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| The
Culture We Have and the Culture We Want: A Commentary on Hugh Sockett's
Creating a Culture for the Scholarship of Teaching By Stephen Chew |
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Culture We Have and the Culture We Want: A Commentary on Hugh Sockett's
Creating a Culture for the Scholarship of Teaching By Stephen Chew |
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© Copyright 2000 by Stephen Chew. The right to make additional exact
copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is
hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require
permission of the author. |
Skills and Innovation The scholarship of teaching and learning sees teaching skills, to a great extent, as discipline specific. Disciplinary differences in approaching teaching and learning reflect the differences of the disciplines themselves. Beyond subject matter, disciplines differ in how they establish knowledge and test ideas. Students also differ in how easily they can learn and apply concepts within a particular discipline. A constructivist approach, advocated by Sockett, recognizes that students have preconceived notions that are resistant to change about any discipline. Becoming an effective teacher involves the understanding of the specific ideas students find difficult to understand and the skill to overcome common misconceptions. While Sockett does not say so explicitly, an implication of the assumption that teaching skills are generic is that many faculty suffer from "fantasia" (Shulman, 1999), the mistaken belief that they are more effective teachers than they really are. This fantasia is the result of the fact that many faculty are willing to accept incomplete or ambiguous evidence as sufficient proof of student learning. If faculty held the same standards of evidence for student learning as they hold for traditional research, then we would be better teachers. Sockett also identifies what in my mind is the most insidious drawback of the prevailing academic culture: it impedes experimentation and innovation in teaching. Innovative teaching is not as valued as innovative research. But beyond that, failure in teaching, in the form of negative evaluations, is typically seen as a personal failure. In traditional research, if a researcher tries an innovative approach that is well-reasoned and has good potential for success, but it fails, we still see it as a useful and productive endeavor. If a teacher tries a new teaching approach that is well-reasoned and has good potential for success, but it fails, it is seen as a personal failing on the part of the teacher. Few junior faculty would dare risk negative evaluations that might come from a new teaching approach. (Senior faculty, on the other hand, can interpret bad evaluations as resentful students being made to work hard.)
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