Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Academic Herofication vs. Academic A-Teams
To be honest, it still amazes me that I am teaching at the college level. I was the kid who never wanted to go to school, would rush through his homework, and rarely gave a thought to what I was learning until it was test time. Not that I didn't get good grades, mind you; I just never pushed myself to go beyond what was expected. Looking back, I guess it was my senior year of high school that made me realize that I didn't do everything that I could -- I was ranked lucky number 13 in my class but I knew that I had had the potential to do better. That ranking was the AHA! moment, when I realized what all those previous grades had meant, in at least one sense. In college, I was determined to do better... and I did. I quickly learned that "better" meant depth, not necessarily breadth, of knowledge and that I would have to make hard academic choices about my academic focus.
I started thinking about all of this the other day when a friend emailed, asking about whether or not it was appropriate to categorize her research into historical periods; would creating periods essentialize history? My response was that you must set parameters for data to have meaning. Despite the urge to "know how everything connects," an urge I tried to satisfy in my college studies, we simply can't know everything. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have academic communities. Everyone gets to work on their piece of the puzzle so that future generations can synthesize that information into a more comprehensive knowledge. Rarely do we get to see the final product of our actual research.
Bummer, no? Then again, if the questions are really that important, wouldn't a quick answer be a bummer too? James Leowen (2007) talks about "herofication" in Lies My Teacher Told Me, arguing that history textbooks often teach about "heros" when that classification is often dubious. Focusing on "heros" often limits our talk to "great [white, European, heterosexual, nondisabled] men" to the exclusion of others. But can we borrow his terminology to describe what we do as scholars? Do we think of ourselves as "heros" in our quest for knowledge? And if so, what does that do to our worldview?
By now, you may have noticed that I do not think of myself as the hero of any work. Indeed, I was quite happy to learn from some of my students the other day when they discussed the literacies needed to be successful in each of their content areas. If I, the professor, learned from my students, does that make me a bad professor? Theoretically, I think most teachers would say no. But how many times can you think of that you learned from your students? So often, we design easily gradable assignments, where we already know the answer. What if we made it our mission to present problems to our students at all levels of education that pull them into our academic communities? What would that look like?
To be sure, I don't know. I'm trying in some various ways, though. What I suspect is that the "18 year old Jason" would have been more motivated to contribute to such a community rather than (unsuccessfully) chase girls. I suspect that truly aligning coursework with questions in a particular field would spur meaningful progress. Finally, I suspect that our cultural understanding of knowledge would change; we'd see students who were valued for their intelligence and interest rather than for their abilities not to get into trouble. Maybe we should foster Academic A-Teams rather than heros.
I started thinking about all of this the other day when a friend emailed, asking about whether or not it was appropriate to categorize her research into historical periods; would creating periods essentialize history? My response was that you must set parameters for data to have meaning. Despite the urge to "know how everything connects," an urge I tried to satisfy in my college studies, we simply can't know everything. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have academic communities. Everyone gets to work on their piece of the puzzle so that future generations can synthesize that information into a more comprehensive knowledge. Rarely do we get to see the final product of our actual research.
Bummer, no? Then again, if the questions are really that important, wouldn't a quick answer be a bummer too? James Leowen (2007) talks about "herofication" in Lies My Teacher Told Me, arguing that history textbooks often teach about "heros" when that classification is often dubious. Focusing on "heros" often limits our talk to "great [white, European, heterosexual, nondisabled] men" to the exclusion of others. But can we borrow his terminology to describe what we do as scholars? Do we think of ourselves as "heros" in our quest for knowledge? And if so, what does that do to our worldview?
By now, you may have noticed that I do not think of myself as the hero of any work. Indeed, I was quite happy to learn from some of my students the other day when they discussed the literacies needed to be successful in each of their content areas. If I, the professor, learned from my students, does that make me a bad professor? Theoretically, I think most teachers would say no. But how many times can you think of that you learned from your students? So often, we design easily gradable assignments, where we already know the answer. What if we made it our mission to present problems to our students at all levels of education that pull them into our academic communities? What would that look like?
To be sure, I don't know. I'm trying in some various ways, though. What I suspect is that the "18 year old Jason" would have been more motivated to contribute to such a community rather than (unsuccessfully) chase girls. I suspect that truly aligning coursework with questions in a particular field would spur meaningful progress. Finally, I suspect that our cultural understanding of knowledge would change; we'd see students who were valued for their intelligence and interest rather than for their abilities not to get into trouble. Maybe we should foster Academic A-Teams rather than heros.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)