Transcript:
Pedagogic Communications: the Seminar and the Essay
How do these educational technologies support different communicative relations between teachers and students?
the Seminar
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- creates a space for joined activities of reading, writing and discussion to take place under the direction of an expert
- usually smaller than lectures, seminars aim to facilitate deeper and more meaningful student-teacher interactions in group learning
- encourages dialectic and discussion as a learning opportunity for both teachers and students
the Essay
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- a teaching device allowing the teacher to promote “proper” thinking within a subject domain
- a window into the student’s thinking capabilities; allows the student to construct and present a central didactic point from their learning
- as a written encapsulation of knowledge, the student essay supposedly reflects and presents the teacher’s intended points of learning within a given topic
What are the two most important ideas embedded in each article?
the Seminar: Watt, I. (1964). The Seminar. Higher Education Quarterly, 18(4), 369-389. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.1964.tb01035.x
The 19th-century German seminar was the primary means through which elite students were trained. The system became a unique demonstration of the idea of the “free collective pursuit of knowledge” (p. 373).
In this sense, the goal of the seminar as it originated was not just a method of classroom organization, more importantly, it was to be a rigorous space of joint effort whereby both teachers and students took on the role of being investigators of knowledge and truth.
Through such an exchange, the seminar teacher goes beyond the activity of conveying information into creating the “zeal and equipment for seeking knowledge” (p. 379). Collective knowledge is generated as such that, ideally, lesser effort is required of the teacher, yet more is learned by the students through their engagement as co-intellectuals.
the Essay: Brice-Heath, S. (1993). Re-thinking the sense of the past: The essay as legacy of the epigram. In L. Odell (Ed.), Theory and practice in the teaching of writing: rethinking the discipline (pp. 105-131). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
The modern academic essay as a “prized written encapsulation of knowledge” (p. 115) has the potential to develop a student’s capacity to engage in processes of didactic and orderly thinking, however, in contrast to the essay being a legacy of the epigram — the production of wit and wisdom in exposition — it necessitates rigid, absolute truths which exclude patterns of social, relational and collective knowledge that play a key role in one’s personal experiences and explorations, through which lively interpretations of ideas are constructed.
The conventions of academic writing as it is today focuses on a single unified point argument, making secondary — or hidden — the “multiplicity of voices and perspectives that lets readers see a mind at work” (p. 118). The life of the essay lies in the writer’s observations and experiences, such that it becomes a story to be experienced by the reader, inviting curiosity and conversation, not just read as an account of facts.
To sum up the key representative ideas from these articles…
the Seminar: Watt, I. (1964). The Seminar. Higher Education Quarterly, 18(4), 369-389. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.1964.tb01035.x
“… successful seminar teaching depends very largely on the teacher’s ability to steer a judicious course between extremes: in subjects treated, it is a question of balance between the central aspects and the unexplored; in the written work, it is a question of balancing the need for helping each student find a separate and congenial area of investigation, with the need of the class as a whole for a common basis of knowledge; in class discussions, it is above all a question of striking a balance between autocracy and anarchy” [with the purpose of] making teachers teach less and pupils learn more” (p. 389)
In this case, the seminar, as defined by the quote, involves a rigorous intellectual exercise between both teacher and student.
Having experienced a number of seminars as an undergraduate and graduate student, it surprises me to discover the standards that could have been upheld. I do not always complete a seminar feeling more motivated to learn about a subject domain, nor feel more equipped to perform further individual research. This doesn’t usually cross my mind as a lack either. However, it appears to me, as a student, that the supposed benefits of a seminar should empower a student beyond the duration of a course.
That being said, the modern university today has changed in many ways compared to the 19th-century German university, perhaps most starkly in the number of student enrollments and in the way that academic roles are defined.
It is reasonable to imagine that a seminar conducted – not necessarily with the success – but on the principles of the traditional seminar, would require a senior expert researcher leading a small group of students. This is difficult to achieve in many public universities.
On a more hopeful note, if the traditional seminar was a form of educational technology, could we acknowledge its underlying principles and apply it to the affordances we might identify in today’s digital technology?
If there is a common ground between the goals of the traditional seminar and today’s post-secondary teaching methods, it would be for teachers to teach less while helping their students learn more.
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the Essay: Brice-Heath, S. (1993). Re-thinking the sense of the past: The essay as legacy of the epigram. In L. Odell (Ed.), Theory and practice in the teaching of writing: rethinking the discipline (pp. 105-131). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
“If creativity and an ability to weigh alternative stand as desirable academic goals, then writing pedagogy should not reject the contexts and texts that reflect the workings of the mind — tension-filled and conflictual, (…) affectively and cognitively engaging, and unappropriated by fixed interpretations. (…) the force and thus the central intelligence of the piece has to be in the multiple voices of the writer expressing his or her experiences reflected in the range of genres drawn from everyday discourses“ (p. 123)
My takeaway from this is that the modern academic essay is subjected to “sterile” writing conditions which strongly strips the individual of the opportunity to include personal observations and experience, rather, the student is required to present a concise didactic point in a manner that is as straightforward as possible.
Thinking back to my first few undergraduate writing assignments, the idea was instilled that only a personal interpretation of scholarly sources was as “personal” as I could get, and that would be recognized as good work. There was little space for one to hypothesize, to not reach conclusions, and, perhaps, feel stirred to conduct independent research.
With the modern academic essay often used as a major method of summative assessment, it causes one to wonder, just how much zeal, or theoretical “distress”, are we encouraging students to bravely take on in their individual pursuit of knowledge?
Have we stripped the raw and conflicting experiences from the written assessment so much that students can only be relegated to becoming excellent paraphrasers? Should we, as students, be given the chance to write “imperfect” papers, with theoretical gaps that, arguably, still document our learning?
Ending question in consideration of these articles…
How does the modern university empower students to explore intellectual domains in a personally meaningful and challenging way, so to spark unpredictable but richer forms of discovery-learning?