Solitude.
There is nothing wrong with solitary study.
This week in our graduate seminar on online teaching we’re discussing collaborative learning - the fancy way of saying group work. It can be an important tool in our efforts to engage students in online courses. I’ll talk about that in tomorrow’s post. Today I want to take a moment and get something off my chest.
Photo by Rostyslav Savchyn on Unsplash
There is nothing wrong with studying in a group of one, alone.
This summer during a webinar I was explaining how I teach online, and I was asked why I hadn’t included any ideas for group work. I replied that not every course needs to have a collaborative learning assignment, that most students would have enough courses with strong group work components. During and after the webinar I heard from a handful of instructors who thanked me for saying that. Every time they have attended pedagogy workshops, they have felt pressured to find ways to incorporate group activities, and many instructors find managing such activities difficult.
Students have expressed similar views. One student actually thanked me once for not having group work in my course. “Since high school all we’ve had is group work, group work, group work,” she told me. There was no joy in her voice when she said that.
When I was an undergraduate student in the early 1980s, I didn’t have a single course with a collaborative learning component. Even today, for better or worse, I tend to prefer working alone, although I do work with people all the time on committees and the like, and I do like that work. But I don’t find that kind of work easy, and maybe that’s an argument for group activities in courses; it takes practice to become comfortable working with others.
But when I reflect on my time as a student, some of my strongest and most pleasurable memories are of sitting in the library, studying, alone. I enjoyed going for breaks with people, but the time spent pondering verb tables or parsing sentences from 18th-century German plays or trying to figure out just what was going on in that story by Kafka has left the most indelible impression. I think I realized then what I most certainly realize now: it was a privilege to spend precious time just thinking things through.
And it was time well spent. I think it made me a keener, more perceptive reader, it taught me that the role that patience plays in gaining insight and perspective, and it gave me a sense of calm (that was quickly shattered when I realized I had to stop thinking and start writing that term paper). These are things I’d wish for anybody.
But if you were to read the work of pedagogy professionals, you’d think that no one studies just on their own, nor should they. It is all about learner-learner or learner-instructor interaction. Even when we talk about learner-content interaction, there is little mention of reading or studying quietly; rather, the emphasis is on learning activities and the like. Not that such activities are bad, of course not. But I think we have all experienced moments of learning that have take place apart from the hubbub of a course, when we sit alone and put our minds to the task at hand. It would do us good to remember that and promote an appreciation for it among our students as well.
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 51/60.