Respecting Student Thinkers

I found many inspired and, I think, accurate appraisals of our students' relationship to learning in this Chronicle of Higher Education article (Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology, January 23, 2009).

So as not to gum it up with my own observation, I'll load you up here with some provocative sound bites:

Today's students know full well that authorities can be found for every position and any knowledge claim, and consequently the students are dubious (privately, that is) about anything we claim to be true or important... Of course, this new epistemology does not imply that our students have become skilled arbiters of information and interpretation. It simply means that they arrive at college with well-established methods of sorting, doubting, or ignoring the same...

So this new epistemology produces a rather odd kind of student — one who appears polite and dutiful but who cares little about the course work, the larger questions it raises, or the value of living an examined life. And it produces such students in overwhelming abundance...

Polite, dutiful, and disengaged students deserve neither blame nor scorn. They have become exactly what one would expect of those born during the information age and reared in America's profoundly pragmatic culture...

And we need to begin by respecting our students (and the wider public) not just as persons but as the arbiters of knowledge that they have become. Specifically, we must respect students as thinkers, even though their thinking skills may be undeveloped and their knowledge base shallow...

Respecting students as thinkers means we need to reveal, not hide, the intellectual journeys we have taken, and make transparent the intellectual transformations we have undergone...

Back when students held us in awe, sat willingly for lectures, and assigned us the work of deciding what knowledge was worth knowing, we organized our classes around our disciplines. We chose what knowledge needed to be conveyed to students in what order. Now that our students assign us no more authority than anyone else, show no patience for lectures, and decide what's worth knowing themselves, we need to reorganize our classes. We need to teach as if our students were colleagues from another department. That means determining what our colleagues may already know, building from that shared knowledge, adapting pre-existing analytic skills, then connecting those fledgling skills and knowledge to a deeper understanding of the discipline we love. In other words, we need to approach our classrooms as public intellectuals eager to share our insights graciously with a wide audience of fellow citizens...

...Perhaps those professors assume that an absence of complaints indicates that their pedagogy is "good enough." But an absence of complaints may indicate only how accomplished students are at appearing polite and dutiful (especially when the professor's grade distribution suits them)...