UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

Pedagogy

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Students as Bridge Builders: Encouraging Connection Across Courses

“That is how innovation happens; chance favors the connected mind”
-Steven Johnson

tillikum suspension bridge in portlandWhat’s the most important thing an undergraduate should be doing at college? The answer, I’ve come to believe, is the simple act of drawing connections between classes.

Students walk off with a diploma after taking some forty separate courses. A major forms one point of connection for a subset of them, but the rest – including their eclectic University Core – may strike them as an inexplicable mishmash. Is this perception our fault or theirs?

Consider the newspaper, in its centuries-old, non-electronic format. This paper platform delivers news at various scales (local, state, nation, world), zooming across common interests (food, sports, homemaking, weather), and varied states of mind (from the comics to obituary remembrances of our mortality). Across an ink-stained hour, such reading invites us to cross-fertilize these diverse human moods and levels of information drawn from the world. A university has similar goals.

According to UP’s Mission Statement, we address “significant questions of human concern through disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies of the arts, sciences, and humanities…”. No doubt we’re doing our disciplinary part – but I wonder if we’re following through on our interdisciplinary mission.

Our grad school mentors taught us to drill down deep into our field’s content; as scholars, we’ve come to know our silos well. But undergraduates – who are asked to draw from ten or twelve of our silos each year – are in a unique position to recognize something we aren’t: the adjacent possibilities that arise between their constellation of courses.

Depend upon it: students’ minds are doing such connecting all the time. But few have been taught to recognize this cognitive labor as valuable, or even central to our UP mission. And so these connective sparks fizzle – forgotten as quickly as they appear.

In casual conversations with students each semester, I hear of the exciting concepts they’re learning: some new theory of mind, a fresh phrase to describe our era of biological extinction, a sexy new theological lens. And I wonder why that rich specificity couldn’t have found its way into their latest literature paper, which was so diluted and deadened by generality (of the “man vs. society” ilk).

More to the point: why didn’t I encourage them to explore Gatsby through a concept they recently mastered in another class? Why didn’t I spend part of Friday’s class having them journal a few connections between the day’s poems and what they were learning on Thursday? Wouldn’t that synergy have aided their engagement by meeting them where they’re at that very week?

Hearing them share reminds me that my course is but one piston in the engine of their minds – one that can only work efficiently alongside the others.

Moreover, in our rapidly changing technological landscape, if we are training our students for jobs that in many cases haven’t yet been invented, the best skill we can teach is thinking flexibly. The 21st century’s best inventions come from the creativity of hybrid thinking: Apple’s stylized iPhone, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, etc. What hybrid beauties might develop from nimble minds suturing knowledge on the Bluff? How might we encourage them to cultivate such intellectual innovation?

Certainly, it starts with a trust in the serendipity of connection-making – in creatively pondering the friction within their given network of classes. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Freytag’s Pyramid of plot have sudden provocation for the student who took time to bridge their geometries. Hamlet’s Ophelia might start to resemble the “indicator species” concept drawn from Environmental Studies, giving a student a fresh way of detecting what is rotten in the state of Denmark.

We can cultivate interdisciplinarity as teachers by sitting in on the class of a colleague we admire in another field. Or checking out the library’s copy of Awaken the Stars: Reflections on What We REALLY Teach to read brief essays by diverse UP colleagues and locate common ground with your area. We can seek out common questions – just as our Core Curriculum does – that unite our courses with others. Our Vision 20/20 plan includes a direction to “Increase the number of interdisciplinary co-taught courses,” and I know of a number of faculty eager to pursue paired courses, despite the challenges of articulation and scheduling.

Above all, we can cultivate the habit of bridge-thinking in students through assignments that open outward to their immediate classes – ones inviting them to bring together outside thinking, and rewarding them for the creative synthesis they construct on their own.

For it may be that our students come most alive in our curriculum by doing what we in our silos cannot: innovating connections between their own uniquely varied set of classes. The shape of the future depends upon this generative habit.

-Lars Erik Larson, UP English Department

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Play in Your Classroom

Steven Johnson

 

As instructors, at some point we were taught to “put away childish things.”  But if this included play, then we’re missing out on a powerful resource for the classroom.

The latest book by the popular science writer Steven Johnson demonstrates the productivity of play. As Johnson mentioned at a recent visit to Powell’s, his tenth book Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World (New York: Riverhead, 2016) gathers stories and evidence he’s collected from the past two-dozen years that show how the playful side of our species – homo ludens – has led to some of our best inventions.

The Book

As Johnson’s work notes, “Everyone knows the old saying ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ but if you do a paternity test on many of the modern world’s most important ideas or institutions, you will find, invariably, that leisure and play were involved in the conception as well” (12).

And so we learn how, many hundreds of years ago, humanity’s taste for spices like pepper, cloves, and vanilla drove global exploration and trade (suggesting that globalization was set in motion by something that wasn’t essential, just interesting). Following Charles Eames’s point that “Toys and games are the preludes to serious ideas,” Johnson shows that that dice, bouncing rubber balls, and other games of chance on the one hand help us “rehearse for the randomness that everyday life presents” – but, on the other hand, also led to thoughtful tools like probability theory (706). Humanity’s simple delight in music helped birth such inventions as computer software (from music boxes with songs that could be switched out), and the industrial loom and typewriter (both derived from keyboard instruments).

Johnson further insists we not underestimate the power of spaces given over to leisure. Sites of recreation as city parks, museums, amusement parks, and Ripley’s Believe it or Not foster the kind of unguarded category-mixing that inspires new ideas (as, for example, the 19th century development of the zoo in London influenced Darwin’s theory of evolution). Many great innovations arose not from boardrooms or labs but in taverns and coffeehouses – social spaces of leisure that led to such movements as the American Revolution and LGBT rights.

For Johnson, humanity’s natural inclination toward play means that “You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun” (15).

While Johnson’s Wonderland does not cover pedagogy, he does reference the idea “of college as a time of intellectual play, a time to experiment, to dabble in eclectic interests and attitudes (257-8). College, he suggests, gives students permission – perhaps for the last time in their hyper-specialized lives – to be a dilettante.

Johnson’s confidence in the productivity of leisure made me think through ways we might bring to the serious space of the classroom some of the fizz and flair of our weekend selves. How might we invest our learning spaces with the playfulness of a Brian Doyle sentence?

The Classroom

Given the differences across our university’s broad spectrum of disciplines, as well as variance in what each of us considers fun, faculty will do best figuring out for themselves how to materialize Wonderland’s invitations to serious play. But this surely involves first giving ourselves permission to be our ludic selves – to avoid our usual flatulent formality. It means becoming aware of our personal springs of delight, and channeling them into the classroom. And it means imagining how these playful tasks might foster our curriculum’s learning goals: given our limited classroom time, we have to be selective.

This semester, in courses involving thinking through literature, I’ve drawn from my own leisure explorations of eclectic music to play one song at the start of each class. This sonic pairing encourages lateral thinking through thematic parallels between writing and popular music. To teach writing, I brought in juggling balls to demonstrate how complex actions are dependent on mastering basic repetitive actions. I drew on optical illusions to render abstract ideas more concretely (using, for example, the famous image of a duck/rabbit head to practice how to craft a thesis that can capture an artwork’s complexity). And for one lesson on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, I placed a cluster of plastic Monopoly hotels and houses on the classroom floor to reinforce the novel’s experiments in scale.

In a course built around the theme of mobility in the world, I’ve been varying students’ placement in the classroom to make a kinesthetic connection. Students are now used to our Mad Hatter’s Tea Party approach, as I have required them to change seats often, face their chairs in various cardinal directions, sit on the floor itself, and one other time stand atop their seats (to experiment with learning in the classroom’s upper altitudes). By disrupting students’ spatial regularity, I’ve been giving them a physical connection with the mobility in the stories we’re reading.

Thinking ahead, I’d like to build more of my lessons around structures of friendly competitions (as the continuing appeal of game shows reveal, we’re all suckers for contests). Group competition generates the kind of drama that disables cynicism and boredom.

Of course, not all playful ideas we dream up will succeed in furthering our curriculum or lead to the kind of innovation Johnson’s book exemplifies. But we can rest confident that the sheer surprise of your approach will make the lesson memorable, and that the presence of joy in the process of learning may foster in students the same spark that got you into the ed. biz. in the first place. Johnson’s Wonderland reassures us of the intellectual power of play.

-Lars Erik Larson, UP English Department
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PS: Scholars of serious fun may find interest in other eclectic works by Steven Johnson: the value of bottom-up systems in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software; The Ghost Map (on the discovery of how cholera spread in 1854 London); The Invention of Air (on Joseph Priestley’s 18th century experiments with gas); Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation; Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter; Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life; and How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World – which has been made into an engaging six-hour documentary.

Featured image: “Poker Game” by Wobogre, CC0 Public Domain

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A Brief Tour of Our Campus’s Handbook to Writing

Writing is hard.

That’s why improving the writing skills of our students across their four years is a cross-campus shared responsibility. Having UP students in all disciplines do much of their thinking on paper has dividends not only in their written expression but also in developing knowledge in their field.

Fortunately, both faculty and students have an enlightened resource – a common campus handbook – to help foster a shared vocabulary, writing strategies, and documentation expertise. The most recent update of this blazingly necessary resource offers faculty the chance to (re)familiarize ourselves with its holdings.

For almost a decade, our campus has required its students to have the same handbook for all their writing-embedded classes and beyond. This is Kirszner & Mandell’s spiral-bound Pocket Wadsworth Handbook, which has been re-named the Pocket Cengage Handbook in its latest edition (7th). Faculty should encourage students to keep (not rent) this reference, so that they can draw from it across their four years.

The presence of this book on our campus is the best argument for why students can’t plead ignorance in meeting our writing expectations. But they would benefit from the occasional nudge from us toward its value.

The latest edition offers students of any major a buzzing hive of resources. Color coding helps visually organize the bundle, and a series of indexes and tables of content make it easy to zoom-in on the information for the moment’s needs.

Here’s a quick overview of what we can find in the new Pocket Cengage Handbook:

-Its opening fold-out “Ten Habits of Successful Students” distills the most valuable habits to cultivate in our learners.

-The deeply useful Part 1 offers 40 pages of strategies and examples for interacting with texts and developing essays. The next section offers advice on accomplishing effective research and drafting papers (including ways of avoiding the nasty nets of plagiarism).

-A thick purple tab signals the next section: instructions and examples for in-text and end-text documentation in MLA, APA, Chicago, and CSE styles. As students across their years here will need to become nimble in working with several of these modes of documentation, I find it useful to use the book to point to the differences between styles and also the logic behind those disciplinary differences (of why, for example, publication dates are foregrounded so prominently in the social sciences, while they’re shoved to the end of humanities documentation styles).

-A hundred-page chunk then gives students a refresher on writing grammatical sentences, effective paragraphs, appropriate punctuation, and proper spelling and mechanics. If you’re grading papers, you can inform students the direct pages to consult for learning how to: avoid run-on sentences (p.234), avoid sentence fragments (236), write unified paragraphs (264), write concisely (273), choose words wisely (285), use commas (295), know when to capitalize (324), etc. (And while these pages are of great use for filling in gaps in student knowledge, no doubt they help reboot our own writing skills as well.)

-A new section, “Composing in Various Genres,” offers students advice in using visuals in document design, writing for online contexts, thinking through workplace writing, and developing and delivering oral presentations in your classes.

-Students who are newer to English may find the last section (Part 9) helpful to review, with its refresh of basics in grammar and style.

-Finally, an excellent bird’s-eye chart to steer your students to during your course’s first week appears on p. 364-5. This offers a map of college knowledge: an overview of where your discipline fits within the spectrum of our campus, including the writing genres, styles, formats, documentation, and methods students can expect to employ.  The chart helps students see the sometimes-confusing variety of writing genres, styles, and disciplinary expectations they’ll be held to in the heterogeneous mix of classes they take (e.g. needing to use active voice in humanities writing, but passive voice in natural science reports). Given the variety of writing students will do on the Bluff, our ultimate goal is not merely to make them experts in thinking-on-paper in their major; they also need to become elastic and flexible writers for the many future contexts of post-college writing, across a diverse life in an information economy.

Encouraging our students to use this learning resource early and often will help the next generation of Pilots become writers and communicators who are admirably precise, flexible, and humane.

[Examination/Desk copies can be secured through Cengage using ISBN 9781305672888]

 

-Lars Erik Larson, UP English Dept.