Easily Distracted

Many of the criticisms directed at information technology in the classroom get hung up on a misattribution issue. Eric Rauchway makes this point very effectively: the problem with bad PowerPoint presentations is often not the software, but the presenter.

The professors who get up and drone their way through slides would get up and drone their way through written notes if you took away the technology. There’s some truth to the point raised by Kid Bitzer in the comments to the Rauchway thread, that PowerPoint exacerbates or aggravates some of the underlying issues that a mediocre or poor lecturer carries into the classroom. Still, dealing with the technology is just a case of treating a symptom, not the disease.

I’ll also leave aside the other contributing problems that make bad lectures even worse than they have to be, such as classrooms with two or three hundred people in them.

I think there a few really basic things that professors who make significant use of lectures in their teaching can do to improve them, whether or not they use any kind of presentation technology.

1. A lecture is not the right vehicle for problematizing a subject, exploring the finer points of scholarly debate on a particular issue, or indulging in the kinds of qualifiers and asides that are a part of scholarly writing in many fields. There might be a moment in a lecture where a student’s question or comment catalyzes a useful digression along these lines. You might build a lecture around describing two major competing schools of thought. But a lecture is a compressed format that requires clear, declarative statements. I know this was the first lesson I struggled to learn coming out of graduate school, because I felt like boiling issues down to some core principles was committing some kind of intellectual sin. Discussion is a good format for muddying the waters, lecture is not.

2) Don’t use a lecture to repeat or duplicate an assigned reading. This is a mistake in several respects. It wastes the time of those who did the reading, it incentivizes others to skip the reading, and it raises the question of why the classroom exists in the first place. A lecture that addresses a reading should be a dynamic response to that reading: putting it in perspective, going beyond its terms, comparing it to material that was not read. Lectures should be used more often to explain and explore material for which there is no useful single reading. Readings and lectures have to be complementary, not redundant.

3) A lecture needs to have a theme, a central idea, and you need to come back to it repeatedly. You can do that elegantly through what pedagogical specialists call “spiraling”, where each return to the theme is slightly different, or builds up. But a lecture that’s just a grab-bag of all the stuff you can think of about a topic makes for a lousy performance and makes for lousy pedagogy. A clear theme, repeated elegantly, is more engaging to listen to and it’s far easier to retain some useful knowledge from listening.

4) Performance counts. Maybe that comes down to vivid language, maybe it comes down to a great anecdote, maybe it involves humor, maybe it’s about great use of props or technology. Don’t be ashamed of a bit of schtick. At the very least, you’ve got to be excited and engaged by the material you’re covering. If you’re bored by it, or sound bored by it, it’s inevitable that the students will be as well. Performance is generally not spontaneous, either: it should be as much a part of preparing a lecture as anything else.

5) Personalization is important. This is one reason I find Horowitzian demands for a completely neutral, affectless classroom so completely clueless. I’m not saying that a good lecturer gets up and rants at students about his pet political beliefs, but if you’re not putting your own distinctive views of the material out there, you’re not giving a good lecture. If you’re just reading off a generic, lowest-common-denominator description of knowledge on a particular subject, you might as well just distribute your outline to the students and save them the trouble of coming to class to hear you read that aloud. If there isn’t some benefit to hearing you, a particular individual scholar, interpret the subject matter, then there isn’t much point to having a classroom in the first place.

6) A good lecturer has got to learn to pay attention to body language in the audience without being over-attentive to it. At first I can remember being incredibly anxious at the least sign of a student appearing bored. Over time what you learn is that there are some people who appear bored when they’re sitting and listening even if they’re actually highly engaged, and there are people who look perky and attentive who are actually busy daydreaming about going to the beach. After a couple of weeks with a given class, you should learn to watch the students who have responsive body language, who can tell you something about whether the lecture is going the right way or not. Use those students as your “standard candle” to decide whether or not to stop or change course in a lecture. If you’re not prepared to try some other approach to a topic or to take another tack altogether, once again, you’re undercutting the whole point of having a real physical classroom with you, a real physical person, in front of a real physical audience.

I didn’t catch the complaint of some philosophers against a small NEH course-development program called “Enduring Questions” the first time around, but picked up on it via Savage Minds.

The NEH program offers a small amount of financial support for faculty developing “predisciplinary” courses that deal with questions like, “What is the good life?”, “What are good and evil?”, “Is there a human nature” and so on.

The term predisciplinary is evidently the first provocation to philosophers critical of the program, as they (I think accurately) read it to say that courses taught by philosophers in philosophy departments which are part of the standard curriculum of disciplinary philosophy are not really what the grant aims to support. There’s nothing excluding philosophers from participation, but the clear implication is that to qualify for the grant, they’d need to teach the normal substance of their discipline in some kind of extended or extradisciplinary framework. Understandably, this is a puzzling request from their perspective, since they’re quite right that they really do address these questions day-in and day-out in their existing courses.

I’m sympathetic to the initial reaction of irritation. If the NEH set up a course development grant called “Time and the Past” aimed at supporting interdisciplinary courses that examined change over time but framed the grant so that ordinary history courses didn’t qualify, my first impulse would be to object. Why exclude the discipline that makes that question its central concern?

But hold on a moment. What might a grant solicitation written that way incentivize? Maybe attention to how thinking about change over time is a real problem for some disciplines: some forms of economics, for example. Maybe a course (by philosophers, even!) on whether history matters or is knowable, which history departments don’t tend to offer. Maybe a course in a natural science that asks how and when old science matters to contemporary science. The more I think about it, the more I can think of really interesting courses that respond to the prompt and aren’t likely to be taught by most historians. I can think of courses which might respond to the prompt that could be taught by a historian, but they’d be good additions to a curriculum in other departments as well.

The more I think about it, the more I also recognize that historicism or study of the past play roles in other disciplines, sometimes roles that intermingle with the way historians work and sometimes not. What skin off my nose is it if a literary critic is also an intellectual or cultural historian? That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. I might have some friendly nudging about methdology to make to a non-historian doing historical work, but no more.

Broadly speaking, I think anyone can study history, and that the methodology and theory of historical study are not highly technical. Academic historians certainly benefit from having studied history, e.g., from knowledge of particular places and time periods, knowledge of historiography, and actual experience of historical research. It does not require a lengthy apprenticeship to begin to think usefully about the past, and scholarly works of history can and should be read and savored and made use of by broad audiences with no special training.

The philosophers who object to the NEH grant largely argue that philosophy is a highly technical discipline with a history of progressively greater and more precise knowledge about its subject which cannot be understood without dedicated training. They also argue that the “enduring questions” the NEH proposes are by nature philosophical in this sense. They perceive no need to incentivize courses in “enduring questions” because they believe such courses already exist and are called “a philosophy major”.

Part of this reaction is just the enduring struggle within and around disciplinary philosophy over Rorty-like complaints that the discipline is too insular and technical. My long-term arguments against fastidious forms of disciplinarity, at least at small colleges, apply just as surely to philosophy as they do to my own discipline and most others. All disciplines, even the natural sciences, need some capacity to translate and disseminate their particular forms of knowledge outside of their discipline, without insisting that an outsider undergo some prior training in that discipline. However, I do think there’s something especially wrong-headed with saying, “Well, we have a pretty precise, well-resolved technical answer to the question, ‘What is the good life?’, but if you’re not trained in philosophy, I can’t explain it to you.” The question “What is the good life?” is really not the same thing as a difficult question in mathematics.

I also wonder, however, if the philosophical critics believe that there is no intellectually useful or legitimate response to many of the “enduring questions” outside of academic philosophy. For example, surely literature or art poses those questions and sometimes struggles to answer them in a manner quite distinctive from philosophy. This is not to say that philosophy, like literary criticism, cannot try to encompass or understand the way in which art or literature ask those questions: philosophers has done wonderful work along those lines. But interpreting how art asks enduring questions is not the same as the first-order posing of those questions by artists within their art.

Similarly, the empirical study of how human beings actually have been in past societies or presently are within contemporary societies tends to intrinsically generate some of those enduring questions. A comparative historian with an interest in political systems may not set out to answer the question, “What’s a good government?” as a political philosopher might, but I’d be surprised if by the end such a historian wouldn’t have some pretty interesting and wholly intellectual answers to that question which come from an accumulation of empirical cases.

If the NEH grant ended up drawing out some of those different ways of coming at big, deeply human questions and forging them into provocative courses, that’s a great outcome. Humanistic inquiry has a pressing obligation to legibility with wider publics, a need to pose its distinctive questions in broadly relevant terms. I can’t see why the federal government (or anyone, really) ought to subsidize humanistic study which is in some enduring or permanent fashion conceived as incommensurable with general intellectual discourse and incommunicable to anyone lacking highly specific training.

Don’t get me wrong: any study of “enduring questions” needs to enshrine philosophy, to acknowledge its central importance, both in its broadest and most specifically disciplinary forms. Anyone aspiring to teach to those questions who recognizes that importance and yet is not a philosopher is well-advised to be seek the counsel of philosophers with some degree of humility. This is where I understand and endorse with reservations some of the irritation expressed by philosophers at this grant program, insofar as it can be taken to endorse the idea that “enduring questions” can be asked wholly innocent of the long history of philosophers asking them.

Humility ought to work both ways, though: contemporary scholarly philosophy doesn’t own a comprehensive patent on those questions.