Schenectady Synecdoche: Banking and learning

May 29, 2006

Banking and learning

Ordinarily I teach very dialogic classes. They may (or may not) be carefully planned and orchestrated, but what happens in class is very interactive, very collaborative.

This fall I'm teaching two authorship courses—a grad course and an advanced undergrad. Authorship is my field of specialty. I do a lot of guest lectures at other campuses on topics in authorship (usually but not always plagiarism). And in my grad class this fall, I intend to devote some class sessions to lecturing. It's the most efficient way to move through an overview understanding of the subfields within authorship. One of the students who will be in that grad class has already done some work in the field. The rest almost certainly have not. Most or all of them will be PhD students in composition and rhetoric. Even in composition, rhetoric, and literary studies, the phrase "authorship studies" is often taken to be a synonym for "the study of writing."

So for that PhD seminar, I can spend the entire semester dialogically giving the class a basic overview of the field of authorship studies. Or I can do that job in a few weeks via knowledge-transmission: one-hour lectures followed by discussion of assigned texts. And then (and meanwhile) we can move into collaborative and/or individual projects in authorship.

So yes, I'm giving serious consideration to lecturing this fall, in a class whose enrollment is likely to be 4-10 students. On hearing this, one of the students who will be in that class said, "Whoopee! We love lecturing! We love soaking up all that stuff!" I hope her sentiments are shared by others in the class! It's kind of funny, really, how comfortable I am with going and lecturing to faculty and/or grad students at other institutions but hesitate to do it in my own classes. I'm afraid that back in the Day when I was myself a grad student reading Elbow, Freire, and Shor, I may have overgeneralized their very sound ideas about pedagogy.

Still, lectures can be such bunk. Consider, for example, the attitudes expressed in the comments section on this post—especially #3, the poor burned soul who believes that all teachers are trying to avoid teaching and that lecturing and podcasting alike are standard mechanisms for accomplishing that avoidance.

Posted by senioritis at May 29, 2006 09:17 PM

Comments

There were many, many times during my graduate education when I would have LOVED a lecture instead of what I would now characterize as fumbling around. I'm working on getting over my fear of lecturing--a result of our field's love affair with the principals of critical pedagogy, I think. Lecturing=banking model=BAD.

Posted by: aerobil at May 30, 2006 09:55 AM