>Marcy, you ask all kinds of tough questions:
>Am I to assume that unless people are doing things for their own purposes
>and goals, they're not learning? Is it impossible to learn to understand
>Mill just so you get a good grade in the class?
I read your earlier longer message and thought I'd put it aside; and the
n came this. I am sure they're learning something, not necessarily what
I hope they'll learn and not necessarily under productive circumstances.
I can read a text in order to answer my questions or in order to answer
yours. In the latter case, I need you to confirm that I have the right
answers. In the former case, where I have turned to the text because I
believe there some answers lie, I am going to make the effort to make
sense of that text. You as teacher may have suggested that particular
text, but it is still I who am asking my questions.
As to your second question, I believe grades do provide an incentive for
reading seemingly unattractive material; however, the focus for reading
becomes a matter of anticipating the grader's interests and concerns.
And that again is sufficiently discomfitting to subvert whatever learnin
goals we have in mind.
I can imagine developing situations where my students, required to atten
d my course and therefore already resentful, begin to read and write be-
cause that reading and writing satisfies an immediate need not some
future need and certainly to please themselves and not the teacher (
and get a good grade). One of my students has just completed her
M.Ed. monograph where she took on just such a challenge with two ESL
classes enrolled in an English Literature course. As I read, I feel her
excitement where her students, despite their qualms about small group
work and the teacher not lecturing, increasingly assume responsibility
for their own learning. She had set up the situations within which they
realized they had within and among themselves the resources to read
and make sense of the assigned texts for themselves. Over several weeks
they come to value and seek the responses of their peers, find confirmat
ions for their own hunches, and shift away from asking teacher like
questions of themselves and their smallgroup partners to attending to
what puzzles and excites them in their own evocations of the text they'v
e read in common.
Patrick Dias
Faculty of Education
McGill University
3700 McTavish Street
Montreal, QC
Canada H3A 1Y2
Telephone: (514) 398-6960 (work)
626-3605 (home)
FAX (514) 398-4529
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Note: Mail transport via Digital Equipment of Canada Ltd. Calgary gateway.
