Friere and Bruffee are all well and good in the humanities based
classroom where students can participate in the "community of
knowledgeable peers," but in a technical classroom, like say
thermodynamics or aerospace engineering, a certain amount of delivery of
concepts needs to occur before anyone can hope to even play at being a
"knowledgeable" peer. Couldn't the best explanation of those concepts
occur within the lecture? Unlike textbooks, a lecture invites a chance
for questions, and a chance for the lecturer to read the confusion on
students' faces and respond to it. Perhaps the lecturing style I am
describing is less old school formal than we might think of from the
type of profs who also liked to wear academic gowns, but I don't believe
that the lecture has to be passive just because it is a lecture.
Certainly, some students will remain passive unless their seats are
wired, and bigger classes invite that kind of hiding, but
"problem-posing" can be done in a lecture surely.
Maybe it is time to establish a definition of terms. What is a
"lecture"? Does it mean a monolithic monologue? Or do some of the
interactive large group strategies that people have discussed still mean
we are lecturing? Personally, I like to think of myself as a teacher
not a lecturer, but I will use the lecture. I will take the time to
give students a clear reading of a passage of Shakespeare, or to present
a concept of postmodernism, or to explain Gopen and Swan's principles
for revising technical documents. Sometimes these things take an hour
or more. I think of these as lectures. I will also get students to work
out their own reading of a passage, explain po-mo from their own
experience and apply principles of revision to a passage or to their own
writing. I do these things within lectures, but also in more discussion
oriented formats. Doug warned against seeing lectures as a straw man to
attack. I guess I still wonder what it is the attack is against.
Vilifying lectures as oppressive (a la friere) seems to me to eliminate
one of the tools from the teacher's box. And while the lecture may be
employed as a hammer pounding the learner into passivity, couldn't it
also be employed to tap a piece into place, to make a quick direct hit
or with a chisel (the student's mind?) to sculpt something beautiful.
This metaphor kind of got away from me at the end and thinking of the
student's mind as chisel to be whacked may not be the most productive
way of thinking of education, but hey, I'll leave it for the rest of you
to whack at.
Rob Irish
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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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