What Is Needed In Order to Have a Scholarly Dialogue

I recently listened to a lecture given by William Wilson. He provided a definition of what it means to have a scholarly dialogue. I liked his definition. I made some additions to it [in brackets], and I figured I would share it with you:

Simplistic as it may sound, the chief requirements for [scholarly] dialogue may be courage and honesty.

By courage, I mean:

• The individual scholar's willingness to put his or her ego up for stakes,


• [Diligently and objectively searching all possible perspectives and information on the topic,]


• Abandoning long-cherished positions when necessary,


• And acknowledging how and why one's mind has changed.

By honesty, I mean:

• Citing other scholars accurately in context and crediting one's sources fully,


• [Ideally using only those sources which are of the highest quality and credibility,]


• Refusing on principle to distort the evidence or another scholar's view,


• And not pretending to have an expertise one does not possess.

What do you think? Is there anything you would add or revise about this definition?

Teacher-Centered vs. Student-Centered Philosophies

Most of you are probably familiar with the concepts of teacher-centered classrooms vs. student-centered classrooms. Here's a quick refresher of the concepts:

In the teacher-centered model:

• The teacher is an expert on the subject matter and the students are there to learn from a "master," if you will.


• The teacher is in full control of the course. He or she selects the projects/texts. The work is produced for and graded by the teacher.


• The teacher dispenses wisdom and the students absorb it.


• The students are motivated by their grades and other extrinsic rewards. They are graded by how well they match up to a pre-determined standard of excellence.

In the student-centered model:

• Power is decentralized in order to make room for everyone's empowerment. Everyone learns from each other---including the teacher.


• The students actively shape the direction the course will take. They select the projects and texts based on their interests.


• Knowledge and learning is created synergistically by the class.


• The students are motivated by their own curiosity and intrinsic desire to learn. The students' work is produced for a real audience and for real purposes. The students may be graded by their peers.

Classrooms have historically followed the teacher-centered model. Most universities are pretty much set up to follow this model. But recent research about teaching methods have led to the growth in teachers who use the student-centered model. Although they were a little more rare, I had a few professors who followed the student-centered model from time to time when I was an undergraduate.

It's important to remember that these are not binaries. I find that many teachers use a combination of these two models, some falling closer to one end of the spectrum than others. During my undergraduate studies when I was being trained pedagogy and educational philosophy, the student-centered model was strongly advocated by most of my professors. I don't think it's because the student-centered model is definitively better (although it does have a lot of research to back it up). I think it was because these professors assumed we were already familiar with the teacher-centered model and wanted to show us the benefits of the student-centered model in the hope that we would give it a chance.

For me personally, my native impulse is to be more teacher-centered. I supposedly have a red personality, which means that I have a strong need to feel that I am in control. For that reason, the teacher-centered model appeals to me on an instinctual level. But I have also found that the more I introduce student-centered elements into my curriculum, the more beneficial I find it to be.

This semester I'm experimenting with a fairly student-centered approach when it comes to my class policies. I have a neighbor who is a psychology professor at UVU and he's been bugging me for a very, very long time to try letting my students determine the policy. I've finally caved in and I'm giving it a chance---reluctantly giving up a little bit of that sense of being in control for the sake of the experiment.

Basically, on the second day of class, I had the students engage in a class debate about what our policy should be for absences, tardies, and late assignments. The debates were fairly interesting. When discussing absences, one class spent the bulk of the time talking about how missing class was its own punishment because it causes you to fall behind in the course. (They ended up opting for just letting people attend as needed with no penalties for poor attendance.) One class decided to allow 4 absences and give 5 points extra credit for every unused absence. Another class decided to give 30 points extra credit for having less than 3 absences and -30 points for having more than 5.

In the first two classes that I taught the discussions went fairly smoothly. It surprised me how quickly they reached a consensus. However, the last class had me second-guessing whether I was ready to give up control just yet. Many of the student started talking about how coming to class was just a hoop to jump through in order to get a grade. Their cynicism towards their education admittedly made me feel a little defensive---and it started to bubble over in my tone during the discussion. At one point I asked them why they weren't just taking an online class (which only required you to do the work and didn't require attendance or strict deadlines). I was hoping someone would talk about the value of coming to class, and a few of them did, but not very powerfully. I honestly began to wonder if any of them would end up attending the class at all. Finally, when I told them that I really didn't think I could be an effective teacher if only 3 students showed up because I had planned lots of group work and in-class discussions, that seemed to shift the discussion a little bit. (They were the class that opted for the +30/-30 policy.)

Anyhow, it's been really interesting. I hope I haven't damaged my rapport with my third class because of my defensiveness. My sense is that it's not a lost cause, but we'll see how it all plays out by the end of the semester. I'll let you know how it all turns out when the semester is over.

Copyright Law for Dummies

My New Year's resolution is to be in full compliance with copyright law. And frankly, I've found that it is much more difficult to comply with this law than I ever imagined. I've been sending out dozens of copyright requests all week and crossing my fingers that everything is going to work out for the best. It has me incredibly nervous!

I used to believe that it was okay to copy just about anything as long as I was using it in a classroom and for educational purposes. Unfortunately, that's not true. Like me, I think that a lot of us may potentially be ignorant of how copyright law applies to us as educators, so I thought I'd write a blog entry about this topic in the hopes that we all can be more compliant.

According to my research, use of copyrighted material for educational purposes falls under the category of "fair use" under the copyright law. There are four criteria that must be met in order for something to be considered fair use:

1. Purpose of Use
It is okay to copy something for educational use, but it is only appropriate if the copies are used spontaneously. For example, let's say I decide to copy a copyrighted article to share with my students in the classroom the day before one of my lectures. That is clearly spontaneous. However, if the next semester comes along and I say "Hey, that lesson plan worked great and that article was perfect!", I no longer have the same rights. If I copy that article for my students the next semester, it is no longer spontaneous and I am guilty of copyright infringement. It is okay to use an article temporarily and spontaneously. But an article should not be put into an anthology of any kind or distributed to students for more than one semester until you receive explicit permission from the copyright holder.

2. Nature of the Work
I'm not totally clear on what this means, but it has something to do with whether the work contains well-known facts and ideas (which are not copyright-able, but are part of public domain) vs. how much of it is the author's own insights and expressions in it. This is something I'll probably need a lawyer to explain to me some day.

3. Proportion/Extent of Materials Used
This refers to how much of the work you are using (e.g. what percentage of the work you are using). For example, there was a case where a teacher was found guilty of copyright infringement for copying 11 out of 24 pages from an instructional book. If you copy a paragraph from an article or a book, you're probably okay since it's just a very small portion of the overall work. However, copying a chapter or more from a book becomes questionable and can get you into trouble.

4. The Effect on Marketability
This is by far the most important of the four tests for fair use. If copying and distributing the materials will result in a reduction of sales for the copyright holder, it's illegal. For example, let's say I decide not to use the Allyn and Bacon textbook in my class because I don't feel I use enough of it in my curriculum to justify the expense to my students. If I decide to copy a few graphs or pages from the book and give that to my students, I essentially reduced the sales for the Allyn and Bacon textbook. That could get me into hot water.

One other thing I didn't know is that you must include the copyright notice whenever you copy something for a student. It is not enough to give attribution.

If you want more information, check out this helpful website: A Teacher's Guide to Fair Use and Copyright. Also check out UVU's Course Reserve page to see the copyright laws in action at our school.

***

Yikes! I don't know about you, but this stuff just floored me when I learned about it a few months ago. This week I've had to send out copyright permissions to: the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Scientific American, the journal Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, Disney's Wondertime magazine, and W.W. Norton who publishes They Say/I Say. (By the way, that last one is a long shot, but one can always hope.) I've also rewritten many of my handouts so that they are purely in my own words and using my own original ideas. It's been quite a mammoth task. Wish me luck!

P.S. The image above comes from Gideon Burton's Flickr photostream. I'm pretty sure that since we're friends, he won't sue me for it. :)

True Story

My husband purchased the video game "Uncharted" last week. We made a deal that I would grade every night while he played the game until it was time to go to bed. We did this every evening for a week. The video game took him about 10 hours to complete and that's almost exactly how long it took me to grade my big pile of Exploratory Essays and Final Portfolios. Wow. No wonder I'm exhausted! :)

Some Links and Some Logical Fallacies

I recently stumbled across a few interesting links that you might find interesting.

First of all, since the WPAs have long proclaimed that English 1010/2010/2020 are about teaching critical thinking, at their core, I thought I would share a fun link on Wikihow entitled How to Think For Yourself. I think it's a good starting place for a discussion about critical thought. Since it's a wiki and since this is something we think a lot about, it might be interesting to see how we as teachers would add or expand to this definition (it is a wiki, after all). I'm sure there's a lot we could add to step #4, in particular.

As for my second link, all I have to say is: I got scooped! I've had the dream of creating a visual graph of logical fallacies for a long time and now the Fallacy Files have beaten me to it. Check out their Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies. It's pretty amazing.

Do you teach logical fallacies in your class? I have a class period devoted to it early on in the semester because I think it's helpful to begin a discussion of sound logic by talking about what is not logical. I actually have a 35+ guide to logical fallacies. It's kind of becoming my magnum opus. I based it on Kip Wheeler's Logical Fallacy Handlist, making heavy edits using additional content and examples from Wikipedia and the afore-mentioned Fallacy Files (among others). All three of these sites grant copyright permission for non-commercial use, which is nice. Normally, I would share my entire guide with all of you, but I'm working on getting some copyright permission for some of the images I use and it makes me nervous to distribute it to anyone but my students right now. However, I might be willing to let you read it just for your own personal reference, if you'd like. Just contact me for the file.

When I teach about logical fallacies, I do a little introduction to Logical Fallacies by reading Max Shulman's "Love is a Fallacy" (with a heavy disclaimer that it's a very chauvinist text) and then I divide them into groups of 3 and assign them 3 logical fallacies to present to the class using my guide.

As a follow-up to the lecture, I have them write online forum posts identifying logical fallacies in 1 of the 4 common film texts they view for my class. I heard an idea for another possible follow up that I used to use, but I stopped doing it because it made my classes run out of time. I got the idea from an Academic Evolution podcast featuring Kathryn Cowley. I still think it's a great idea. Here's the directions I used to use for it:

Now you’ll get to use your creativity to apply your logical fallacy to an argument. Choose one of the two passages on the following pages (Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" or "America Recycles Day"). Your group is going to pick one of the logical fallacies you learned about together and you’re going to "doctor" this piece of writing so that it has your assigned logical fallacy in it. For example:

From a section of Kennedy’s Inaugural Address:
To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Doctored Inaugural Address with the "Ad Hominem" logical fallacy:
To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required--not because those stinkin’, lyin’, no good, evil, God-hating Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

I then had them doctor the text of either The Gettysburg Address or an editorial that used to be available on the America Recycles Day website. (You can contact me if you want the text.) Back when I did it, I sometimes got some pretty creative responses. It's a fun activity if you want to give it a try.

Harry Potter and Scholarly Texts

I thought Alyssa's post last week was great and a good way to help our students see the bigger picture of academic research. I just wanted to share an activity that I tried that seemed to go well. First, I did a search of full-text, peer-reviewed articles on Harry Potter in EBSCO. I got about 300 or so hits. I printed off six very different articles from different journals (one was in a law journal about bureaucracy and government in the books, one from a social work journal about parenting in the books, one was about using Harry Potter in the classroom for teaching Latin roots, one was a feminist literary critique of the books, one was from an economics journal about the marketing of the books, and one was about moral education). Actually, since some of the articles were long I just printed the first few pages and the last page or so (for the references). I then divided the students into small groups and gave each one an article to analyze. They had to answer the following questions:

Who is the author of the article and what are his/her credentials?
What is the name of the journal that published the article? What other types of articles do you think might be found in this journal?
Who is the intended audience for this article?
What is the main idea/thesis of the article?
What kinds of sources are listed as references for this text? Based on their titles, what do you think they are about?

After each group had about five minutes to familiarize themselves with their articles, we discussed each one as a class (I had the PDFs on my computer so we could all see them, but that's not necessary). My goals for this were two-fold: first, to familiarize the students with journal articles and how to understand what their main points and context are; second, to help them see how to take a scholarly approach on a subject, even one that was seemingly non-academic like Harry Potter. I think this activity worked really well for my students. They were mostly able to get a feel for what each article was about and who the intended audience was. Many of them also expressed surprise that scholars were discussing Harry Potter in so many different ways, and it helped them understand better what a scholarly approach to a subject is.

One Way to Encourage Students to Engage with Scholarly Articles

I've been spending the last 3-4 weeks in my class discussing how to develop a research strategy, how to conduct library research and how to evaluate sources to determine if they are credible and authoritative.

I thoroughly enjoyed John Goshert's presentation at the beginning of the semester about deepening the level of our students' critical thinking through scholarly articles. I don't want to sound like a brown-noser or anything, but I genuinely thought it was inspiring. As a result, I've made some modifications to my curriculum this semester in order to emphasize scholarly texts a lot more.

I added an extra day to my curriculum to "champion this cause," if you will. Since I taught my lesson about engaging with scholarly texts last Wednesday, I decided to blog about how I approached it in case it could possibly be helpful to you.

I introduced the lesson by showing a brief PowerPoint presentation to kind of get my students thinking about the big picture of why they should do scholarly research. The presentation was based on a blog entry by Matt Might at his blog http://matt.might.net. It is called The Illustrated Guide to a PhD. Might has given permission to reproduce this blog entry for non-profit purposes as long as they give proper attribution to him and follow these requirements. Here's a reproduction of the presentation, with my additional comments in [brackets]:

Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge.


By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little.


By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more.


With a bachelor's degree, you gain a specialty.


A master's degree deepens that specialty.


Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge.

[I modify the original text for the above slide to say that reading scholarly articles takes you to the edge of human knowledge. And then I tell them that this is why the English department stresses peer-reviewed, scholarly articles so much. Scholarly articles are where the truly deep, critical thinking is taking place. They're at the edge of human knowledge. So, if you want to improve your critical thinking, you need to read scholarly articles.]

Once you’re at the boundary, you focus.


You push at the boundary for a few years.


Until one day, the boundary gives way.


And that dent you’ve made is called a Ph.D.


Of course, when you’ve reached this point, the world looks different to you now.


So don’t forget the big picture.

[On the above slide, I talk about how this is the purpose of research and scholarship: to expand the circle of human knowledge. All of us are benefited directly or indirectly by this process. I mention a story I heard on NPR's Planet Money about economist Tim Taylor who asks his students rather they'd prefer to be a middle income American living on $70,000 a year or a super-wealthy person in 1900 living on $70,000 a year. Approximately 2/3 of his students choose to be middle-income Americans because imagine all the things you'd do without: no antibiotics and other important medical procedures, no airplanes for easy travel abroad, no movie theaters or TV or Netflix or iPods, etc. The point is that the circle of human knowledge has expanded quite a bit in the last 100+ years. And we all benefit from those tiny little dents.]

[I then add something which wasn't in the original blog entry, but was a post script. I preface it by saying: "To put it a different way..."]

If you zoom in on the boundary of human knowledge in the direction of genetics, there’s something just outside of humanity’s reach. [The author of this has a son who was born with a rare, fatal genetic disorder. He discusses that he and his wife started funding graduate students after they learned about this.]


So... Keep pushing.

***

As for the rest of the lesson, I had required my students to bring a scholarly article to class this day and we spent the day talking about how to read scholarly articles, what their format is like, the best methods for reading them, etc. I then gave them about half an hour to read through their article and then we had an in-class discussion in which the students respond to what the experience was like.

For those students who were frustrated with the highly technical language, I go over some strategies for learning how to process what you read in scholarly articles better. (For more of my lecture notes---including strategies---or for the PowerPoint I created with the images above, feel free to email me.)

One of the awesome comments I got in class on Wednesday was from a student who said that reading his article was "surprisingly refreshing." He was reading some of the scholarship about Constitutional law and talked about how it was nice to actually read directly many of the things he hears glossed over in the mainstream media. I used that as a jumping off point for discussing how when you are reading scholarly articles, you're often reading primary research. So you're getting information direct from the source, free from mediating forces that interpret the information for you. You get to make up your own mind about the topic when you read scholarly articles.

I hope some of these ideas are helpful to you as you work on encouraging your students to engage with scholarly texts! Any pointers you have to share?