I’m racking my brains to think about any lecturer who ever grabbed my attention. Professor Tara Brabazon at Grand Parade certainly did last year with her black evening gown, long silk gloves, blond beehive and heels stomping to T Rex as she set up her powerpoint and waited for us to take our seats, but I couldn’t tell you anything about her inaugural lecture, “Google is White Bread for the Mind”. Maybe it’s me. Of the charismatic lecturers of my own uni days, I can only remember the one with whom my house-mate was having a not-so-secret affair. I can still see the look on his face as she eased herself past him to take her seat, just late enough to hush the hall.
I can remember watching films in lecture time and thinking how incredibly cool it was to be watching a Douglas Sirk film on a Wednesday morning. I don’t remember the lecturer’s input at all, but somebody must have told me about the relevance of Melodrama in McCarthy’s America. Compared to three hours of dictation on semiotics, it was a dream of a lecture.
So when I started teaching last year, I also showed films to my first years. They had never heard of the great documentary film-makers or ever really thought about content, and I felt it was a legitimate use of our time. Maybe it’s not so cool these days; most of them either texted their friends throughout or fell asleep. They woke up pretty sharpish when I told them about the reflective essay they would have to write for their ‘homework’.
This year, my teaching time has been reduced from three hours to two, so it’s impossible for me to put on a film even if I were to ignore the clear evidence of its failure to teach. I can show brief examples of what I think students should be watching but they will have to do the rest themselves. Will they organise a group screening? Will they borrow the DVD from the Uni library and watch it at home? It’s too early to tell, but if the snoozers of last year are anything to go by, it’s much harder to get students to study outside a lecture than inside – even if that means simply watching a film. I’m going to assume that they won’t. It may be harsh, but don’t tell me I’m not watching the signs.
But after reading The Stanford Handbook, I’m not so sure that what I do could really be called a ‘lecture’. I prepare a powerpoint, turn on the projector and the computer, and while they’re warming up, I arrange the tables and chairs for 25 in a vague class room arrangement so that everyone can see me at the front. But once they’re all busy signing the register and leafing through the papers for news stories, chatting with each other to discuss their spin on their stories, we’re already dispensing with what would normally be called a lecture. Standing on a lectern reading some lofty thoughts on how to make a documentary isn’t really my style, but more importantly, it doesn’t give my students a chance for their ideas to be heard.
If the “best way to 'awaken critical skills' is to practice using the canons of criticism” (Bligh 1972), then deconstructing the news is surely the best way for broadcast media students who may have never read a broadsheet to sharpen their thinking. So each week we turn a news story from the papers into a different broadcast genre – a documentary, two minute news item, magazine show item etc and within a few minutes, I’m leaning over their shoulders to see the stories they’re playing with, walking from table to table and only going back to my ‘position of authority’ (Gibbs) to set the next task. We role play for much of the session; I’m the ‘news editor-in-chief’ while my team of ‘researchers’ and ‘reporters’ pitch their ideas to ‘producers’ and then to me. On Monday my students will even find themselves miraculously transformed into Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby as we deconstruct the magazine show format. Gibbs was right about that one; any anthropologist looking in on one of my lectures would find the whole thing completely bizarre.
I think they do learn in my 'lecture'. We go over and over the 60 word 'pitch', learning from each other's disasters and refining the practice until we've got it right. They continue to do so in their weekly essays as part of their assignment, but without the 'lecture', I can't imagine how they would be able to get the same results.
Gibbs and Bligh take their examples from lecture halls of a different era in education, and maybe a lecture means different things to different people these days. But let’s say that getting a bunch of students into a closed room for two to three hours and hoping that they come out at the end with at least five new facts (Stanford 2007) in their exercise book is called a lecture. Is it any use? Yes; I think that it provides a cohesive learning experience, an opportunity to share the learning and enjoy university life more fully. School leavers feel more secure with the clear boundaries of a lecture, while mature students feel embraced by the experience. Even any negativity they may feel can provoke a discussion in the café afterwards about the content that could move their learning on. But if it doesn't offer the chance for a student to hear his or her new ideas for the first time, what's the point? If a lecture is as Gibbs says, a 'symptom of self-importance', then we've lost any opportunity for inspiration which is where, for me at least, education really starts.
If the word 'inspiration' comes from the Latin inspirare meaning 'to breathe in','education' comes from educare meaning 'to lead out'. And that's what I think lectures should be all about.
No comments:
Post a Comment