O.k. it is time for me to re-enter the fray here. In response to
Mieke's questions: in the course I reported about (a first year
technical writing course taught by English Dept to Engineering
students), the students meet in the lecture format for two hours per
week (one by me, and one by a guest lecturer talking about some aspect
of engineering) and they also meet in tutorials for two hours per week
where they practice writing with assignments moving through the
rhetorical patterns and certain forms like memos, letters, proposal. Or
they did, the English department in its wisdom has cut back to one hour
per week of tutorial and has eliminated the guest lecture component,
meaning that the poor blighter who is succeeding me has to lecture 2
hours and the poor students only get 1 hour per week of anything useful.
I also lecture in literature courses (or I did when I taught them,
whether I will teach such courses in the future is an open question). I
think in this discussion a couple of points have emerged as important
for me. One is Jim Bell's comment that lecturing can have a purpose,
but that the problem emerges when the lecturer does not know what that
purpose is, or (to reinterpret Doug Brent's final lament) when that
purpose is merely to self-promote for 40 minutes at a conference. I
lecture to give students tools necessary for writing or for interpreting
literary texts. For example, I might lecture for 1/2 hour on Rene
Girard's theory of triangular desire, and then more discursively get the
students to apply it to a short story, or whatever. This is lecturing
with a purpose. And, I know it gets through because students will then
raise it themselves in discussions of later stories, sometimes at weeks
remove from the initial lecture.
I think Jim's point about having an objective also relates to Doug
Brent's point about the dialogic possibility of the lecture. If the
students are motivated and interested, the lecture becomes a dialogic
possiblity, if not, it is merely background noise like the air
conditioner in my office, cool but annoying.
Cathy and Marcy lament class size (trust Cathy to see the political
angle) but if this is the direction universities are going, and it seems
to be, it becomes even more important to continue to explore ways of
getting through to students in larger groups. In the past, one of my key
motivating strategies has been sheer personal energy. I figured that if
I showed them I was excited about this stuff and made the lectures kind
of fun (yes, Lorri I admit that I have resorted on occasion to
"stand-up" routines --as well as blackboards, overheads and all that
stuff) then the students would catch on ("even so quicky may one catch
the plague"). Certainly a few have--probably those most inclined toward
writing in the first place. Another trick I have used is again a
personal attribute--I'm good with names. As a result, I can learn a
significant number of names in a class of 200. This impresses the hell
out of students, and in an anonymous subject like Engineering, I am the
only prof who knows them at the end of first year. This encourages them
to commit more fully to the course. I'd like some real strategies to
reach more students that would not rely on my use of steroids and
caffeine or the quality of my memory synapses.
So, maybe I'm asking people to move on to looking at big group (lecture)
strategies. How do you break your groups down in ways that are
productive without leading to classroom chaos? Do you get students
reporting back to students? (isn't this just students lecturing
students?) What do you do when a group assigned a particular portion
doesn't come through?
And Belated Happy Canada Day
Rob Irish
P.S. I'm still keen for more responses to the question "Why not
lecture?"
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Dr. Robert Irish
Coordinator of Language Across the Curriculum
Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering
University of Toronto
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
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