The Learner.
What do we need to know about our students?
If we want to improve how we teach, in the classroom or online, we do well to pay attention to our learners. Understanding them and their needs, aspirations, and ideas can help instructors in the design and instruction of their courses. But what do we need to know about them? What is the learner’s context?
Photo by Maxwell Nelson on Unsplash
Instructors are paying more attention to their learners of late, or so it seems if you read the teaching development pages of university teaching centres. The Community of Inquiry model, the ACE framework, and other strategies have helped to engender and reinforce a learner-centric approach to teaching. These approaches don’t just view the leaner as an information-gathering machine, either. They encourage instructors to take a holistic view and to understand students as people, something that seems fairly obvious, but which can be forgotten in the hectic of course preparation and design. If we think of students as just students, we may be missing out on whole parts of their lives that inform how they learn and study.
A method often suggested for learning more about students is a pre-class (or beginning-of-class/term) survey. This signals to students that the instructor wants to know more about them than their student number and email address, and it gives instructors the opportunity to set a learner-centric tone for the course. There’s lots of advice about what kind of questions to pose, though some questions are fairly obvious: name, major, why you’re taking the course.
Other questions reflect the times. Asking students what pronouns they prefer is becoming more common. And demonstrating interest in the student’s own particular circumstances is also encouraged. Take for example this question from a fairly well-known “getting to know you” survey:
Which of the following describes you? Select all that apply:
This is my first semester of college.
I am the first in my family to attend college.
This is my first time taking an online class.
I work more than 20 hours per week.
I am a caretaker for at least one person.
Other (please describe)
I’ve seen this question suggested in webinars and the like, and the response to it is very positive. Instructors like how it doesn’t assume that students have the ability to devote themselves completely to their studies; they have lives that extend beyond the classroom. Demonstrating this understanding to students is important. But are questions like the one above the best for doing that? It provides a pretty narrow list of options, and those options all play into current ideas about students having extra burdens because they’re caregivers or they have to work their way through school or being the first in their family to attend university puts them at a disadvantage. Imagine you were a student in that class and you were asked to respond to this question (a required question in the survey, no less). You’d assume that if you met none of those criteria, the instructor might not be very interested in your learning. Or perhaps you are the first in your family to attend university, but you think that makes no difference because you know that you got there on your merit and that you’ll do fine, thank you very much.
The question above doesn’t really tell you much about the student who answers it. But it says a lot about the instructor asking it. It says that the instructor wants to signal their virtue, wants to show that they are very aware of all the disadvantages facing students today. But does it show that the instructor wants to know students beyond the cliches that we project onto them? I don’t think so.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 40/60.