This week, Sarah and I spent time talking largely about the “making sure they learned it” issue, and how we would reasonably know when there are no graded assigments. It’s a much more complex subject in a large class; I journaled on this last week. Some of it is indeed an aspect of teaching philosophy. Some of it is a sheer physical limitation issue. But today we talked about the signaling of having some kind of written ‘product’ or some piece of accountability for an in-class activity. Even that, though, is not clear, and there are tradeoffs. For example, I facilitated an activity showing differences among the Myers-Briggs types as part of the personality unit for the course. For the activity for Sensing and Intuitor differences, students wrote about their Smarties (NZ version of M&Ms). The results were spot-on for differences in S/N and while having them prepare something to hand in about that difference (“write about” your Smarties) might have signaled that this was not all fun and games, it also would have probably negatively impacted the spontaneity and creativity of the activity if students were worried about getting it right to hand in.
On the flip side, we wondered if there was a way to fix up the “test” issue I wrote about last week. Because not only can’t I hear what they’re talking about, there is no back end ‘test’ like calling on groups to report out. Thus, the traditional small-class ways of ascertaining learning cannot be duplicated in those particular ways. Could we approximate that with having some kind of group outcome or writing assignment produced? Assessing it for content would be for simple acknowledgment only: rules about what is marked and assessed here are too stringent for making modifications on the fly like that. And could that little written ‘assignment’ be enough to get students to really take it more seriously than simply experiencing something and talking about it?
Conversational learning theory says talking is the finisher, but here, it seems like we need something else and we are struggling with what that something else might be. We are also present to the fact that writing something down could engage the reflectives, much in the same way it does in smaller classes. So there’s that, too. Is that enough?
I have been thinking about why classrooms ‘work’ as they do in different contexts and what the holistic cultural norms impact on the way we learn. It seems to me an interesting balance. In some ways, U.S. students may be more compliant in doing what we want them to do; they are unfazed at the idea of classroom activities and other types of active learning like community-based learning. At the same time, we as instructors are less authoritative in our roles, so that kind of ‘compliance’ seems really a form of trust. For example, when Sarah visited the United States a couple of years ago to team-teach with me in Idaho, she remembered that when the Org Behavior class was asked to get into groups, they just did it– no defensiveness, no arguments. The cultural norms going on certainly support that, since group work and interactivity in college courses are reinforced in a variety of classes, particularly in business schools.
There was a minor snafu this week when students did not have their 4 Myers-Briggs letters… They crowded the lectern, anxious, and relied on the safety-in-numbers type of complaint that “a whole group of us” didn’t have what they were supposed to have. Lecturers here, Sarah says, might actually have yelled at them, and told them it was their fault they were unprepared, which I guess I can imagine happening in the U.S. but not with impunity. Student evaluations would certainly note students’ sense of unfairness, or RateMyProfessors.com would get a barrage of negative ratings. I experience the U.S. set of norms as providing more of a feedback loop between the instructor and the student, but, that is not the expectation here.
The Diversity course, a smaller 300 level course, continues to go well. I have never taught a stand-alone Diversity class, so I am hoping to import some nuggets for a possible Gustavus course. I could at least steal enough great material (oh, wait, I mean borrow) to integrate materials into other courses. We ran a role play simulation showing differences in cultural orientations based on Hofstede’s work, and the students really engaged. As Sarah and I consider what happens in class each time in our post-mortem reflection time, we’re building from scratch a set of student learning competencies that most have never had before. Again I am sure it’s a trust thing, and it is humbling to me that they are willing to be vulnerable with us and their peers when they have really never been able to do that before.
Out of class exploration
These are the “temporary” learning buildings that we erected after the earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. This spot used to be a grass track and greenspace play area when I was here in 2009. Kirkwood Village, as it is called, has classrooms that are connected with ramp-like walkways, and they seem anything but temporary. Air-conditioning, technology, nice moveable furniture, and of course, a dedicated café. We teach the Diversity course in one of these classrooms, and it’s quite nice.
We were here on February 22, which was the 4th anniversary of the major earthquake centered near Christchurch, measuring 6.3 on the Richter and resulting in 185 lives lost. The devastation remains, and it will be decades before Christchurch is back to its 
pre-earthquake building count.
Here is downtown, a mix of rubble and artwork. The Cathedral is perhaps the most visible symbol of the destruction, and there is fierce debate about what to do now: tear it down and rebuild, or, try to save it. The emotion around that debate is very raw, four years on.
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