(Ooooh, yay, I can swear in titles again!)
I absolutely love discussion. There’s nothing better than hanging out till 4 am exploring different facets of an idea, critiquing each other’s ideas, learning from another person’s lived experience, synthesizing different worldviews into a more full and nuanced whole, finding out what Judith Butler was saying from someone who could actually put up with that asshole’s terrible writing.
So, of course, I picked a school that advertised its seminar-style discussion-based classes.
As it turns out, discussion has roughly the same relationship to discussion-based classes as brie does to Extruded Cheese-Based Snack Product.
When you talk about interesting ideas with people, they’re generally people you choose to talk to. Of course, you don’t want to just talk to people who agree with you, that’s boring. (In fact, one of my favorite people to argue with is a libertarian moral realist Kantian.) But you get to filter for things like “has insight and interesting ideas” and “is willing to change their mind when presented with new evidence” and “listens and attempts to understand your point of view.”
In a discussion-based class, you are talking to an arbitrary collection of random students. (Occasionally, in upper-level classes, they may even be an arbitrary collection of random students from your major.) This means you have to put up with That Guy who thinks of themself as a great philosopher, as shown by their tendency to interrupt social psych class with questions like “what is love really? Like, on a spiritual level?”
Furthermore, there’s a certain level of trust and mutual respect you need for a really good conversation about ideas. The kind where you’ll wait and see where someone’s going with that absolutely ludicrous notion, or ask for clarification instead of just assuming that someone meant something utterly idiotic. The kind where you can point out flaws in your own position or defend the other person’s, because both of you know that this is not a game where you win by proving the other guy wrong (whether they are or not). The kind where either you have similar worldviews or you understand why and how your worldviews are different, so you don’t run into the rocks trying to explain things to each other.
It’s really hard to get that kind of trust in a discussion-based class unless everyone knows each other really well already (which is uncommon, especially if you have classes with asocial cockends like me).
In any given class, there are a couple people who don’t want to be there. The class fit their schedule, or it’s a requirement for their major or a distribution requirement, or their best friend is taking it, or they got dropped from the class they wanted to take at the last minute, or they have an enormous crush on the professor, or whatever. Those people are likely to be utterly uninterested in the topic and, thus, have very little of interest to say about it. But since the class is partially graded on participation, they have to speak up anyway. People being forced to talk about things they don’t care about is a recipe for conversational disaster and lack of insight.
In addition, in any class, at least half the people did not do the reading. (These probably include the uninterested people, but also a bunch of other people who are lazy, disorganized, depressed, taking six other classes and supporting themselves so they don’t have time for this bullshit, or more interested in parties than studying.) In normal discussion, you can simply explain the author’s point and move on; in addition, since you’re basically familiar with what people have and have not read, you can just talk about the things both of you have read. But since we’re all participating in the collective fiction that everyone has done the reading, no one is allowed to explain the reading to the people who didn’t do it or decide to talk about something everyone has read instead.
Oh, discussion based classes, how I loathe (most of!) thee.
I’ve had one lecturer who did fantastic at holding class discussions (She’d not only follow the weirdest tangent, but also shut down shitty things like “What if women aren’t actually good at games because biology and thus it’s pandering” really goddamn quick and snarky). That class was probably also great because tiny cohort (like. ~20 people, all in the same degree).
Otherwise, it’s been shit of “What if women aren’t represented in animation because BIOLOGY” and “I think southpark is ~edgy~ because transphobia and homophobia are ~against the norm~” and “Everyone has sex all the time and rape’s just an outreach of that (LOL what r asexuals?)” and gods why.
anyway. *offers sympathy gestures and/or tea*
It’s better at a very small college, especially once you get into 200 and 300 level courses that few, if any, people are taking for general education requirements. That way, even if you don’t socialize, you end up with something approaching the degree of trust you talk about just from having a lot of the same classes with everyone.
I’m going to be teaching a discussion based class this semester on “Issues in Psychology” . I’ll be focusing on social justice based stuff – sexism in scientific research, therapy to “fix” homosexuality, the scholar-activist model, and the enforced medical “normal” of the DSM (especially the DSM V and its love of pathologizing absolutely everything), and in light of this post, I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions about how to make it as productive as possible?
In my experience, the biggest problem is that students are afraid to be the first to speak, and that you end up lecturing to them instead of discussing
Anthony: it might not work with the kind of class you’ll be doing, but my most successful discussion-based classes tend to have a student (or students) assigned to the material ahead of time, and in charge of coming up with a brief summary and discussion questions to present to everyone else. People tend to be a lot more comfortable jumping in and disagreeing with their peers, and when you know you’re going to have to do the same thing next week? It incentivizes talking to help the presenter out.
Thanks, that’s good advice
Anthony: Honestly, this may sound childish (it probably is, at that)… but I had a teacher who always tossed a Dum-Dum or something to the first person per class to break the ice.
It got us out of the habit of self-editing and being self conscious; sure, you might say something stupid, but hey, candy!
I also find myself wondering if teachers and lecturers could get away with “moderating” discussions the way certain commentspaces are moderated online: a sort of “These attitudes and ideas have no place in this discussion, and if you are persisten in bringing them up or otherwise disrespectful you will be invited to leave and eventually encouraged to drop the class.”
Maybe that’s my perfect-world daydream interfering with reality again, though. =/
I had a bad experience with discussion based classes too.
I was in a class that was supposed to be a sort of philosophical capstone for psychology looking at some of the built-in pitfalls/strengths/oddities to the discipline. The problem was I was the only person in the class for whom this was not a first seminar course.
To make matters worse the professor was SO AFRAID of imparting his baises that the class was essentially paced by the slowest, least interested, most cognitively frugal people as he refused to do anything more than the absolute bare-bones basic facilitating.
One of the worst classes that I’ve ever had, which is sad, because the skill set that it imparted is far from useless.
@Anthony
It might work better than you expect, though perhaps in ways you are not expecting. In the above class (on the first day) as an extreme, quick-and-dirty example of how “cultural relativism” might work, the professor brought up an example from feminism. I wont mention the example for fear of derailing or inviting “Ahabing,” suffice it to say it wasn’t taxing, and had almost a black-and-white set of “answers.” At the end of the class, one of my classmates stood up, loudly proclaimed her belief, demanded that the rest of the class conform to it, and left. The professor tried to patch things up the next class period, but her example rubbed off on a few other students. Thus, right off the bat something like 4 or 5 minds were slammed shut to even basic philosophical exploration.
Maybe, though that’s risky, esp. as social studies classes about social-justicey topics might tend to become enclaves that don’t necessarily correspond to what people care about outside. Maybe they should respond specifically to people in discussion looking uncomfortable?
It could be useful to have safespace and non-safespace sections provided you could prevent non-safespace from becoming ultra-danger-horrible-space.
As I remarked on to you on Twitter Ozy, this sounds so much like the school I went to it’s surreal. It would always end up as one of the people who loved to espouse their own theories about everything spouting off ‘all reality is PERCEPTION’ and other bullshit, and then another person or two in the class (often me, much to my shame) would just argue with this person ultimately leading nowhere. This style of class inordinately leads to people who are more comfortable in this sort of environment dominating the talk.
There were a few occasions where the teachers of the class were very obviously having students lead the discussions because the teachers didn’t want to. Sometimes they’d LEAVE and just tell us to stick around and talk.
The class breaking up into smaller groups occasionally produced some interesting talk. The only time whole class discussion was successful was when it was basically a lecture people could ask more questions and share anecdotes in with strong direction from the professor.
Full disclosure: There were a couple times I derailed a discussion intentionally because I didn’t like where they were going. Once I got my small group playing the game Zork, and the other time I kept subtly pushing the discussion of Video Art into talking about Max Headroom, so the teacher kept having to explain the premise of that series in greater and greater detail to the rest of the class.
as a lecturer I’m trying to break away from this, with the knowledge that people may not want to be there – so I don’t make classes compulsory or participation (also because it’s a way of marking on extroverted biases and fuck that shit) so I make online discussion compulsory because people only have to check in there for 3 minutes a week to post something – and if it’s meaningless,no big deal, if it’s meaningful and other people are there to learn and engage, then it’s beautiful
in class itself, I often get people to do group teaching – by that I mean randomly break up my tutorial classes into groups of 4 or 5 ppl, assign them a reading, and get them to summarise it and report on it back to the rest of the class – if someone hasn’t done the reading, well now’s there chance to learn…
as for the asshatters… and yes, there are many, there are a variety of ways to shut them down – if it comes to it I’ll use my privilege and challenge them directly for about 10 minutes because if they want to engage in a discussion about their penises in the guise of intellectual debate I’m happy to hold it up to the microscope (thanks socrates)… otherwise I try and shift topics or if I’m not in the mood I’ll say, well that’s an example of an interesting viewpoint to hold, other thinkers such as blah and blah have often reasoned that, and we move right along…
but yep – as a lecturer and facilitator and former participator as a student, it’s fucking painful…
I always feel at a disadvantage when it comes up to bringing up personal background in discussion classes. Because “no personal stories” rules suck on account of how they exclude lived experience and leave people stuck listening to detached intellectual theorizing about whether their life could ever happen in the real world.
But allowing personal stories means people have to out themselves. They have to tell the class that they have experience with poverty or mental illness or nonstandard sex, and “what’s said here, stays here” policies just aren’t asshole-proof.
I think the answer ends up being that you can’t discuss really painful personal topics in a class of random undergrads. It’s the emotional equivalent of trying to teach an anatomy class by having students strip naked. It just can’t be done safely. Give a lecture, take in essays, and don’t let the more vulnerable students see what the more callous students are writing or vice versa.
Building off the trust issue I would add that the teacher/student power imbalance often makes me feel like I can’t voice opinions that (I think) the teacher disagrees with. In particular, I had an english class where the prof was friends with the author of one of our readings. The prof missed class (or was just late, she did this sort of thing a lot) on the day we were supposed to discuss it, and in our informal discussion almost everyone in the class agreed that the reading sucked. Then we had a discussion with the teacher present, and it got a much warmer reception. I don’t think people were lying per se., but there was a huge selection bias in what aspects of the book we focused on.