher’s culture is quite different from the student’s • Teachers tend to have strengths where the students have weaknesses and vice-versa • Hence a process of mutual acculturation is needed

8. Acculturation and development • One could look as students as in need of development, to become better abstract thinkers etc… but there are ways in which the student culture is valid, and an adaptive response to a rapidly changing world. • Teachers also can learn from the student culture -especially in terms of adaptation to change- while holding on to their important values.

9. Teaching as bridging cultures • Teaching requires communication between cultures • Teaching is the creation of a common space in which both cultures can meet.

10. The process of acculturation (adapted from Edward T. Banks) • Stages of acculturation: • Conformity (students to teachers, teachers to students) • Dissonance and conflict/resistance • Introspection / concern with the other side’s judgment • Synergy

11. What strategies might help acculturation?

12. SECTION II • STUDENT CULTURE AND POST-MODERNISM

13. Bricolage (tinkering)A term coined by Claude Levi-Strauss in “The Savage Mind” • The bricoleur or bricoleuse • Performs tasks with objects already at hand, makes structures out of events whereas the scientist creates events by means of structures. • Bricolage deals in signs, whereas science deals in concepts • Concepts seek to be transparent as to reality, whereas signs stay opaque

14. Transparence, accessibility and opacity • The Macintosh and Windows are iconic opaque systems because they give us no access to the underlying reality (code, true way things happen). Yet those semiotic systems are very easy for us to use -hence we experience them as transparent. • For example, moving a file into the trash, an easily accessible icon, w/o relationship to the underlying reality. • We often mistake accessibility for transparence.

15. The seduction of opacity • Many of what we think we know -many of our “concepts”, “theories”, “belief systems” are in fact opaque. Opacity, traps us, and we are willing captives (Baudrillard). • This is true for us as for our students. We use words, concepts, without probing what is underneath. We mistake the surface for the deeper reality. We may prefer simulacre to reality.

16. What are some examples of this opacity? • In everyday life? • In our professional life? • In how and what we teach students?

17. How might we remedy this? Do we want to?

18. SECTION III • SOME RESOURCES

19. Learning styles page • http://www.fln.vcu.edu/Intensive/LearningStrategies.html • http://www.msg.ucr.edu/it/3a22.html • http://www.colorado.edu/UCB/AcademicAffairs/GraduateSchool/gtp/print/kolb.html

20. The End