Today

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Todays students

• How do they learn?
• Composed by Lucie Johnson, 6/4/00, revised
  10/18/00

Next
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SECTION I

• STUDENT CULTURE AND TEACHER CULTURE

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The student learning culture

• Multiprocessing
• Image and screen literacy
• Bricolage approach, bias toward action
• Flexibility
• Concrete, applied bend

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What the teacher culture sees in students

• Short attention span, demand for edutainment
• Little interest in reading
• Tendency to stay at the surface, weak theoretical
  understanding
• Weak integration of the self
• Weak synthesis and abstraction

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What might be the teachers learning styles? The
students?

• Look at the websites below, what learning style
  characteristics are yours? Your students?
• Take the Keirsey temperament sorter at
  http//www.keirsey.com/scripts/newkts.cgi (an
  MBTI equivalent).
• Explore the Theory into Practice database at
  http//www.gwu.edu/tip/

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What learning strategies might be favored by
these two groups?

• Multiprocessing
• Dominance of image and screen media
• Bricolage approach, bias toward action
• Used to rapid change
• Concrete, applied bend

• One-point concentration
• Dominance of reading
• Stresses theoretical coherence
• Values tradition
• Values abstract thinking

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Learning as acculturation

• The teachers culture is quite different from the
  students
• Teachers tend to have strengths where the
  students have weaknesses and vice-versa
• Hence a process of mutual acculturation is needed

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Acculturation and development

• One could look as students as in need of
  development, to become better abstract thinkers
  etc but there are ways in which the student
  culture is valid, and an adaptive response to a
  rapidly changing world.
• Teachers also can learn from the student culture
  -especially in terms of adaptation to change-
  while holding on to their important values.

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Teaching as bridging cultures

• Teaching requires communication between cultures
• Teaching is the creation of a common space in
  which both cultures can meet.

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The process of acculturation (adapted from Edward
T. Banks)

• Stages of acculturation
• Conformity (students to teachers, teachers to
  students)
• Dissonance and conflict/resistance
• Introspection / concern with the other sides
  judgment
• Synergy

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What strategies might help acculturation?
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SECTION II

• STUDENT CULTURE AND POST-MODERNISM

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Bricolage (tinkering) A term coined by Claude
Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind

• The bricoleur or bricoleuse
• Performs tasks with objects already at hand,
  makes structures out of events whereas the
  scientist creates events by means of structures.
• Bricolage deals in signs, whereas science deals
  in concepts
• Concepts seek to be transparent as to reality,
  whereas signs stay opaque

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Transparence, accessibility and opacity

• The Macintosh and Windows are iconic opaque
  systems because they give us no access to the
  underlying reality (code, true way things
  happen). Yet those semiotic systems are very easy
  for us to use -hence we experience them as
  transparent.
• For example, moving a file into the trash, an
  easily accessible icon, w/o relationship to the
  underlying reality.
• We often mistake accessibility for transparence.

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The seduction of opacity

• Many of what we think we know -many of our
  concepts, theories, belief systems are in
  fact opaque. Opacity, traps us, and we are
  willing captives (Baudrillard).
• This is true for us as for our students. We use
  words, concepts, without probing what is
  underneath. We mistake the surface for the deeper
  reality. We may prefer simulacre to reality.

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What are some examples of this opacity?

• In everyday life?
• In our professional life?
• In how and what we teach students?

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How might we remedy this? Do we want to?
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SECTION III

• SOME RESOURCES

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Learning styles page

• http//www.fln.vcu.edu/Intensive/LearningStrategie
  s.html
• http//www.msg.ucr.edu/it/3a22.html
• http//www.colorado.edu/UCB/AcademicAffairs/Gradua
  teSchool/gtp/print/kolb.html

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The End