Date:         Sun, 10 Nov 96 04:57:27 EST
From: "T R. Young" <34LPF6T@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>
Organization: Central Michigan University
Subject:      And Gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche...
To: GRADUATE STUDENTS IN SOCIOLOGY <SOCGRAD@CSF.COLORADO.EDU>
Message-Id:   <961110.063929.EST.34LPF6T@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>
Chaucer wrote, among other stories on the road to Canterbury, the
Clerke's Tale...since reading it in college, the subject line above
has stayed with me through the good and the lean years I have in
academia...more about the clerke later but just now, I want to
share with you the rare genius of the good teacher.  I take as
exemplar the people in the Session on Teaching and Learning at
the recent Humanist Sociology Conference in Hartford.  Their ideas
on how to learn and to teach is a gladsome lesson for all of us.

The session was organized by Kathleen Tiemann, UNDakota and her own
presentation on the use of high tech in the classroom is a cautionary
tale upon which we all should ponder...but let me start with the first
presentation...that of Steve McGuire of Muskingum College...Steve
said, Goodbye to All That...were the that of which he spoke was tests
and lectures.  In a massified society offering little more than
massified education, the teacher becomes class enemy to the student
while the student comes to despise the classroom and knowledge process.

Steve offered several ideas about how to create an interactionallly
rich and informationally rich learning experience...the ideas began
with his use of 'Wake Up' questions...questions students must ask
themselves and answer themselves about concepts and theories in the
text being used...a sort of free-for-all about the topics of the day.

Steve also used group work as a way to focus upon such questions and
such answers...students shared the answer to their own questions and
that of others in short group sessions of 4-5 students...not lectures
but discussion among the students...Steve circulated among the groups
to keep them focussed and to hear what was being said.

Guided Meditation meant that Steve would ask students to put their
heads down and simply think a few moments about a question or a point
he would raise.  I have turned the lights off and given mini-lectures
--less than 10 minutes--about controversial ideas with good effect.

Steve also used 'Free Writing' as a focussing technique on given
topics of the day...a short unstructured passage on given topics in
sociology...I'm not sure just how Steve used the technique but since
you have human genius and human imagination, you can think of how you
might so do.

Musical Chairs and Charades were welcome interludes in Steve's
class-room [I have been to Muskigum to watch him teach]...and
my own students like to make a game of learning...more about
which later.

One of the most creative things Steve did was to ask the students
to write metaphors for basic sociological topics...he passed out
a sheet to us in the session in which he listed some metaphors
his students had created with which to 'Talk of Human Nature.'

   1.  Is Human Nature more like an ant colony or like spilt mercury?
   2.  Are Social Occasions more like a funeral or a party?
   3.  Is Human Nature more like a rubber band or a pair of handcuffs?
   4.  Is Human Nature a bad joke or a comfortable old shoe?
   5.  Is college like flying a kite or falling on your face?
   6.  Are social processes like bumper cars or like a relay race?

When Steve mentioned he used asked students to write advertizements,
I said, 'Steve, that is terrible!'  It wasn't of course but it did
focus attention on his humanizing response of an alienating art form.
He asked students to write ads on:

  1.  A sociological cure for pressure people experience on the job,
      in school, with family or those internal struggles we have.

  2.  Think up an ad for a product which will help people avoid
      cynicism, nihilism, mindlessness and superficiality.

  3.  Write an ad for a politician but since you have taken a drug
      which requires you be honest, you must tell the truth and the
      whole truth about him and/or her opponent.  Or one for a
      nuclear power company, the CIA or your own university...recall
      that you still take the honesty drug.

  4.  Write an ad for someone who has no anxiety about his/her
      essential sexuality, no fears, no compulsions, and who does
      not appear to be interested in worldly things.

Steve works in a small college with classes ranging from 15 t0 25;
seldom more.  But both Kathleen Tiemann and I have taught large
classes...there are both high-tech solutions to largeness as well
as labor intensive solutions to largeness.  I will tell you Kathleen's
solution now and about mine next week...

Last year, UNDakota built a high tech class room; in it were computer
driven monitors, VCR's, over-head projectors, audio system, and movie
projectors.  She found that, while grade distributions were about the
same before and after she began using high-tech, there were other
effects on both teacher and student.  Kathleen said she felt like a
weather forecaster talking to an unseen audience and pointing at a
data screen with a pointer in a darkened room.  Students said they
felt alone and isolated; had trouble staying in focus; missed the
rich voice and body talk of others lost in the dark but liked the
graphics and the smooth organization of data.  Kathleen agreed with
a comment that, once it is set up, it saves a lot of work for the
teacher; shifts the locus of teaching from the human being to the
machinery.
    Next semester, at U/Vermont, I will use Power Point and the
computer generated graphics Kathleen used but I will use high tech
as part of 'The Great Flying Chaos Learning Circus' I developed
at Virginia Tech six years ago...and about which I will tell you
next week in Part II of this series.

CULTURAL PLUNGE: Sara Schwartz Kendall is a Bay Area Organizer and
a teacher in a large California University...Sara had been under-
grad at Vassar and found teaching and learning very different in
the massified institutions which used to be the pride of California
and, indeed, of the world.  So Sara, bright young woman that she is,
set about to humanize the knowledge process...she made her students
take a 'Cultural Plunge.'  By that, she sent them out to observe,
report, think about and apply their Sociological Imaginations to
the marginal, the dispossessed, the outcast, the wretched refuse
from the teeming shores of Asia and Central America...as well as
to middle class churches, working class bars and upper class
homes...a cultural plunge indeed.

You might want to use such 'informal field' assignments as a warm-
up for your classes.  I give the students a list of ten concepts
from the chapter on which I am working and tell them to use any
five in a report on the social structure and social processes they
observe in such churches, bars, shops and, if they like, other
classes in which they are enrolled.

WARNING: Such field assignments can be dangerous to their health
and welfare not to mention your salary and tenure...others in the
session commented on university requirements for 'experimentations.'
I handle both the administration and the danger by telling the
students, with all sincerity, that they must do nothing to embarrass
their 'subjects;' themselves or the university.  If the field assign-
ment is in a questionable part of town, I go with the students;
limit the adventure to ten students and tell them they must not be
more than 15 seconds away from me  [as though I could do anything
if they were threatened...but it is re-assuring to them that I come
along...and I can talk to most folks].

MOVIE LABS: Rhonda Zingraff, Meredith College in Raleigh, Va. and
Tony Ladd, Loyola in New Orleans offered a special session called,
'Humanist Sociology Goes to the Movies: Teaching Critical and
Reflective Skills Through Film.'  It was a most helpful session to
those who want to expand the knowledge process from lectures to
movies.  The session had two main parts; one a discussion of 100
or so movies set up in 13 categories which you might want to use
to illuminate the sociology of it all.

The second part centered around the politics of using film in
class...the short version is that colleagues, chairs and deans
deem the use of films a cheap way to spend the semester and hold
those who use it in small regard...there is a solution to it which
did not come up in class other than to say that the teacher '..must
take time to discuss the film before and after the showing...often
hard to do in a class period of 50 minutes and a two hour film.

I have used movie labs for years and have developed a highly focussed
way to use them...about which I will tell you next week...the short
version is that I schedule a two-hour block for every Thursday
afternoon and give a mini-lecture on some 20 concepts together with
a work-sheet which students must hand-in...as part of their grade.
Movie labs are very popular so I have sign-up sheets and charge
10% of the semester grade for each lab...few people sign-up and fail
to show when 10% of their grade is on the line.

I will conclude this report of the teaching/learning sessions at AHS
with a partial list of the movies Rhonda and Tony handed out...then
say just a bit more about Chaucer and his Clerke as background to
your own commitment to the lerning and the techeing process.

13 categories and selected films [how many have you seen?]:

A.  Capitalism/Class/Stratification:
    Wall Street
    Other People's Money
    Norma Rae
    The Grapes of Wrath
    Blue Collar
    The Wizard of Oz

B.  Cultural Diversity
    Powaqqatsi
    Road Scholar
    The Gods must be Crazy
    Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Don't ask me; I didn't see it!)
    Grand Canyon

C. Political Repression/Revolution/Social Change
   Salvador
   Fahrenheit 451
   Missing
   Cry Feedom
   Gandhi
   Michael Collins

D. Media and Power
   Network
   Talk Radio
   To die for
   King of Comedy
   The Player

E. Gender/Sexuality
   Thelma and Louise
   Oleanna
   An Unmarried Woman
   Diary of a Mad Housewife
   the Crying Game

F. War and Peace
   Johnny Got his Gun
   Gallipoli
   Dr. Strangelove
   Born on the 4th of July
   Killing Fields

G. Race and Ethnicity
   Native Son
   El Norte
   Do the Right Thing
   Boyz'nthehood
   Hoop Dreams

H. Crime and Violence
   Clockwork Orange
   12 Angry Men
   Silence of the Lambs
   Primal Fear
   Natural Born Killers

I. Deviance/Stigma/Social Control
   Midnight Cowboy
   One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
   My Left Foot
   Stand by Me
   Shawshank Redemption
   Cool Hand Luke

J. Religion
   Mass Appeal
   The Mission
   The Last Temptation of Christ
   Jesus of Montreal

 K. I use a 14th Set: Coming-of-Age flicks about young people just
    coming into the fullness of their morality/sexuality:
    The Breakfast Club
    Memphis Belle
    My Fair Lady
    Romeo and Juliet
    Up the Down Staircase
    The BlackBoard Jungle

And now, a word about your mentor.  Chaucer was born about 1340 and
lived a very full 60 years or so.  Of the teacher in the Clerke's
Tale, Chaucer said:

That he was from Oxenford and had unto logyk longe ago undertaken;
that, at his beedes heed there were right twenty bookes, clad in
reed or blacke of Aristotle and his philosophie.  That of all that,
he was a philosophre, sobre and holwe, yet hadde he little in his
cofre but...
gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.

You too will have some 20 books at your bed and you too will not
grow fat nor be rich but, as with the Clerke, you will learn and
gladly teach as indeed do I.
                                                   TR Young