In the Ultimate Dog Tease, one of You Tube’s most popular videos of 2011 (now almost 94 million views), a man’s voice teases a dog with descriptions of maple-flavoured bacon and other tasty morsels, and the talking dog responds with increasing emotion as each treat goes elsewhere. I chuckle every time I watch, but the clip also reminds me of the importance of teaching because this entertaining conversation is, of course, not conversation at all; it’s an amusing illusion created by brilliant editing.
In contrast, teaching, in my view, is about developing a genuine conversation with students so that nobody will ever be able to put words in their mouths. Teaching is about helping students acquire thetools—the knowledge, the confidence, and the communication skills– crucial to individual intellectual and emotional growth as well as to society’s development.
Without such tools, we all run the risk of ending up like the YouTube dog, as manipulated performers in the social, political, cultural, and personal constructions edited by others. But can universities today still provide the circumstances in which genuine conversations can flourish? I worry that the various pressures facing today’s universities are leading many of us to lose belief in the meaning and value of higher education altogether.
“Why waste four years at the Provincial University of the Masses?” asked one columnist recently in a national newspaper (Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, 4 February 2012). Mocking the university classroom as both inadequate (a “medieval model”) and no longer “affordable in an age when public money is increasingly scarce,” Wente proposed a cheaper, more modern alternative: an online model where students sitting at home earn “career-oriented degrees” by logging screen time by themselves instead of seat time with classmates and professors.
Her model university “certifies students by competency,” which apparently means mastery of facts is proved through “assessments along the way–and a tough exam at the end.”
Although digital resources can enhance many aspects of higher education, it seems to me that this model university advocated by Wente and others is, ironically, more outmoded than what they think they are attacking.
Their model university appears to be merely a digital conduit for what might be called knowledge transfer, similar to the type of education propounded nearly 200 years ago by teachers like Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M’Choakumchild in Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.” In this knowledge-transfer model of education, students are empty “vessels . . . ready to have . . .facts poured into them until . . . full to the brim.”
But this model turns education into a replication of the talking-dog video, with words and ideas imposed upon passive students.
Genuine education, however, is like genuine conversation: it’s a dialogue in which professors and students collaborate as partners in intellectual discussion so that students acquire not just specific, testable knowledge about specific course facts but also an analytical ability to assess the many facts and situations they will certainly encounter after their degree programs are long over.
Students write back long after graduation to discuss continuing “to learn for myself,” or to ask about a long-ago text because since “the message has remained strong in my mind,” the book might be enjoyed by Medical School colleagues, or, after visiting Thailand and Cambodia, to mention “I thought a lot about your class … seeing the real Killing Fields” because of a related novel studied years before.
For me these notes offer ample proof of university’s enormous personal and societal value because they show former students experiencing education as a life-long process, not merely as material to be prepared for an exam.
This concept of education is what motivated the ad accompanying this commentary, taken from the February 14thGlobe and Mail newspaper. It is part of a series by ten 3M National Teaching Fellows who want to offer a public demonstration that today’s university professors do still care about education.
We value the complexity of the many intangibles in the teaching that inspired us, and we want to repay our debt to those who taught us by honouring the obligation to “pay it forward” and teaching our own students today to the best of our abilities. Good teaching has always mattered–and it still does.
To care about teaching is to recognize that genuine education creates a conversational legacy that will contribute to the lives of both individuals and society in a multitude of ways. Education, in the broadest understanding of the term, is about all of us, professors and students alike, “paying it forward” in whatever we do.
So if there is any teacher or mentor in your past that you have never let know just how much what they did meant to you, please join the discussion by going to this higher education website and clicking on the yellow sticky “thank you” note. Let’s all help generate more discussion about education by telling how good teaching mattered to each of us as individuals.
Let your own story be heard!
Dr. Diana L. Austin Department of English Faculty of Arts University of New Brunswick Fredericton 3M National Teaching Fellow 2011
Maple-Flavoured Bacon: The Importance of Teaching
Posted by UNB on 2/14/12 • Categorized as Commentary,In the Media,myUNB
In the Ultimate Dog Tease, one of You Tube’s most popular videos of 2011 (now almost 94 million views), a man’s voice teases a dog with descriptions of maple-flavoured bacon and other tasty morsels, and the talking dog responds with increasing emotion as each treat goes elsewhere. I chuckle every time I watch, but the clip also reminds me of the importance of teaching because this entertaining conversation is, of course, not conversation at all; it’s an amusing illusion created by brilliant editing.
In contrast, teaching, in my view, is about developing a genuine conversation with students so that nobody will ever be able to put words in their mouths. Teaching is about helping students acquire thetools—the knowledge, the confidence, and the communication skills– crucial to individual intellectual and emotional growth as well as to society’s development.
Without such tools, we all run the risk of ending up like the YouTube dog, as manipulated performers in the social, political, cultural, and personal constructions edited by others. But can universities today still provide the circumstances in which genuine conversations can flourish? I worry that the various pressures facing today’s universities are leading many of us to lose belief in the meaning and value of higher education altogether.
“Why waste four years at the Provincial University of the Masses?” asked one columnist recently in a national newspaper (Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, 4 February 2012). Mocking the university classroom as both inadequate (a “medieval model”) and no longer “affordable in an age when public money is increasingly scarce,” Wente proposed a cheaper, more modern alternative: an online model where students sitting at home earn “career-oriented degrees” by logging screen time by themselves instead of seat time with classmates and professors.
Her model university “certifies students by competency,” which apparently means mastery of facts is proved through “assessments along the way–and a tough exam at the end.”
Although digital resources can enhance many aspects of higher education, it seems to me that this model university advocated by Wente and others is, ironically, more outmoded than what they think they are attacking.
Their model university appears to be merely a digital conduit for what might be called knowledge transfer, similar to the type of education propounded nearly 200 years ago by teachers like Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M’Choakumchild in Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.” In this knowledge-transfer model of education, students are empty “vessels . . . ready to have . . .facts poured into them until . . . full to the brim.”
But this model turns education into a replication of the talking-dog video, with words and ideas imposed upon passive students.
Genuine education, however, is like genuine conversation: it’s a dialogue in which professors and students collaborate as partners in intellectual discussion so that students acquire not just specific, testable knowledge about specific course facts but also an analytical ability to assess the many facts and situations they will certainly encounter after their degree programs are long over.
Students write back long after graduation to discuss continuing “to learn for myself,” or to ask about a long-ago text because since “the message has remained strong in my mind,” the book might be enjoyed by Medical School colleagues, or, after visiting Thailand and Cambodia, to mention “I thought a lot about your class … seeing the real Killing Fields” because of a related novel studied years before.
For me these notes offer ample proof of university’s enormous personal and societal value because they show former students experiencing education as a life-long process, not merely as material to be prepared for an exam.
This concept of education is what motivated the ad accompanying this commentary, taken from the February 14th Globe and Mail newspaper. It is part of a series by ten 3M National Teaching Fellows who want to offer a public demonstration that today’s university professors do still care about education.
We value the complexity of the many intangibles in the teaching that inspired us, and we want to repay our debt to those who taught us by honouring the obligation to “pay it forward” and teaching our own students today to the best of our abilities. Good teaching has always mattered–and it still does.
To care about teaching is to recognize that genuine education creates a conversational legacy that will contribute to the lives of both individuals and society in a multitude of ways. Education, in the broadest understanding of the term, is about all of us, professors and students alike, “paying it forward” in whatever we do.
So if there is any teacher or mentor in your past that you have never let know just how much what they did meant to you, please join the discussion by going to this higher education website and clicking on the yellow sticky “thank you” note. Let’s all help generate more discussion about education by telling how good teaching mattered to each of us as individuals.
Let your own story be heard!
Dr. Diana L. Austin
Department of English
Faculty of Arts
University of New Brunswick Fredericton
3M National Teaching Fellow 2011
Watch a video about Dr. Austin’s teaching award