Category Archives: Alex's Teaching Tidbits

Alex's Teaching Tidbits, Comment-fishing

Learning Frowns and Teaching Moments

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It’s something of a pattern in your life as a teacher, though not one with high frequency. Once a  semester, maybe? Hard to tell. Though it’s a striking occurrence, the overall emotional impact is stronger than the situation’s specifics. You remember some of the most recent cases and you think a lot about them when they happen. But it’s not something constantly on your mind. It’s parallel to your core experience as a teacher, not the main thing you do.

Though it happens on occasion, it’s not something you can accurately predict. It’s neither surprising nor predictable.

You’d get some frowns during class. That part is common enough and you’ve learnt to interpret these frowns as moments of puzzlement, which lead to learning. They’re directed at you, the teacher. “How dare you challenge what we know?” So far, a pretty common case. Happens every week, probably. In William Perry’s classic description, you might guess this marks the transition from one position to another. The usual stuff of teaching.

But then, there’s this one student whose frowns become more insistent. Often a young woman (but you mostly teach young women anyway). Chances are that she comes from outside your field and took your class for quite specific a reason. Not the all-too-typical “trying to get an A in this class”. It’s not about raising a GPA. But she could be saying “I’m an A student” (to which you reply “well, you’re A student”). Or maybe it’s a completely different situation, having little to do with grades or signs of academic success. This dimension isn’t a necessary part of the pattern. Especially since the sample size is so small.

As her frowns get more frequent, other reactions might come up. Including vocal ones, possibly in a confrontational tone, demanding straight answers to what appears to her to be straight questions. Frowns have escalated into frustration. Your empathy might make you feel this student’s pain, but these comments aren’t a problem. They express something important.

What may be worrisome, to you, based on experience, is when this student tries to get others on “her side”. If she succeeds, it can be toxic for the classroom dynamic. But it can also be part of the peer-learning process.

Then, one day, you receive an email. A strongly worded email. Maybe the student is making demands. Maybe she’s more conciliatory. Those things vary quite a bit. But, still from experience, you recognise this email as a step in an important process. Your temptation might be to reply on the spot but you realise that a realtime interaction is more appropriate and you try to make an appointment with this student. Best possible use of your office hours.

If there’s a bit of time elapsing between receiving this email and getting the student’s visit, you might feel a bit of tension during classroom interactions, though you’re quite confident that something good will come out of all this. Of course, the tension was already there, what with all those frowns. But now things could be getting trickier. Or not. With experience, you’ve learnt to take these situations for what they are. Learning experiences.

By the time this learner comes to see you in your office, you have a fairly good grasp of how her semester has been going. But you still need more insight into the situation, so you start by asking a broad question.

And something clicks.

At this point, it’s clear to both people involved that you’re trying to help and the learner’s ready to learn. Even if you might be a tad bit defensive about some of the comments made, it’s quickly shifting into a teaching moment.

In some cases, it could also be an informal advising session. At other times, it might be closer to a discussion of pedagogical principles. But it’s clearly not anything like a griping session, though the frowns might continue throughout the whole interaction.

There’s a phase in which you learn the specifics of this particular learner’s case. Sometimes it might be quite personal, including family background, cultural identity (you teach in quite diverse a context), or “hopes and dreams”. Sometimes it’s restricted to the learner’s academic projects. But you come to understand this one pattern, this one thing which can help this one learner find the key to unlock her learning experience. Even if it plucks at your empathetic strings, you get to focus on the learning experience.

Obviously, you take the time it takes. This is one reason it’d be strange to think of your teaching work as being paid by the hour. This might be the most valuable part of your work and the most rewarding. But you don’t get paid extra if you do it well and you don’t get paid less if you don’t do it. It’s the teaching equivalent of bedside manners and it probably requires experience more than pointed advice. You may write about this type of thing to help other teachers. You might use some examples from these experiences if you act as a pedagogical advisor. But there’s no guarantee that others can learn directly from your experiences.

It’s on a case-by-case basis.

 

Alex's Teaching Tidbits, Cyberspace Sociology, Linkfest

Playful Gamification?

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In part because of this EdTechTeam badge (and because we’ve been working on badges), I’m encouraged to write something about my involvement in using “game principals” to motivate learners positively. This despite the fact that I’ve been quite critical (on the record, on more than one occasion) about gamification, especially in education. (In this context, “Serious Games” are a separate issue.)

So here’s what I did last night, which does relate to game mechanics, in some ways, and did sound like it was quite motivating…

Prepping for the final exam, students in Cyberspace Sociology course http://learn.enkerli.com/category/coursenotes–2/cyberspace-sociology/ had to create lists of threads and themes from the semester. Nothing gamified about this, though (as with every activity in this class) learners were posting their lists to a peer-rated forum.

Made a scattered map out of all of these items, to serve as a master list of sorts. As per my own policy, exam questions may only come from these items.
SOCI221 Threads and Themes

So… here’s the playful and game-like part: I allowed students to take off some items, but they had to team up and select only two items per team, for elimination.

After teams debated list items for a while, we went through all the teams and tallied the “votes” for those items which should be avoided on the exam. One item had the largest number of team votes, so I deleted it right away (after discussing it). Three items had the same number of team votes so we did a quick raised hand poll and noticed that one of the terms could stay (only a few hands went up to eliminate it). Chatting with the class, we eventually decided to eliminate both of the two remaining terms.

Here are the other terms which had at least one team vote:

  • Cyberasociality
  • Algorithm
  • Centrality
  • Cyborg
  • Recursive Public
  • Intersectionality
  • Onground

How does this qualifying as using game mechanics, if individual students didn’t receive extrinsic motivators, individually? That’s where it becomes somewhat subtle. I did use a type of “Carrot & Stick” approach, in that they had to go through the classroom activity or get stuck with things they didn’t want to have on the exam. But the real effect of the activity is that students were discussing most of the items in the list, explaining things to one another. Sneakily getting students to do a bit of peer instruction isn’t something I’m ashamed of.

One effect of the activity was similar to gamification effects. Members of a team who had been the only one to vote for “centrality” to be eliminated were experiencing the small frustration of having “lost”. Given my empathy levels, it didn’t feel extremely good at first. But after a quick explanation of the concept, the teammates sounded relieved.

The major effect, in my observation, was that the atmosphere became remarkably playful. To me, playfulness in the classroom brings a lot to the rapport established between people involved. As with rapport, it has to do with mutual respect. And I really care about playful living.

To me, playfulness (open play) is the mirror image to gamification (game mechanics). I’d go as far as to say that gamification is “gaming without playfulness”.

After that very informal “team vote” activity, students had to discuss items which still weren’t clear, identifying some things which were obscure to everyone in their team. We then discussed those items with the whole class, getting people to provide explanations.

Something to note about that “team vote” activity is that in no way does it ensure appropriate representation of diverse voices. In other words, it wasn’t really meant to be “democratic”. But it did allow for diverse forms of participation. Some learners involved did a lot more peer-teaching than they had ever done during the semester. The extrinsic motivation (to show off, to get a good grade…) is already there, so I didn’t need to add much of an incentive.

The resulting list is the basis of a collaborative study guide, to which students are contributing in diverse ways. And it helps me prepare an exam which many might consider fair.

Alex's Teaching Tidbits, Comment-fishing, Linkfest

ATT8: Alternatives to Textbooks

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[It’s potentially dangerous for me to blog about this since I have many ideas on the topic. But thinking about teaching is something I enjoy so these “tidbits” are almost a release…]

I use textbooks in two of my courses: introductory sociology and introductory cultural anthropology. More accurately, I still use textbooks. But I do want to switch away from textbooks in these courses.

In some contexts, such as a discussion of the usefulness of textbooks in anthropology, I’m almost defensive in my description of the role textbooks play in my teaching. It’s a sign of ambivalence, of course. But the fact that I still use textbooks shows that something weighs in their favour, Despite being problematic, textbooks still seem useful to me and I have yet to find an alternative.

But I think a solution is finally on the horizon. It’s a bit difficult to explain and may seem farfetched or even crazy, but I’m getting more comfortable with it. So it may be the right time to put it in writing.

A few words about how I use and choose textbooks…

I perceive textbooks as shared resources, rallying points, conversation starters. study guides, “lecture notes”, and sources for examples. Textbooks aren’t ideal for any of this, but they’re rather unique in fulfilling all of these functions.

Textbooks are also expected to be part of at least some courses. The two main introductory courses I teach are of that type. If I were not to use textbooks at all, I’d have to propose something else.

Which leads me to thinking about existing alternatives to textbooks…

A relatively uncommon practice, but one I’ve experienced as a student, is for instructors to teach from extensive coursenotes, without making use of shared texts. In such a case, the “content” is “delivered” in the classroom. Without being common practice, it wasn’t unknown at Université de Montréal, where I did my B.Sc. in anthro (back in the early 1990s). I suspect that this approach was somewhat common in French-speaking contexts a while before that. It avoids all problems associated with textbooks, but it has none of the advantages textbooks have. In fact, because it puts so much emphasis on the “sage on the stage” model, it’s incompatible with my teaching philosophy.

Apart from my main “intros”, all of my courses are built on “coursepacks”. A coursepack is a custom package of primary texts which weren’t originally connected to one another. I like this approach in any course and have been thinking about ways to shift my intros to something of a coursepack model.

The traditional coursepack model is to send a bunch of texts to a third-party service which will make all the necessary enquiries to ensure copyright compliance and then print coursepacks to be sold at the bookstore. At Concordia, the university bookstore currently handles the whole process. Eastman Systems used to do it. In both cases, the process requires a lot of lead time. It’s thus more flexible than the textbook model but remains quite constraining. As I do most of my reading online, it’s actually far from ideal. But it’s an interesting alternative to publishers’ textbooks.

I have yet to find a way to use coursepacks in my main “intros”. I know some colleagues do it and I could invest time in such a solution. But the convenience of traditional textbooks still seems to me to outweigh the costs of the textbook model. (Yes, this is where I get defensive.)

In some contexts, I was able to use a model which was an alternative to traditional coursepacks, using online reserve instead. In those situations, I could select texts during the semester and have them on online reserve quickly after that. It was close to an ideal model, especially paired with the collaborative syllabus. But it requires three things which I don’t currently have: reasonable copyright laws, access to a service dealing with copyright compliance, and efficient electronic reserve. I can get somewhat close to this approach at Concordia, but some pieces are still missing.

It’s also possible to use “readers”, which are midway between coursepacks and textbooks since they contain primary texts but those are edited together and published like textbooks. I haven’t used readers. To me, they have some of the advantages coursepacks have (multiple voices, intellectual depth) but also most of the disadvantages of textbooks, including a lack of flexibility and all the issues associated with commercial publishing.

Of course, there are people who simply post files online without worrying about legal implications. This is obviously a non-solution, as failure to comply with copyright laws, however arcane these laws may be, can have dire consequences on learning institutions.

Which leads me to the first key issue I identify with textbooks: “the content industry”. As I said two years ago:

If your only business is “content,” now might be a good time to think about diversifying.

(My approach to “content” has long been the basis for diverse discussions, including one which got me cited by tycho garen in such august company as John Gruber and Merlin Mann. Incidentally, I’ve been listening to a number of 5by5 podcasts, including those by Mann and Gruber. Textbooks have been a topic of discussion in those podcasts and part of my thinking may have shifted because of them.)

Got lots to say about content, which is part of the reason why I was worried this post may become overwhelming. But I’ll summarize the situation as much as I can.

For the past ten to fifteen years, an increasing number of people have been made aware of problems with “content-based models”, especially in terms of “publishing”. The context for this increased awareness is the expansion of the Internet. But the process started much earlier, with the transformation of information into “content”, consolidation in diverse industries, and what scholars have long been calling “postmodernism”. As you might notice, I’m specifically not saying that one of these things caused any of the others. But I see connections between all of them. They “go together well”.

The first well-known case of a “content industry” having some difficulty is the one involving music labels, the so-called “Music Industry”. At the very end of the 20th Century, the “Napster Revolution” associated with trading of audio files was a turning point for music labels and the business model on which they relied. Some might say that it was quickly over. And there are many points of continuity in the “political economy of music”. But the current state of music-related business is clearly in a “post-” phase: it’s significantly different from what it was twenty years ago. I wrote extensively about this on a blog which is currently offline. I happen to think that this turning point in the way musical “content” is distributed is the early model of turning points happening elsewhere.

Subsequent “content industries” going through major transformations include films, video games, journalism, and books (possibly in that order, with significant overlap). In each of these cases (including music), “intellectual property” has been used as a core concept in discussions surrounding the “content shift”. I’ve had (and still have) a lot of things to say about any of these. But I’m focusing on textbooks which, I’d argue, are just now going through a major shift.

Most of the problems associated with textbooks have to do with the content model. What textbook publishers do is quite elaborate and rather complex (from dealing with authors and editing texts to obtaining media usage rights and coaxing people into “adopting” textbooks). But their main business model is based on selling access to content. That model isn’t obsolete and some publishers can survive for a little while longer. But it’s clearly not forward looking.

Access to content can take many forms, many of which incur no cost to the person accessing such content. Typically, “content access” and the business model behind the creation of this content are disconnected.

Borrowing books from a public library is a key form of “content access”, and it’s typically paid by taxes. Watching television advertisement can be described as access to content, paid by advertisers. Even glancing at someone’s “freesheet” in the métro is “accessing content”, and it’s also paid by advertisers. Open Access journals, YouTube, WordPress/Moodle/Joomla/Sakai/Drupal, Craigslist, Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and iTunes U all focus on “access to content” but their business models clearly separate production costs from access costs (with the result that access to content is often “free as in beer”). Even a café conversation can be conceived as “content access” and it’s associated with no direct cost in money. (Interestingly, the UnivCafé model does involve some financial costs, which are covered partly by Concordia University’s School of Extended Learning, and partly by donations. I’ve been on the record about my interest in this model.)

The “elephant in the room” is “online piracy”, which contains in its name the notion that it’s illicit or illegitimate access to content. Those who pirate content online typically don’t pay directly for that same content (though, according to some peer-sharing enthusiasts, these same users may be more likely than others to spend money online, including for “content”).

Of course, all of these things are much more than “content access” and reducing all of them to the same model should eventually show the absurdity of said models to those who aren’t in the “content industry”. “Access to content” isn’t really a business model. Were publishers able to get past the “content access” model, we may finally get an improvement over textbooks.

Call me naïve, but I think the shift is finally happening.

Part of it is through the slow transition from physical textbooks for electronic ones.

Which makes this blogpost into a followup to a post I wrote just before Apple’s iBooks Author announcement. In that previous post, I tried to talk about “learning content” in as general a way as possible, making as explicit as possible the notion that “content” is but a small part of learning. It encapsulated something about which I’ve been adamant: those of us who are interested in learning and teaching should not focus so much on content.

But I’ve been so “obsessed” with this issue that I haven’t been heeding my own advice. I keep talking about content despite the fact that I care a whole lot more about learning.

And my focus on content is part of what prevented me from thinking further than textbooks. As I kept going back to those problems with textbooks which are associated with content (cost, medium, distribution, usage rights, rigidity…), I was missing a core point  about textbooks: they intrude on, encroach upon, interfere with, and disrupt the relationships between learners and teachers. Their existence is a form of «ingérence».

See, my teaching philosophy is based on constructivism. Though I still lecture, I’m looking at alternative teaching models, which may put me at odds with some colleagues. I eventually found a way to use textbooks which makes sense to me. Point is, I care more about “building a context in which learning happens” than about “transmission of content”.

My class meetings now have the following structure…

Students come prepared, having worked with some textual material and, in the case of introductory sociology, taken a reading quiz about the class material (teamwork exercises serve part of the same role in my introductory anthropology). So, at the beginning of the class period, we go through a kind of collective Q&A session during which the class comes up with both questions and (partial) answers. Though I often end up providing extended answers to some questions, I try to engage the whole class in the process. In the two sections of introductory sociology with which I work, this semester, many questions are the outcome of reading quizzes. Taking those quizzes, students often find out that they may not have fully understood some core concept or aren’t yet able to apply a given perspective. That Q&A section of each class meeting often takes more than half of the classroom time. As it’s the one part which most directly depends on face-to-face interactions with the whole class, it makes a lot of sense that it’d be the core part of classroom interaction.

Another proportion of class time is devoted to “tangents” which connect the material with diverse issues. These discussions are especially useful for learners who reached the “upper” positions in “William Perry’s Scheme of Intellectual and Ethical Development”. At the same time, they might be less appropriate for students who (still) focus on “what’s the right answer that I need to remember for the exam”. In prior semesters, these tangents took a very significant portion of the class time. The shift from these discussions to Q&A is probably the most significant change in my teaching, this semester. Perhaps due to this shift, online forums in this course have become much more active than they ever were in the past. Parenthetical discussions work quite well online and I’m convinced that they do accomplish a lot in terms of the “higher domains” in Bloom’s Taxonomy.

During the last (and often shortest) portion of each class meeting, I go on “lecturing mode” to prepare students for the material which is coming up. In other words, I spend twenty minutes to half an hour at the end of each class period trying to get students started with a new topic. While my lectures are relatively “classic” in format (in fact, I feel the need to work on this structure, as I often end up running against the clock, at that point), they are mostly oriented toward giving learners their first exposure to some ideas, concepts, and issues. As a compulsive outliners, I base my “lecture mode” on slides with bullet points. But what I may say in relation to these bullet points varies quite a bit. At times, I will teach students concept definitions which are meant to help them understand the material (these are relatively rare and almost choreographed, with artificial pauses)  During “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” moments, I even hint at potentially tricky quiz questions. Otherwise, much of the lecture section is a restructuring of the material in a way which makes sense to me. This is where my outlining is probably the most obvious.

As you might notice, my class meetings devote little time to summary of textbook content. Even those short sections when I restructure that content, emphasis is on the connections between ideas, not with the “content”.

Having used several different textbooks in my teaching, I have a lot of “content” in my mind. In fact, some of the “bullet points” I present in class are carried over from prior teaching experiences which may have relatively little to do with the material for this one course. While I’ll never go to the “text-less teacher-driven content delivery model” I described about my UdeM past, I often muse about teaching without textbooks.

As a partial step in that direction, I started using a Wikibook in introductory sociology, a few years ago. It’s somewhat fragmentary as a textbook so I also use a printed textbook (recently switched from OUP’s “critical” Knuttila to Pearon’s “contested” Hale). However, were I to expand the Wikibook, I may be able to teach without a traditional textbook. If I succeed in doing so and colleagues start following suit, textbook publishers may run into deeper problems than they currently imagine. And it has very little to do with “piracy”, as the “content” used in my courses would be completely legitimate and licit, licensed through Creative Commons or taken from the Public Domain.

What’s more, I could easily complement the “textual content” with all sorts of things, including “interactive material”, collaborative activities, and open discussions. Almost any website could allow for this and I have most of the infrastructure in place to make it doable.

The only thing I’m missing is a bit of “content”. Not much, as the Wikibook is fairly extensive. But enough to make this experience of learning in this environment a clear improvement over textbooks. With just a bit of grant- or fellowship-style funding to devote some person-hours on such a project, it’d be easy to produce most of that content, including a large part of the job which is usually done by publishers.

There are many projects like this, going on. In my mind, it’s only a question of time before publishers are required to pivot their business model.

What I’ve been thinking about is, obviously, a shift away from the “content access” model. I kept thinking that publishers should transform into a service bringing together people who use the same content. Instead of “selling access to textbooks as content” (and offering some services as a way to force people into “adopting” their textbooks), publishers could be paid for services which are truly added value over that content. If access to content were free of charge, a lot could be done around that content. During a recent crisis with journalism, a lot of things have been said about curation and advertising. While advertising models are antithetical to the learning models most of us have in mind, something close to curation makes a lot of sense in learning and teaching. What I have in mind has less to do with “recommendation engines” than with “localization”. The idea, here, is closer to “citizen journalism” than to HuffPo. The added twist is that some people would be paid to adapt the “content” (including “ancillary material”) to specific contexts.

And this is where the hard work and added value can be found. It’s not that difficult to “produce content”, especially if we think about what we do as lecturers or the “content” created by students. As some of my students just created an elaborate study guide to prepare for my midterm (and claimed that it was easy to do), I have a neat example of how effortlessly that may happen.

What takes more effort, though, is creating appropriate material, such as exam questions related out of a classroom discussion, moderating a forum, or editing a text to make it understandable by outsiders. It would make sense to pay people to do some of these things. In some cases, the amounts paid for all sorts of learning-related services could be as much, if not more, as what is currently paid by students for textbooks. Sure, it requires some creativity to make the business model work. But that’s the reason people like Clay Christensen and Horace Dediu are around. True disruption in the market doesn’t happen by merely extending the current business models.

Most of this has been on my mind for quite a while. And though I spent some time explaining it, I still went rather quickly about it.

What has just hit me is the part about learner-teacher relationships. With all the talk about “student engagement”, we may forget the “intermediation effect” textbooks (and standardized examinations!) have had on the relationship between students and teachers. By moving away from textbooks, we can “disintermediate education”.

I had a sort of epiphany while reviewing a textbook manuscript. A significant part of the problem I had with that manuscript is that it was a “voice from nowhere, talking to ‘my’ students”. Not that I’m protecting of my students. But I was imagining a situation in which we were using this text as “content” for a course. As I imagined this, I grew increasingly concerned about the effect such a text could have on the most interesting things happening in my classes. My guess is that a large number of teachers have had an experience of “battling with a text” (because it’s confusing, misleading, inaccurate, inappropriate, outdated, boring, or flat out offensive). Beyond the frustration of being unable to modify the text to be more appropriate is the broader issue that teaching shouldn’t be about transmitting somebody else’s dogma. Especially not university teaching.

Fortunately, I can now choose which textbook I adopt. And I might soon elect not to use any textbook.

 

Alex's Teaching Tidbits

ATT7: Prewrite

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I have this simple policy: you submit something at least one week in advance in one of my courses, I give you feedback so that you can improve this assignment and submit it again by the due time.

Here’s how I’m stating it in my syllabi, this semester:

Extra credit will not be given in this class. However, if you submit a written assignment at least one week in advance of its due date, I will be able to provide you with feedback on your assignment and allow you to rewrite it based on this feedback. Rewriting an assignment does not guarantee a better grade but should enhance your learning process and might allow you to improve your grade.

In class, I often do contextualize it in the “no extra credit” frame. And I spend some time explaining how it works in my teaching philosophy, including the comparison with my approach to marking and grading.

The feedback I give on “prewrites” is usually very elaborate. One reason I’m posting this is that I sent feedback on a few prewrites. In the case of one 3000 word assignment, my feedback was 1700 words. (This blogpost contains 654 words.) In the case of some short assignment submission (say, 300 words or less), I’m sure I’ve sent feedback which was actually longer than the assignment itself.

I call it a “prewrite” because, in my head at least, it seems to conjure appropriate connotations. It’s fairly idiosyncratic a policy, at least the way I spell it out, but I know colleagues do very similar things.

One peculiarity of my “prewrite” policy is that it’s very dissimilar to the way I grade assignments.

Because, when I grade assignments for a course, I actually give very short feedback. For several reasons, I don’t annotate every page. I basically summarize my comments in a “holistic” fashion (after all, I’m an ethnographer). That “holistic feedback” tends to be mostly positive. I emphasize the high points of the assignment. [dramatic-rendition]”Oh, I see that you emphasized this one point from the material. That’s a good start as it can lead you to talk about these other things we’ve been discussing…”[/dramatic-rendition]. My actual comments are frequently more subtle and they’re not passive-aggressive (at least, not in the way I intend or perceive them), but they seem to have the intended effect: let students know what was appropriate and help them find ways to improve, either in the next assignment, in the rest of their academic careers, or even during the rest of their lives.

I do the same thing for any kind of grade apart from that given on exam answers. It can be on a final paper, on a self-assessed grade for contributions (yes, I do grade contributions), on a project plan, etc. I even use the abbreviated marks described previously on open answers to exam questions, but without this more “textual” feedback.

To a limited extent, I might scale up this feedback on assignments when I perceive some extra effort may have been made or when I feel that my evaluation requires some justification. But, overall, the type of feedback I give on an assignment which wasn’t a prewrite will might be around three or four sentences. Of course, I’m always ready to provide more feedback. Still, from what I’ve seen, extended feedback is rarely request. Even when students ask for additional comments, sometimes in a rather confrontational manner, the extra feedback I give them isn’t necessarily appreciated or even understood in the most appropriate frame of mind. Which might give you some idea why my “normal” feedback is so limited. (Additional reasons provided upon request.. 😉 )

But this blogpost wasn’t meant to be about “normal” feedback. It’s about prewrites and what they can do.

Simply put, I love it when I get to give feedback on a prewrite. To me, it means that the student is taking an actual interest in the learning process. Sure, the prospect of potentially increasing her/his grade is likely the main motivation. Sure, in some cases, students get “more than they bargained for.” They thought it was a way to get their grade raised automatically by virtue of submitting the assignment ahead of time. (These students probably have a rather big surprise when they receive my feedback, especially since I can then be brutally honest as to what could have been done. Not that implementing changes based on my feedback is likely to take a lot of time. But those students who seem to misunderstand my prewrite policy as an easy way to increase their grades are also those who make no change whatsoever to their assignments.)

Still, most students who submit prewrites are actually looking for feedback and are taking an active part in the learning process.

Whatever reasons a student has in mind submitting a prewrite, the effect is the same. Whether it’s based on a misinterpretation or on a genuine desire to enhance her/his learning experience, as long as the student reads my feedback, s/he ends up focusing on the work instead of on getting the highest grade in the most effortless manner (or on ensuring s/he gets the grade s/he thinks s/he deserve as an “entitled” student). Even if it were just for this, I’d be happy to get these prewrites.

But there’s more. Not only “a lot more” but something qualitatively more significant.

The feedback I give clearly has an impact on the work being done. It’s all good and well to get students to take an active part in the learning process. Some would even take this for granted. But there’s something about providing “extended feedback which is likely to be taken into consideration” which is worth more than any amount of time I’m able to spend on it.

See, by providing this kind of effect, I’m often able to help students achieve something special. It’s not about me, but it relates to my work. And there’s little more satisfying than this kind of work. “Teaching moments” in the classroom come close or even reach the same level of satisfaction. But that’s because the same basic idea is at stake: in the classroom as on paper (or online), you’re helping create something. And this something is often more than students thought they were able to create.

This is one of the situations in which I perceive myself as a sherpa. And I specifically think about Tenzing Norgay.

(As an anthropologist, I take solace in the fact that Norgay is credited, along with Hillary, as being one of the two human beings who first set foot at the top of Mount Everest. Given the structure of the world in the mid-twentieth Century, I wouldn’t expect Norgay to have received praises. In fact, mountaineering is specifically a domain in which credit may be given to people in a rather arbitrary way. But, at least if the version of the story I’ve heard about is accurate, the fact that Tenzing Norgay can be celebrated means a lot to me. It also makes me think of those cinematographers who accompany people during great feats. The fact that they get to those same spots carrying a lot of equipment often makes me wonder if they’re not the real heroes. But I digress especially far since I don’t want this to be about heroism..)

Of course, I don’t compare myself to Tenzing Norgay. But I find inspiration in what he accomplished. He not only accomplished a great feat himself (something I don’t see myself capable of) but he enabled somebody else’s great feat (something I perceive very highly).

With students who are “at the top of their game,” serving as a sherpa can be very satisfying because the results can reveal intellectual prowess. But, even though it means “improving something which was already good,” it’s relatively easy to do because these students have stimulation, motivation, and possibly drive, not to mention mad sk1||z.

The situation at the other extreme can be as satisfying but it’s also more “touching” and less impressive. You get a student whose “game,” for whatever reason, isn’t at the very top. Someone who probably wouldn’t get a very high grade in the course if it weren’t for your help. And, despite your help, this student may not achieve the type of proficiency that your grading scheme puts at the top. Yet this student improves her/his work through concerted effort with you. In other words, you’re not helping Hillary climb Mount Everest. But it’s a bit as if you were helping a paralympian climb the Matterhorn. Sure, other people have been there. In fact, some people set records on doing it quickly. In my mind, though, at least in terms of “overcoming some preconceived notions of what can be done,” what you’re helping someone do is more significant than setting a new world record.

As is often the case when I think about teaching, I get to reminisce about my father’s career as a high school teacher for students with learning disabilities. On numerous occasions, my father was able to help students get over significant hurdles. One occasion I remember quite vividly is when he helped a well-motivated student complete three years in one. Part of the reason I remember this is that I was present during some study sessions my father did with that student. I vaguely remember her, but I can say that this is an occasion for me to be proud of my father. And it surely had a large impact on my perception of teaching.

But what probably had a deeper impact and is more impressive in so many ways is something I rarely discuss: my mother’s career. For most of her working life, including while she was working on the more administrative side of things, my mother was an occupational therapist helping adults and children suffering from MR. [Having a hard time with the English term. The French «déficience intellectuelle» seems to me more appropriate..]

Many of the people with whom my mother worked had Down Syndrome. Probably more than the physical handicap to which I alluded, in the “paralympian climing the Matterhorn” idea, Down Syndrome sets a very strict limit to what the person can or cannot do. While we’ve all heard cases of “physical disabilities” being overcome to the extent that the person may accomplish feats a “normally able” person is unlikely to accomplish, Down Syndrome may prevent some rather normal tasks from ever being undertaken. This description of Down Syndrome may be wholly inaccurate, as I’m not an expert in the field (unlike my mother who has been spending the past few weeks among Swiss mountains, including the Matterhorn). And I certainly don’t want to understate the challenges facing those with physical disabilities. But my limited experience with Down Syndrome adults and children left in me a lasting impression. Close to helplessness. Making rather mundane tasks into monumental achievements.

It takes more than courage and determination to overcome significant hurdles such as a mental or physical handicap. Whatever the case may be, the inspiration to not take for granted some of the simplest things in life runs deep.

Of course, the students who take my courses in a university setting are as far as you could get from suffering from MR. Though there have been differences in terms of specific accomplishments, it doesn’t escape me that people who go to universities represent but a fraction of society as a whole and that, in a certain sense, the distinction implied bears some relationship to possessing intelligence which is often ranked much higher than average. [My perspective on intelligence isn’t one which puts people on a linear scale, so I’m hard-pressed to find a way to express this which makes sense in my mind and addresses some common perceptions about university students.]

The part of my mother’s career which most directly inspires my teaching, with the sherpa analogy in mind, is precisely that ability isn’t a given and that there isn’t a direct correlation between assumed ability and potential achievement.

It might be one reason behind my rather strong negative reactions to the infamous “sense of entitlement” perceived on some campuses (“campi” is allegedly frowned upon). Comparing a university student’s achievements to those of someone with Down Syndrome may seem exceedingly strange (and even, given social stigma on MR, very insulting). Using extreme examples about mental abilities to show the importance of intellectual humility and intellectual honesty is very tricky. But if it helps people become more thoughtful about the specificity of university work, the risk is worth it.

I’ve already been on long tangents and I should probably cut this up in two or more posts. But I need to go.

RERO!

Alex's Teaching Tidbits

ATT6: Marking Scheme

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Been thinking about my “scheme” for marking assignments. It’s something I’ve designed based on some comments I was frequently making on those assignments.  Basically, all of these comments are positive but they’re set in a hierarchical structure, with “insight” at the top and concision at the bottom.

  • IF: Insightful
  • OC: Original and Creative
  • HP: Honest and Personal
  • TR: Thoughtful and Reflexive
  • EX: Appropriate Examples
  • ED: Elaborate and Detailed
  • CSF: Concise and Straightforward

In some ways, “TR” is the baseline. A “TR” paper is one which shows that the student has “done the work.” Nothing more, nothihng less.

The three marks above TR are “added value.” Not only has the student given back what was expected, but s/he put her-/himself in the work, did something unique, or even reached a high level of insight.

The three marks below “TR” are a way to emphasise the positive while pointing out some potential problems. An assignment with appropriate examples is useful, but it may not reach the expected level of understanding. Long papers filled with lots of details require some effort, but may miss the point of the assignment. And some very short but clear assignments at least show an ability to be concise, even if they don’t do much more.

These “marks” are usually combined in some way and student work can be “TR and ED” or “CSF and TR.” Order counts, with the first mark being the most important. Outstanding work will usually have “IF” as the first mark and often has two other comments. Suboptimal work is often “CSF and EX.”

Obviously, I also provide some more elaborate comments about some key points in the assignments. These range from “interesting emphasis on concept X but bear in mind that this was about concepts X and Y” to “you’ve clearly understood the issues and you’ve really managed to do something unique with this paper.” Even in those fleshed out comments, I might end up reusing the same comment, if similar issues happened in assignments by diverse students. Generic work may get generic comments and outstanding work often gets very specific comments.

As I assess an assignment, I have something close to “sliders” in mind, with something resembling VU meters. (Not literally, but the image works.) The balance between the abbreviated qualities may shift as I work with the text: “It seems to be mostly TR but maybe there’s a nugget of creativity, somewhere” or “It starts out in a very unique way but let’s check if this originality carries through.” When something reaches a high level of insight (relative to the context, of course), it can “peak out the master” and, unless the rest of the text causes a radical drop in quality, the “IF” level will remain as part of the overall assessment.

The correspondance between the abbreviated marks and points/grades isn’t linear. I typically mark all assignments before I add the actual grades, so I get a good idea about the range in quality. I usually don’t work by direct comparison, but I also won’t grade down papers just because they’re not “publishing quality.”

In fact, as may be obvious from these marks, there are many things which don’t usually matter, to me, in an assignment. For instance, the only elements of form which do matter have to do with getting the message across and displaying a thorough understanding of the material. My assignments are about insight, not about production value. More specifically, I typically don’t “grade language,” though I could do so and have done so on occasion. In most cases, I’d rather not have students too self-conscious about their mastery of normative language.

I realize how idiosyncratic my “scheme” may be, but it’s worked quite well in several of my courses. For one thing, it helps bring home the point that I’m looking for insight. And it can help me explain that length matters very little.

Alex's Teaching Tidbits, Comment-fishing, Placeholders

ATT5: EZ Test Online

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Got a number of things to say about testbanks, including a sort of “justification” for my use of them and several comments about how I use them. But I thought I’d post a “tidbit” about a specific testbank system. In a way, it’s more “practical” than other things I have to say about testbanks and practical things fit more in the “tidbit” concept I’m using here. I even thought about doing a tutorial. But tutorials are time-consuming and I’m not sure it’d be more useful or useful to more people than this less-structured post.

EZ Test Online (EZTO) is, as you might expect, an online system to facilitate test creation. More specifically, it’s the online version of the EZ Test program developed by McGraw-Hill to distribute the testbanks which accompany its textbooks as “anciliary material.” Almost all of the features of the standalone version of EZ Test are available in EZTO and the overall user experience is quite similar. Haven’t used the offline version in a while but, if I remember correctly, it also used a Web browser (though it could be used without an Internet connection; basically, it was using the local machine as a simplified webhost).

Obvious advantages of the online version over the offline one:

  • You can work from any machine.
  • You can share testbanks.
  • You can have students take tests directly in EZTO.

Obvious disadvantages:

  • You need an Internet connection.
  • In some circumstances, it might be slightly less secure than an offline program.
  • In some ways, you’re sharing data with McGraw-Hill (though their privacy policy doesn’t really specify much about this).

In my case, EZTO makes a good deal of sense. I tend to use “the cloud” as much as possible, these days, and EZTO is convenient in that sense.

In a way, I wish McGraw-Hill were to go further with EZTO. As with Learning Management Systems, I can easily imagine some connection with the “social Web.” Of course, most people would prefer testbank items to remain protected, hidden, and private. But I can still imagine the sharing of testbanks between instructors to become similar to sharing Web content generally.

In fact, I’m slowly coming to terms with a notion of “transparent testbanks.” Basically, it would mean that all potential questions would be available to the wide public, instead of being restricted to instructors. It’s an extreme case, and one which I think most instructors would think is crazy. But I think it might actually make it easier to control such things as cheating, as counterintuitive as it may sound. Even though I’m typically in favour of radical transparency, this is really an edge case and I’m not that attached to it. But knowing that many exam questions are already shared among students, putting all questions in the open (and, one would suspect, making sure that some very similar questions would be part of those testbanks, to prevent mere memorization of the answers) could have actually make this practice of private sharing of questions more impractical.

After all, there are already some sample questions available in diverse places, including on open access websites created by textbook publishers. These questions are typically meant to help students prepare for exams and quizzes. Using the same questions on exams may have the effect of encorcing rote learning. But if there are enough questions in a centralised testbank which serves both as a practice and as a source for exam questions, the result may actually be to avoid using questions which were already seen by individual students.

But, again, I’m not pushing this model. I’m just wondering about the effects. Part of the reason is because of things like information about the “Rorschach test” having been publicised. Haven’t had to deal with this issue directly and what I’ve heard about it was rather minimal, but the fact that test items can now be shared easily means that we need to think about the effects of sharing. After all, even if one is to limit testbank access to instructors of a given course (with all the necessary processes of verification and validation), it only takes one hacked account to make the whole thing insecure. And even the most careful (and even paranoid) of instructors can be the victim of some form of hacking, including “social engineering.” So the assumption that testbank items can be protected clashes with the ease of “leaking content” online. A transparent testbank is a way to flood potential cheaters with an overwhelming number of potential questions, which is similar to disinformation strategies currently used to protect some private information, including trade secrets.

Even in the case of a “transparent testbank,” I imagine much metadata to remain private. In this I include success rates for each question, answers given by individual students, and comments about use of the question. Other pieces of metadata could potentially be shared too, including “source information” about each question (chapter or page number in a textbook), question type, and even aggregate ratings. These can make testbanks look like so much “user-generated content” online. Which could have some advantages.

I didn’t originally plan to make this tidbit about those issues, but I’ve been thinking about them a bit and it’s probably better to put them “out there.”

What I did plan to talk about is how I use EZTO.

So, in some courses I teach, I do use McGraw-Hill textbooks which are accompanied by testbanks in EZ Test format. In fact, I just finished creating an exam using such testbanks.

This is for an online course using Moodle. Students take the actual exam through Moodle. Students have also been taking reading quizzes, with questions from the same testbanks. The midterm exam focuses on understanding. Students have a full week to take the exam (i.e., there’s no set schedule for everyone to take the exam at the same time). In this context, it seems necessary for each student to receive a different set of questions as other students in the class (otherwise, shared questions would guarantee a near-perfect grade for every student who sees them). With individual versions of the exam, risks related to questions being shared are still a matter of concern, but the effects are much less damaging. (In fact, I haven’t noticed any significant effect from questions being shared.) All questions are multiple-choice and they are graded automatically in Moodle.

The key thing, here, is that I want to have a big pool of questions for the exam (to make sure that very little overlap exists between two versions of the exam) yet I want to make sure the questions are as appropriate as possible. The testbanks I use have many questions which are really about rote learning, and that’s not the kind of exam I want to give. I’m also trying to get a nice balance in terms of the types of questions asked. Otherwise, I’d just dump all the testbanks in Moodle and select the appropriate number of questions from the whole set of testbanks.

I’ve used several methods in the past but I think I found the most useful one in this context. There are likely other methods which work well for other people and/or other contexts. But it’s the one I’m likely to use, for the time being.

Here’s what I did… (This is where a tutorial would make sense!)

  • In EZTO:
    • Uploaded all the testbanks to EZTO (they’re separated by chapter).
    • Created new tests for each question category (according to the testbank): definitions, perspectives, etc.
    • For each test by question category, added questions of that question category from all the chapters. In other words, collected all the questions about definitions from each chapter by using “Select Questions from Banks” with each chapter-based testbank.
    • In each question category testbank, created a new category to select questions.
    • Assigned that new category to questions which seemed appropriate for the exam.
    • Created new testbanks for the selected questions from each question category (again, using the “Select Questions from Banks,” but using the new category to select the questions).
    • Checked and edited each testbank of selected questions by question category.
    • Exported each bank of selected questions by question category to Blackboard format.
  • In Moodle:
    • Created new question categories and new folders to reflect the exported EZTO testbanks (e.g., a folder and question category for questions about “definitions”).
    • Uploaded the files exported by EZTO (“bboard.zip”) into the new folders.
    • Unzipped these Blackboard export files to get multiple files which are all called “res00001.dat” (that’s why it was so important to separate in folders).
    • Imported questions from each “res00001.dat,” making sure the appropriate category was selected.
    • Created a “quiz” activity, with a description of the exam, some information about the process, and some settings (can only be taken once, time is limited to 60 minutes, etc.).
    • Editing the exam, chose each question category and added a number of random questions from that category.
    • Changed the total on which grades will be calculated (60 points total for 60 questions).
    • Previewed the exam.
    • Made the exam visible to students.
    • Announced the exam.

A fairly convoluted process, but one which provides me with remarkably appropriate results. Actually, other attempts I’ve made, in the past, were even more convoluted. For instance, noticing that several questions revolved around the same concept or issue, I would create subcategories from which only one question was randomly picked. It was very time-consuming and the rule of only having one question per issue or concept was self-imposed. Even with a lot of cautious work, it’s almost impossible to get each version of the exam cover exactly the same topics in exactly the same depth as every other version. Given a sufficient number of questions, one can do as if these things even out. Not ideal. But reasonable in this context.

Selecting questions is neither difficult nor that time-consuming. A lot of questions are easy to eliminate, using a few “rules” I have about exam questions (including “no question about factoids from the text”). There are enough questions in the testbanks I use that I need not worry about having enough for the exam. For this midterm, I had more than 800 questions in the relevant testbanks. I selected a bit less than half of these questions as being appropriate for the exam. The exam contains 60 questions. So, basically, I threw away more than half of the testbank questions and ended up with six times the number of questions for each version of the exam. Unless I’m mistaken, the chances that two students have almost identical versions of the exam are low enough to be insignificant (in a group of 25 students). And, though the questions come from a testbank, they’re appropriate for this specific group.

Much of this could be done through another testbank platform. And, of course, the questions could come from a testbank I’ve created. But, in this case, the quality of the questions I selected is sufficient for me to be rather satisfied. I’ve created other exams through similar methods in similar contexts and the results seemed rather appropriate. If problems arise, it’s still possible to work through issues without losing my sanity.

If I sound like I’m justifying myself, it’s probably because I am. There’s something strange about using testbanks, especially when exam versions are randomised. I wouldn’t use the same strategy in other contexts but this is a course for non-major given purely online. It’s also a course for which the textbook really is the main source. And it so happens that the testbanks are rather decent, containing a good number of questions that I find very appropriate.

The parts which are specific to EZTO mostly have to do with how questions are selected and exported. This is a situation in which I wish I had access to ratings for each question, and some way to bulk process the kind of question I don’t want. (For instance, I exclude all questions which have “All of the above” or “None of the above” as the correct answer.) I’d also want to get some way to assess the overall difficulty of the exam so that I could tweak it up or down depending on what seems to be needed.

I also feel like I’m getting too close to standardized tests. In fact, I keep thinking about the GRE and TOEFL (the two standardized tests I’ve taken). I used to react strongly against them but it sounds as if I were getting closer to them, in this context. Exams in my other courses differ significantly from that model, thanks in part to open questions. And I could technically apply some of the same principles in this case, though it’d make things more difficult for everyone. Yet the reasons I use randomized questions from testbanks have to do with the conditions in which I teach this course, much beyond convenience and time commitment.

In such a context, McGraw-Hill’s EZ Test Online makes some sense. It’s “good enough” as a solution to a given task in a very specific set of conditions.

I wouldn’t use it too extensively, though.

Alex's Teaching Tidbits

ATT4: Sociology’s Major Theoretical Perspectives

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This one is a post I sent to students in an online course to help them understand a key matter in introductory sociology: the distinction between some core theoretical perspectives. As an anthropologist, I’m often struck, while teaching introductory sociology, how consistently these perspectives come up. This specific course is based very directly on Richard T. Schaefer’s Sociology: A Brief Introduction. So a few points are specific to that book (and the exam students will take is based on that textbook). But I’ve seen a number of other textbooks in introductory sociology, using some as inspiration for questions in other exams or as required rteadings in other courses: the very same perspectives come up all the time.
Not that other disciplines don’t have this. But I really don’t see anything similar in cultural anthropology even though introductory courses in anthropology, like introductory sociology, is very standardized in terms of chapter headings.
The reason I post here as a tidbit, apart from the fact that I happen to think it could be useful for other people, is that there’s a teaching angle to this.
This is a course which is really based on content. It’s a “GenEd” course for nurses at a school of health professions associated with a health system with five hospitals in Texas. What I’m doing here, in terms of “instruction,” is very different from my usual teaching strategies in that it’s very directly related to an exam. I usually wait until my last interactions with students before I build the exam, so that I don’t “teach the exam.” In this case, though, these theoretical perspectives are so fundamental that it’s very far from telling them about things they should memorize. Besides, it’s easy enough to do a copy-paste like this and it might encourage me to post more tidbits (something which has been on my mind, recently).
Making Sense of Major Theoretical Perspectives (MTPs)
Class,
As I’ve said so many times, these perspectives are really key to introductory sociology. And they’re really not that hard to spot, once you get the differences. So I’ll give you a few tricks. This isn’t a thorough analysis of their differences but kind of a “cheat sheet.” Of course, you can’t use cheat sheets (or any documentation) on exams. But if you understand what it’s about, at this point, you won’t need a cheat sheet.
So, the Major Theoretical Perspectives.

WMD

To summarize:

  • Functionalism
  • Conflict Theory
  • Interactionism

With these three, you can understand a lot of what’s going on in sociology. Because they’re associated with Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, I tend to call them the “WMDs.” (DMW would also work, and it vaguely sounds like a car manufacturer, but “WMD” makes the point more strongly.)
You could argue that feminism is the fourth one and I’ll talk about it But the first three are what can guide you.
One thing to notice is that the order I listed them is pretty much the order in which they appear in most places. Not that they’re really in chronological order. But there’s a notion that conflict theory was a response to functionalism and that interactionism contextualizes the other two.
So…

Recognizing Functionalism

  • As I hinted in another post, any mention of “stability” should give you a clue that it’s probably functionalism. Functionalism is about seeing society as a funcitoning system: stable, balanced, durable. A well-oiled machine (the mechanical metaphor) or a living organism (the organic metaphor). In a functionalist’s view, everything in society has a purpose and the overall purpose is the functioning of the society as a whole.
  • You recognize the early signs of functionalism in Auguste Comte (the guy who coined the term «sociologie» which is the origin of “sociology”) but Émile Durkheim was pretty much the founder of modern, functionalist sociology. In the US, Talcott Parsons and his “equilibrium theory” are the most obvious examples of sociological functionalism. In a way, the 1950s were the heyday of functionalism in North American social sciences.
  • Functionalists make models which are very “scientistic.” In some forms of functionalism, you even perceived society as a “lab.”

Recognizing Conflict

  • People perceive “conflict theory” as a critique of functionalism. Conflict theory is all about inequalities. You see some comment about problems associated with inequality, exploitation, poverty, classes, chances are it has to do with conflict theory. For conflict theorists, social life is a constant struggle between haves and have-nots, those who are given access to resources and those who are unlikely to ever get much resources. This goes for any kind of inequality: class inequality, inequality based on gender, inequality based on race, global inequality…
  • The “struggle of classes” angle makes it clear that many of these have to do with Karl Marx. Because other people have used ideas from Marx, it’s not uncommon to call the conflict theory “Marxian” to distinguish it from Marxism in the political domain. Schaefer tends to use “Marxist” for both, which can get quite confusing (for one thing, many conflict theorists are against governments).
  • In some ways, conflict theory became mainstream with the human rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Unsurprisingly, some of the most vocal activists in sociology can be heard using concepts from conflict theory.

Recognizing Interaction

  • While functionalists and conflict theorists debate one another, there are sociologists on the sidelines who focus on social behaviors, relationships, and meanings. Interactionism (or “symbolic interactionism,” as it’s often called) is recognized as a micro-level analysis and it’s one which may not be that interested in direct causal links of the big machine or big struggle types. It’s more about what happens between individuals and how things can make sense.
  • Interactionism is very recognizable in labeling theory or in the dramaturgical approach. But some people (including Schaefer) associate it with Max Weber. Weber also did work which was closer to macro-level analysis (including what he’s written about the Protestant Work Ethic, or PWE). But interactionists do turn to Weber as more of an inspiration than Durkheim or Marx.
  • Interactionism is very obvious in the work of many contemporary sociologists but it’d be difficult to say that it’s ever become dominant, in sociology.
  • Interactionists often do things which are close to ethnography, including participant-observation.

The Feminist Angle

Occasionally, people will propose feminism as a fourth member of the MTP group. Schaefer doesn’t really do it like that. In fact, sociological feminism is pretty much a reply to the WMDs. It’s much more clearly influenced by conflict theory, to the extent that some might think of feminism in sociology as a part of conflict theory. In fact, some early feminists in sociology saw women as suffering from gender inequality in pretty much the same terms as class inequality. But feminists also criticized conflict theory as exhibiting machismo at many phases in its development. Overall, feminism has been among the most important changes in the history of sociology during the 20th Century. As the notion that women and men should have equal rights, feminism is very strong throughout the discipline.

Potential Pitfalls

Now, this is all a very simplistic model. But I do think it helps, if you don’t get stuck in it. Which is probably why most introductory textbooks (including Schaefer’s) present some version of it. But you may still run into problems if you follow it blindly.
Here are a few things to be aware of:

  • Nowadays, sociologists mix and match ideas from these MTPs and it’s rare to find a “pure” functionalist, a die-hard conflict theorist, or an exclusive interactionist. Feminists are even more active in terms of using tools and concepts from diverse perspectives.
  • Because functionalism and conflict theory are both working at the macro-level, they often have more in common than one might think.
  • Though functionalism mostly talks about stability, they also talk about transition and adaptation. Going from one stable system to another causes some social problems, which may make them sound like conflict theorists.
  • Similarly, the notion of a “dysfunction” may sound like a conflict theory idea, since it has to do with social problems and even with inequality. But the perspective is still that societies “work.”
  • Many broad sociological concepts are carried across all MTPs. For instance, sociologists in general care about social roles. But the way people handle roles will depend on their major theoretical orientation. For instance, an interactionist will see how people “play” their roles in society, what it means to them. A conflict theorist might emphasize that roles are related to statuses and that statuses are often ascribed. Unsurprisingly, a feminist cares a lot about gender roles and might talk about the fact that these roles can be quite diverse, so that there are many ways to be a woman or to be a man. Finally, a funcitonalist is likely to see the set of roles played by different people in society as complementary to one another: society “needs” criminals, CEOs, students, sick people, homemakers, cousins, nurses…
  • Just so you know, there’s no such thing as a “global perspective” in Schaefer’s book. Sure, sociologists talk about globalization and about global inequalities. Immanuel Wallerstein proposed the World System Analysis. But none of the perspectives discussed by Schaefer is labeled as the “global perspective.”

(For the most astute observers among you, it may be obvious that I’m giving you a bunch of hints about the exam. Some clues were subtler than others, but I think they can all be useful.)

Alex's Teaching Tidbits

ATT3: Last Minute Nugget

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When I started thinking about these tidbits, something I had done in class had been at the back of my mind. It’s actually quite simple, but I found the effect rather nice.
See, in some classes, there are students who start to pack their things several minutes before the official end of the class meeting. I know several colleagues have the same problem, so “it’s not just me.” It doesn’t happen all the time or in every class, but it does happen and, when it does, it seems to spread to a significant part of the class, causing significant disruption.
Hadn’t found a way to solve this. Tried telling students about the disruptive effects of this behaviour, but that never worked. So, one class meeting, I had this very simple idea: say something important at the very end of class. That’s the last minute nugget concept.
A few moments before the end of the class meeting, I warned students that I would end the class with something which should be on the exam. Obviously, they started paying a lot of attention. I said a single sentence which encapsulated a rather important and potentially complex conceptual link. I said this only once and I didn’t address the same issue in class at another point. Students who really understood the material could answer a question about this issue even without my “nugget.” Since I podcast my courses, everyone has access to that nugget, even if they weren’t in class at that point. Besides, if students do any kind of peer-learning, the nugget can easily be shared through the group. Bottomline: my question on this was going to be fair and students knew it. A student asked me for clarification and when I refused, it made it sound almost like a game.
In fact, that nugget was rather effective, I think, because it was somewhat more complex than other things I’d usually address more fully. And thinking about this nugget could be an efficient way to focus on understanding instead of on remembering. I hadn’t really prepared it so much in advance but it made a lot of sense when I said it.
And I did the same thing in other class meetings from the same course. Just a few times, but it was enough to change the dynamic and students were fairly attentive at the end of class meeting from this point on.
It may sound like I simply taught them a lesson but I think it’s more than that. It changed something about my teaching.

Alex's Teaching Tidbits

ATT2: Study Advice to my Students

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I posted the following on a forum in my “ANTH202/4B Introduction to Culture” course and realized it might be useful for other people. So I decided to post it here, in the spirit of “Alex’s Teaching Tips.” Some parts are specific to this course and most of it is about the way I teach, but it may still make some sense.

For a tiny bit of context: the midterm is tomorrow. Through the first part of the semester, I’ve tried to give other kinds of tips. This post was meant as a way to put things in perspective. I sent it to a forum called “Mid-Term Preparation.”

Someone asked for advice on exam prep. It’s a bit late for this and I want to be fair to everyone in the same way, so I’ll answer with a general forum post. At other points, I was (and will be) able to give customized advice, based on a student’s needs. But this is generic advice about preparing for an exam in one of my courses.
I’m actually somewhat torn about this. Some of you may feel even more overwhelmed while others may find this reassuring. Yet because I get the impression that it can be useful to a number of people, I’m posting this anyway.

First note that, if you’ve been doing your work and following advice I’ve already been giving you (say, by starting from the most general to the most specific or by focusing on links across the material), you probably have nothing to worry about. The exams aren’t ways to trick you but to assess your understanding of the material. There won’t be questions about specific details of the “Which anthropologist is credited with” kind. Wouldn’t make sense for an exam. Fairly useful in a self-administered quiz, not so cool on a midterm.

But, if you still worry, here are a few notes. My purpose here is to get you to “think like a cultural anthropologist,” not to make sure everyone gets high marks. But it’s clear that those who are able to think like a cultural anthropologist are also the ones who typically receive high marks on exams in a cultural anthropology course.

So, a bit more of a “procedural” advice, keeping in mind that we’re all far along in the process…

You all have, in fact, already started your exam preparation, even if you didn’t sit down to review material for the exam. The work you’ve put into the material should pay off. Keep that in mind.

So, at this point…
Go back to “the big picture,” before even glancing at any of the material. The “What have you learnt?” question. Focus on the most obvious things. It’s no secret that the course is about culture so you can think about what you now know about culture. Take notes, either in your head or in writing. Part of this should help you notice that you did learn a fair deal. This can be done quickly and almost effortlessly. You’re not trying to recreate the course in your mind. You’re just trying to pick what was most salient, what struck you. Chances are that those things are related to what’s important to understand.

Then, go through concentric circles, from the most general to the most specific. Think about the structure of the first part of the semester (class meetings and book chapters), first without any material then more specifically with the course material. You can use yesterday’s slides, for this. They’ve been reposted in a variety of formats and, though they don’t contain anything that new, they may be a useful summary.

After that, use any of your own material. If you’ve been posting journal entries in order to assess your own contributions, now may be an appropriate time to go back through them to put the course material in context. These entries weren’t meant as a study tool and that’s part of the reason they can be useful. If you’ve been taking notes while working with the book, look at these notes. Same thing with notes you may have taken in the classroom. Or anything about teamwork and individual exercises!

I would not advise you to go through the podcast recordings, at this point. Even at double-speed, it’d take you way too much time to listen to all of them and it might confuse you. But if there’s something you locate in your notes which seems like it has been discussed in class at a specific moment in time, you may be able to quickly retrieve this discussion from a podcast recording. Not something everyone is necessarily very good at, but it can be done. (Since I listen to a lot of podcasts, I’m pretty efficient at this. But it does require some practice and/or a specific type of memory.)

I also don’t advise you to take the self-quizzes, at this point. It’s very useful when you’re first learning about some concepts and you want to make sure you were paying enough attention while working with a given chapter. But it puts way too much emphasis on details and rote learning to be helpful just before an exam. At the same time, if you’ve taken those quizzes in the past and have some way to see what was unclear to you at that time (i.e., where you made mistakes), you can use this as a way to focus. As long as it’s not about details.

Using multiple-choice questions for Chapter 2 as an example… (Again, if you never took this quiz, do not take it now!)

If questions you got wrong, at the time, were about “Annette Weiner’s re-study of the Trobriand Islands” or about the indigenous group studied by Napoleon Chagnon, you shouldn’t worry about them. There will not be questions like these on the exam and it just means that these parts of the material were unclear while you were working with that chapter. No biggie. Moving on.
On the other hand, if what you got wrong was about a definition of rapport, it might be useful to look at why you got it wrong. Not because it’s so important as a concept but because you should be able to find the correct answer by elimination.
The question about the AAA’s code of ethics is also a good example, even though there won’t be negative questions on the exam and it sounds as if it’s asking about details on the AAA. If you really understood what ethics in cultural anthropology is about, it’s quite likely that you’ll know what the right answer is without knowing the first thing about the AAA (no, I don’t mean the US equivalent of the CAA wink).
One way to put it is that it’s about “common sense.” If you miss such a question, though, it’s not because you lack “common sense.” It’s that yours differs from the kind of anthropological thinking we’re talking about. In fact, with that ethics question, I could imagine a sociology student choosing “Be open about who you are and why you’re there” as what the AAA’s code does not include because there are very well-known cases where sociologists aren’t advocating this kind of transparency (even though informed consent is now a requirement in any study done with human subjects, including sociology). There are even anthropologists who have concealed their identities and we’ve talked about this in class. But I think it should be obvious from the classroom and textbook material that cultural anthropologists do seek informed consent from people with whom we work.
This part is all about those who did take the self-quizzes in the past. But I think it also helps you understand what the exam is about.

A final approach, which can still be taken at this point…
In the past, I’ve been telling you about finding links between issues and concepts. It’s still good advice, especially if you use it as a way to get yourself thinking about broader issues or if it helps you notice that you do, in fact, understand most of these. The list of glossary items is useful, in this case. Pick two items at random and, in your head, think about what you might say on their relationships to one another.
Now, this may not be for everyone either. Some of you may get lost in this while others do it “in their sleep.” That’s why I list it last.
Doing the exercise myself, using the slides from yesterday (using QuickView on my Mac, not even opening the file): “horticultural” and “negative reciprocity.” There’s an obvious link, there, but I’ll actually go toward something a bit more involved, for demonstration purposes. Horticulturalism is what we call a “subsistence strategy” and negative reciprocity has to do with “economic anthropology.” So I’m thinking about the relationships between “means of production” (in this case, how we get our food) and means of distribution (how we share resources across members of a group). It’s pretty much a “textbook case” of the kind of holistic approach Omohundro explained with the puzzle pieces. In this case, it’s about links between what we’ve called “infrastructure” and social structure. So you can quickly go very far. Or stick with what’s obvious (that both have to do with goods or that either is typical of a certain set of cultural contexts).
Again, this kind of stretch isn’t for everyone, at this point. If you try it and find it too difficult, skip it. As with physical training, not everyone can benefit from every exercise.

I very sincerely hope that this helps at least a few people and that it doesn’t have a negative effect on anyone.

Enjoy!

—
Alex

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New Feature: Alex’s Teaching Tidbits

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When I created this blog, I mostly thought about using it to host a podcast but I still wanted to use it as a place where I could blog about topics related to ethnography. Originally, I called it “Headnotes: The Informal Ethnographer Blog” (HIEB) and some remnants of this old name can be found in some places. Because the method I use to distribute podcast episodes assigns the blog’s title to the podcast, I decided to change this blog’s official title to reflect the name I had decided to give my podcast. “Rapport: The Informal Ethnographer Podcast” (RIEP).
I’ll still use this blog mainly for my ethnography podcast. I’m not really getting any significant feedback about that podcast, but I don’t have any reason to stop doing it. So I’ll maintain that.

But I’ve also been meaning to blog about other things. I could post things on my main blog, but what I have in mind is more structured and that personal blog is anything but structured.

What’s funny, is that what I’m thinking about isn’t that directly related to ethnography. At least, it’s not specific to ethnography.

Basically, I want to share some ideas I have about teaching. More specifically, I want to share little bits and pieces of things I found useful in my teaching experience. Not that I consider myself a better teacher than somebody else or that I have something very unique to share. But talking about teaching is a useful way to think about what it may imply and to enhance our teaching methods. In order to, hopefully, enhance people’s learning.

I don’t really want to do meta-teaching, here: I’m not teaching teachers. My father used to do it and I have some ideas about how that’s done, but it’s not my purpose, here. So this isn’t about telling others what to do or to boast about successes. In fact, while some of the “tidbits” I have in mind may sound like pieces of advice or indications about effective strategies, I mean this feature to be about short reflections on teaching, including challenges faced or failed attempts at using a given strategy.
In fact, I tend to be wary of “tips and tricks,” especially when it comes to teaching. We all have different approaches and what may seem like the best advice to give one person might actually disrupt somebody else’s approach. What works for me may not work for you. Furthermore, what didn’t work for me may in fact be quite appropriate in your case. Either because I wasn’t effective at implementing it or because it’s not appropriate in my context.

My hope is that my tidbits will be a source of inspiration for certain people. Simply put, I just want to share. Much of blogging (and social media in general) is really about sharing thoughts and ideas. In this case, the thoughts and ideas shared will be about teaching.

Part of the inspiration for this new feature is the Quick Hits series from Indiana University‘s Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching (FACET). I don’t presume to be able to imitate the Quick Hits or produce something similar in any way, but this blog feature is my homage to that series and to FACET, which produces it.

In a sense, it’s my way of giving back to the community.

Back in 2004-2005, I received a Future Faculty Teaching Fellowship (FFTF) to teach in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Indiana University South Bend (IUSB). One important benefit of this program is that it was an opportunity to fully immerse myself in teaching. I had already taught at different institutions, but this was a time to really focus on teaching. Some resources were provided through the FFTF program while others were available at large. In the latter case, I’m mostly thinking about teaching workshops and I attended ad many as I could, during that time. I still do the same, in fact, and I’ve given a few myself. As for FFTF-specific resources, two very valuable things remain on my mind. One is a mentor at the department where I was teaching. I was lucky enough to get two inspiring teachers splitting this task between the two semesters: Becky Torstrick (who was just coming back from a year abroad on a Fullbright covering both research and teaching) and Scott Sernau (who was then chair of the department).
The FFTF also offered a chance to work as a group of fellows across diverse campuses Before the start of the academic year, we were invited to spend a weekend at something close to a retreat during which we all participated in customized sessions on a variety of topics ranging from teaching portfolios to “non-traditional students” (those who are older than the typical age range for undergraduates). It’s during that retreat that we were given copies of one of the Quick Hits books.
The FFTF also brought us together at mid-year, for a series of discussions about our experiences up to that point and as a way to welcome new fellows. That event mostly inspred me to think about a sense of continuity between teachers. Like successive cohorts of students, we were gaining from peers who came before us and had a chance to help those who would come after us. From pithy advice to exam questions, we could reciprocate.

My FFTF year wasn’t my first year of teaching but it was the start of something special in my teaching career.
And it was mostly about getting inspired, not about being told what to do.

What does this have to do with ethnography? Well, again, not much. I did talk about “Teaching Ethnography” in one episode and I do frequently mention teaching as I talk about what I do as an ethnographer. After all, though I’m getting contracts as a “freelance ethnographer” and I do take on other projects using my ethnographic background, my main job as an ethnographer is still that of a teacher in a variety of ethnographic disciplines. Since I’m now using the “Informal Ethnographer” (and “iethnographer”) identity to regroup my work activities, it all makes sense, in my mind.
Besides, my approach to teaching is itself ethnographic. Not just because I do participant-observation in teaching contexts but also because my perspective uses the same considerations as ethnographic research.
There are some things which are specific to ethnographic teaching, in the tidbits I have in mind. But I really want to discuss teaching in general, whether or not it’s applicable as a reflection (or strategy) to disciplines outside of ethnography.
How do I dare do this? Well, it’s my blog and I feel free to use it the way I want to use it.
Those posts won’t be labeled “ethnography” unless they directly relate to ethnography. They’ll all have “ATT” in heir titles, to designate them as part of “Alex’s Teaching Tidbits.” they’ll also be categorized as “Alex’s Teaching Tidbits” using this blog’s simple post taxonomy. So they should be easy to spot and skip.
I don’t have a specific plan in terms of schedule but I do have a fairly long list of potential topics, already. Not sure I’ll cover them all but it’s easy to get started.

So I’ll start.