Cynthia Prescott, Department of History, University of North Dakota
With fall semester drawing nigh, I find myself scrambling to catch up on the research and writing I optimistically planned to complete this summer. The enthusiasm for completely overhauling my courses for the fall that I felt coming off the highs and lows of last academic year is quickly drowning in pressing deadlines of other kinds. This tension between fresh ideas and overripe obligations, between good intentions and base self interest, has me reconsidering the wisdom of current calls for classroom engagement and active learning modules.
Recent scholarship of teaching and learning has consistently upheld the value of engagement in the learning process. My own experiences have also reinforced the desirability of active learning. Both my students and I seem to have more fun when class time is devoted to activities that go beyond traditional lecture or even class discussions. I wonder, though, how reliable student feedback really is as a measure of effective learning. Two years later, I am confident that our lively debate on whether farmers’ daughters benefited from working in the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills is the only thing that many of my former students remember about my course in American women’s history. But did they truly come away from that class activity with a greater understanding of the impact of the market revolution on rural and urban women’s lives? Or do they simply remember that it was fun to argue with their classmates, and take a break from taking lecture notes? Does a fun or memorable activity necessarily lead to deeper learning? Are these activities sufficiently superior to more traditional classroom learning styles that it justifies devoting not only class time to completing the activities, but also the preparation time required to develop them? Time that I could be spending on guiding the students’ independent research projects, reading the latest scholarship on the topic, or making progress on those pressing publication deadlines?
Almost certainly, it depends on the activity. I could devote a 75-minute class period of U.S. women’s history to leading my students in calisthenics, and I am sure that it would be memorable. I am sure it would even be good for our physical and emotional health (particularly my own, since it wouldn’t require as much preparation time). But developing classroom activities that are engaging, memorable, and also educational – in the truest meanings of the term – is a bigger challenge. So I’ll follow through on the best of the ideas I generated in teaching workshops back in May, when summer was young and every new idea seemed possible. I’ll put the finishing touches on the library scavenger hunt that a previous Teaching Thursdays post inspired me to create(see “Teaching in the Sun: Revisiting the Study Tour”), and find better ways to integrate that Lowell mill debate into broader course themes. I’ll daydream of creating a database of these engaging activities to share with colleagues around the world. And then I’ll stop planning and daydreaming (and blogging), and get back to work on those overdue conference papers and book reviews.
