As I blogged earlier, my department is facing an interestnig problem/opportunity in the possibility of shifting from a 3-4 teaching load to a 3-3 load. One of my colleagues astuted pointed out, the shift requires us to determine what we value and what we are willing to give up. For example, would we be willing to raise class sizes for certain courses? Would we be willing to alter our curriculum in some way so as to eliminate certain courses and funnel those students into other courses with open seats? In a meeting with my chair and two senior colleagues I had suggested two possibilities. The first was that we eliminate an advanced writing course we had created specifically for Education majors to take (though the content was not education-related, just an adv. comp. course) and allow those students to take Professional Writing and upper-division, writing-intensive literature courses. The second was that we reduce the requirement for literature surveys for English majors from four to two, thus reducing our need to offer those courses and, again, shifting students into the low-enrolled upper division literature courses.

Both suggestions were opposed for essentially the same reason: they would result in students appearing in 400-level literature courses who did not have a particular general knowledge of a period. The argument is flawed on several levels. 1. While ENG majors are required to take the surveys, all other students are already allowed to take these courses, provided they’ve passed their gen. ed. literature course. 2. Though ENG majors take all four surveys, they only need to take one before they are allowed to enroll in 400-level courses; thus, a student who has taken Brit Lit 1850-present can take Am. Lit or Chaucer or whatever. In other words, the requirement is no assurance the students have taken the relevant course. 3. The notion that these survey courses are somehow a panacea for a lack of cultural literacy is absurd.

However, what is really at stake here are significantly different notions of teaching and learning. I was reminded of this again today, rereading Bill Schneiderman’s Leonardo’s Laptop. These differences are well-described as a conflict between an individualistic-competitive model of learning and a networked-collaborative model. At one point Schneiderman asks

Why shouldn’t every student earn an A? The first response from educators habituated to competition is cynical: they assume that this goal is attainable only by lowering standards…However, grading on a curve can encourage mediocrity instead of excellence, and it often prevents students from learning communication skills. By contrast, if instructors have a clear set of educational goals, then isn’t it possible to design courses so that every student attains them?

I can’t say that I agree with this entirely. That is, I think this is some value in setting goals, or at least creating assignments, that many students in the course will not, and perhaps cannot, attain. Failure is also a valuable learning tool, but perhaps then I am just thinking of learning goals in a different way b/c a student who takes a risk and fails can do as well in my class, if not better, than the student who takes less risk and succeeds. Students in my model, and Schneiderman’s, spend their class time in discussion and collaboration, either as a class or in groups, online or FTF. I lecture, probably more than I would like. It happens b/c the students need me to fill in information and b/c that’s where their comfort level is, their expectation of teaching. And its difficult to break them of the habit.

Grading (and “grade inflation”) is one of the classic topics that we argue about in department meetings. For those like myself who stress experimentation, collaboration, and projects with some connection to the real world, grades work very differently than they do for someone who stresses mastery, competition, and artificial testing. Similarly, when we ask what we value about our curriculum and what we are willing to give up, I (and others like me) are willing to give up mastery, memorization, and control. Reducing or eliminating the literature surveys and/or inviting students outside the major into 400-level courses requires understanding learning in a different way–not as the developmental process, not as a movement from general to specific. Undoubtedly English majors should have an advantage over non-majors in their own discipline, but students always enter the course with a variety of levels of preparation. Besides all students take courses outside their major. In the networked-collaborative model, the disparity of preparation is mitigated by working in groups, and the more expert students benefit from developing their communication and teaching skills.

In any case, as it clear in Schneiderman’s book and to anyone who teaches with networks, electronic communication facillitates, though it is certainly not required for, networked-collaborative learning. I would like to suggest that it is our students expectation to learn in this way, but it isn’t. However, it is increasingly the way in which they will be asked to work after they graduate. In English Studies, we must come to realize that our discipline is not about knowing certain information about literary periods or authors or mastering a level of grammatical performance or stylistic correctness. It is instead about engaging and practicing a fluid literacy that allows us to participate in a plethora of networked discourses in ethical, creative, and productive ways.