In the previous post, I described the three kinds of challenges teachers face. Today I want to discuss how teachers might deal with each case.

On the surface, it might seem that the first kind of challenge (where students do not have much prior experience (either explicitly or implicitly) with the material being taught and don’t have strong feelings about it either way) is the easiest one. After all, if students have no strong beliefs or prior knowledge about what is being taught, then they should be able to accept the new knowledge more easily.

That is true, but the ease of acceptance also has its downside. The very act of not caring means that the new knowledge goes in easily but is also liable to be forgotten easily once the course is over. In other words, it might have little lasting impact. Since the student has little prior knowledge in that area, there is little in the brain to anchor the new knowledge to. And if the student does not care about it one way or the other, then no effort will be made by the student to really connect to the material. So the student might learn this material by mostly memorizing it, reproduce it on the exams, and forget it a few weeks later.

The research on the brain indicates that lasting learning occurs when students tie new knowledge to things they already know, when they integrate it with existing material. So teachers of even highly technical topics need to find ways to connect it with students’ prior knowledge. They have to know their students, what interests them, what concerns them, what they care about. This is why good teachers tie their material in some way to stories or topics that students know and care about or may be in the news or to controversies. Such strategies tap into the existing knowledge structures in the brain (the neural networks) and connect the new material to them, so that it is more likely to ‘stick.’

The second kind of challenge is where students’ life experiences have resulted in strongly held beliefs about a particular knowledge structure, even though the student may not always be consciously aware of having such beliefs. A teacher who does not take these existing beliefs into account when designing teaching strategies is likely to be wasting her time. Because these beliefs are so strongly, but unconsciously held, they are not easily dislodged or modified.

The task for the teacher in this case is to make students aware of their existing knowledge structures and the implications of them for understanding situations. A teacher needs to create situations (say experiments or cases) and encourage students to explore the consequences of the their prior beliefs and see what happens when they are confronted by these new experiences. This has to be done repeatedly in newer and more enriched contexts so that students realize for themselves the existence and inadequacy of their prior knowledge structures and become more accepting of the new knowledge structures and theories.

In the third case, students are consciously rejecting the new ideas because they are aware that it conflicts with views they value more (for whatever reason). In such cases, there is no point trying to force or browbeat them into accepting the new ideas.

Does this mean that such people’s ideas never change? Obviously not. People do change their views on matters that they may have once thought were rock-solid. In my own case, I know that I now believe things that are diametrically opposed to things that I once thought were true, and I am sure that my experience is very common.

But the interesting thing is that although I know that my views have changed, I cannot tell you when they changed or why they changed. It is not as if there was an epiphany where you slap your forehead and exclaim “How could I have been so stupid? Of course I was wrong and the new view is right!� Rather, the process seems more like being on an ocean liner that is turning around. The process is so gentle that you are not aware that it is even happening, but at some point you realize that you are facing in a different direction. There may be a moment of realization that you now believe something that you did not before, but that moment is just an explicit acknowledgment of something that that you had already tacitly accepted.

What causes the change could be many factors – something you read, a news item, a discussion with a friend, some major public event – whose implications you may not be immediately aware of. But over time these little things lodge in your mind, and as your mind tries to integrate them into a coherent framework, your views start to shift. For me personally, I enjoy discussions of deep ideas with people I like and respect. Even if they do not have any expertise in this area, discussions with such people tend to clarify one’s ideas.

I can see that process happening to me right now with the ideas about the brain. I used to think that the brain was quite plastic, that any of us could be anything given the right environment. I am not so sure now. The work of Chomsky on linguistics, the research on how people learn, and other bits and pieces of knowledge I have read have persuaded me that it is not at all clear that the perfectly-plastic-brain idea can be sustained.

On the other hand, I am not convinced that the socio-biological views of E. O. Wilson, and more recently Steven Pinker, who seem to argues that much of our brains, attitudes, and values are biologically determined by evolutionary adaptation, are correct either. That seems to me to be too pat and too much like Kipling’s Just-So Stories, where Kipling’s fictional characters accepted the present state of affairs as ‘normal’ and biologically determined, and concocted fanciful tales to ‘explain’ how they came about. I am always skeptical of theories that try to make the status quo seem ‘natural’ and just. It seems to be very convenient for those who benefit from that status quo.

It seems reasonable that some structures of the brain, especially the basic ones that enable it to interpret the input from the five senses, and perhaps even learn language, must be pre-existing. But I am not convinced that the more sweeping claims, such as that men are better than women at math or that women are more nurturing than men or that our behaviors can be explained by the desire to maximize the spread of our own genes, are biologically determined.

So I am currently in limbo as regards the nature of the brain, mulling things over. At some point I might arrive at some kind of unified and coherent belief structure. And after I do so, I may well wonder if I ever believed anything else. Such are the tricks the brain can play on you, to make you think that what you currently believe is what is correct and what you always believed.

I have been teaching for many years and encountered many wonderful students. I remember in particular two students who were in my modern physics courses that dealt with quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology.

Doug was an excellent student, demonstrating a wonderful understanding of all the topics we discussed in class. But across the top of his almost perfect final examination paper, I was amused to see that he had written, “I still don’t believe in relativity!�

The other student was Jamal and he is not as direct as Doug. He came into my office a few years after the course was over (and just before he was about to graduate) to say goodbye. We chatted awhile, I wished him well, and then as he was about to leave he turned to me and said hesitantly in his characteristically shy way: “Do you remember that stuff you taught us about how the universe originated in the Big Bang about 15 billion years ago? Well, I don’t really believe all that.� After a pause he went on, “It kind of conflicts with my religious beliefs.� He looked apprehensively at me, perhaps to see if I might be offended or angry or think less of him. But I simply smiled and let it pass. It did not bother me at all.

Why was I not upset that these two students had, after having two semester-long courses with me, still not accepted the fundamental ideas that I had been teaching? The answer is simple. The goal of my teaching is not to change what my students believe. It is to have them understand what practitioners in the field believe. And those are two very different teaching goals.

As I said, I have taught for many years. And it seems to me that teachers encounter three kinds of situations with students.

One is where students do not have much prior experience (either explicitly or implicitly) with the material being taught and don’t have strong feelings about it either way. This is usually the case with technical or highly specialized areas (such as learning the symptoms of some rare disease or applying the laws of quantum mechanics to the hydrogen atom). In such cases, students have little trouble accepting what is taught.

The second type of situation is where students’ life experiences have resulted in strongly held beliefs about a particular knowledge structure, even though the student may not always be consciously aware of having such beliefs. The physics education literature is full of examples that our life experiences conspire to create in people an Aristotelian understanding of mechanics. This makes it hard for them to accept Newtonian mechanics. Note that this difficulty exists even though the students have no particular attachment to Aristotle’s views on mechanics and may not have the faintest idea what they are. Overcoming this kind of implicit belief structure is not easy. Doug was an example of someone who had got over the first hurdle from Aristotelian to Newtonian mechanics, but was finding the next transition to Einsteinian relativistic ideas much harder to swallow.

The third kind of situation is where the student has strong and explicit beliefs about something. These kinds of beliefs, as in the case of Jamal, come from religion or politics or parents or other major influences in their lives. You cannot force such students to change their views and any instructor who tries to do so is foolish. If students think that you are trying to force them to a particular point of view, they are very good at telling you what they think you want to hear, while retaining their beliefs. In fact, trying to force or bully students to accept your point of view, apart from being highly unethical teaching practice, is a sure way of reinforcing the strength of their original views.

So Doug’s and Jamal’s rejection of my ideas did not bother me and I was actually pleased that they felt comfortable telling me so. They had every right to believe whatever they wanted to believe. But what I had a right to expect was that they had understood what I was trying to teach and could use those ideas to make arguments within those frameworks.

For example, if I had given an exam problem that required that the student demonstrate his understanding of relativistic physics to solve, and Doug had refused to answer the question because he did not believe in relativity or had answered it using his own private theories of physics, I would have had to mark him down.

Similarly, if I had asked Jamal to calculate the age of the universe using the cosmological theories we had discussed in class, and he had instead said that the universe was 6,000 years old because that is what the Bible said, then I would have to mark him down too. He is free to believe what he wants, but the point of the course is to learn how the physics community interprets the world, and be able to use that information.

Understanding this distinction is important because it is this type of misunderstanding of the purpose of education that leads to things like Senate bill 24, which seems to assume that students are like sheep who can be induced to believe almost anything the instructor wants them to and thus require legal protection. Anyone who has taught for any length of time and has listened closely to students will know that this is ridiculous. It is not that students are not influenced by teaching and do not change their minds but that the process is far more complex and subtle than it is usually portrayed. (This is a topic I will come back to in a later posting)

My own advice to students is: “Listen carefully and courteously to what knowledgeable people have to say, learn what the community of scholars thinks about an issue, and be able to understand and use that information when necessary. Weigh the arguments for and against any issue but ultimately stand up for what you believe and even more importantly know why you believe it. Don’t ever feel forced to accept something just because some ‘expert’ (whether teacher, preacher, political leader, pundit, or media talking head) tells you it is true. Believe things only when it makes sense to you and you are good and ready for it.�

If there is one underlying idea that drives the effort to pass Ohio’s Senate Bill 24, it seems to be the idea that college faculty cannot be trusted to behave ethically in their dealings with students, in what they teach and how they assess and grade.

College faculty are probably no better or worse than other people in their ethics. But in my experience, both university administrators and faculty know that it is in their interest to have everyone behave ethically. What this bill ignores is that there are already remedies available within the universities and in the courts for the most egregious violations of ethics, and tries to micromanage ethical behavior by detailing what can and cannot be read, taught, discussed, and examined in each course.

I am not convinced that people can be forced to behave ethically. The presence of rules can prevent the more obvious or overt forms of unethical behavior, but it cannot completely eliminate them. For example, we know that there are laws on the books, and official university policies, that prohibit discrimination against people based on their gender, ethnicity, or religion. We also know that we have to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.

But do we really believe that the existence of such laws and policies has eliminated discrimination? People who want to can always find ways within the laws to discriminate against people. In fact, the creation of lots of rules might work against more ethical behavior because it shifts the burden of proof. Now someone can say that as long as they are following the rules, they are behaving ethically, although they may be violating the spirit of ethical behavior.

People who value ethical behavior will, if left to themselves, of their own accord go beyond the letter of the law. Putting a lot of rules and regulations around them is likely to create resentment and hostility and a rule-following mentality.

For example, there are lots of things that instructors can do to help or hinder students that cannot be governed by rules. How an instructor responds when a students asks a question in class or asks for assistance outside of class can have a huge impact on a student’s attitude and learning. The amount of encouragement that an instructor gives, the level of guidance the instructor provides, even the letters of recommendation that they write, are very important for students, but such things cannot be legislated.

The same thing applies to students. An instructor who puts in a lot of rules designed to ‘make students learn’ is, in my opinion, doing something counterproductive. When confronted with a lot of rules and requirements, most students will simply do what is asked for and no more. What an instructor should do is to try and create the conditions which makes students want to learn and then give them the resources to do so. Learning is an inherently voluntary act and you cannot force people to learn any more than you can force them to act ethically.

There will be the rare student who will abuse this freedom, just as there will be the rare professor who abuses the freedom given to him or her. But they have to be treated as special cases and dealt with accordingly. Putting in a lot of rules to take care of such isolated cases results in the learning experience being spoiled for everyone else.

In my own experience most, if not all, students react very positively to being entrusted to take charge of their own learning. Our goal in universities should be to create students who are self-directed and ethical learners, people who enjoy learning even when no one is looking over their shoulders, and to encourage faculty to trust students and be ethical in their dealings with them.

How can people learn to achieve this higher level of self-direction if they are always viewed with suspicion and constrained by detailed rules? What we should be aiming for are fewer rules, not more.

I tend to be one of those ‘glass-half-full’ kind of people. Maybe it is because of my fundamental sense of identity as a teacher. I see most things, even things that I do not agree with, also as possible ‘teachable moments’ that can be used to obtain a deeper understanding of issues. This is why, even though I think that so-called intelligent design (ID) theory is not science, discussing why this is so can lead to a deeper understanding of the nature of science.

The same is true with the attempts to legislate a so-called “academic bill of rights� for students to supposedly protect them from alleged abuse by college professors and which in Ohio is taking the form of Senate Bill 24, currently pending in committee. While I think this is a really bad idea, articulating why this is so can lead to fruitful discussions on what education should be like.

Last Thursday I was on a panel that met to discuss the implications for universities if such a bill were to be enacted (Thanks to Veronica of the Case ACLU for organizing it.) A mix of faculty and students met over the inevitable pizza to discuss the issue.

As I said in my opening comments to the group, it is my belief that it is in such types of informal gatherings of faculty and students to discuss issues of mutual interest that real learning occurs. We should have a lot more of such gatherings and fewer structured courses in college. But since formal courses and grades are a seemingly unchangeable component on the current educational structure, what we should try to do is to replicate as much as possible this kind of informal atmosphere in our formal courses.

This means that we should, as far as possible, move away from highly detailed syllabi and course requirements, and allow for more flexibility so that the direction each course takes can be driven by the shared interests of students and faculty, while still maintaining the integrity of the overall curriculum. Of course, it is only in small enrollment courses (say with fifteen students or less) that achieving this kind of consensus becomes feasible and in my own small enrollment SAGES course I have been moving in this direction and will keep doing so.

With large enrollment courses, however, many of the course and curricular decisions have to be made even before the course begins, in order to manage the logistical issues. But even there we should try to build in room for as much flexibility as possible.

I have addressed in a previous posting that things like Senate bill 24 will move things in the opposite direction, in effect writing curricula and mandating what should be in syllabi and exams, and the mind boggles as to where this can lead. For example, section A of the bill says that “curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social studies shall respect all human knowledge in these areas and provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints.� This immediately raises problems of interpretation and enforcement.

For example, when discussing history can the instructor assume that the concentration camps of World War II are an established fact or is he/she obliged to also provide readings of holocaust deniers and use class time to discuss their ideas? If the instructor does not do so, does this mean that a student who does not believe that the holocaust occurred has grounds for complaint?

Also Marxist economics and social theory are not taught much in US universities although they have had a major influence worldwide. Should instructors be forced to have more of it and to analyze each topic in the light of what this theory says? If an economics course ignores Marxist theory, does a student have grounds for complaint? And even the terms “Marxist economics� or “capitalist economics� are open to many interpretations, with diverging schools of thought. Which schools of thought are worthy of inclusion?

If a student does complain in either of the above situations, who should be the judge of whether the instructor acted appropriately or not? Who gets to decide what is worthy and not worthy of inclusion? It is not hard to see that this kind of thing can lead to a bureaucratic nightmare.

What this bill does is infantilize faculty and students. It assumes that faculty cannot be trusted to exercise their trained judgment on what should and should not be allowed in curricula, and that students are not capable of judging when their professors are doing their job well. This bill also underestimates students’ ability to hold on to their beliefs in the face of opposing views, a topic I will discuss further in future postings.

Other panelists addressed the political and legal implications. I learned from Professor Durschlag some very interesting information about how the US Supreme Court has in the past interpreted the first amendment’s application to university education and the precedents that have been set. I will write about that at a future date when I get hold of the actual ruling. It involves a trek to the Law school library.

POST SCRIPT

There is an interesting post and discussion going on at Research in Progress about the Lawrence Summers controversy about the representation of women in academia and the professions, and the connection to Stephen Pinker’s work and talk at Case last week. You really should visit.

Update: There is also now a new post on the topic, also well worth reading.

As you enter my office, directly across from the door is a bulletin board and on it is a little sticker. It has the words ‘SAFE ZONE’ in large purple letters over an inverted pink triangle background.

It was given to me by the Spectrum group at Case which, according to its website seeks to “provide an environment where GLBTQQIA (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersexed, and allied) persons can socialize, learn, and grow.�

The sticker on my bulletin board is meant to be a signal that a student who fits into any of those categories can let me know without fearing any adverse or hostile reaction from me.

I have to say that I feel a little sad whenever my eye falls on that sticker. Have we come to this, that we have to publicly announce zones of safety for people for no other reason than their sexual orientation? Shouldn’t that be something that is taken for granted? The fact that it is not is a sign of how far we are from creating a tolerant society.

I have never quite been able to understand why some people get so upset by other people’s private lives. Yes, I can understand that because of your own religious beliefs or culture or upbringing or whatever there are certain things that you personally might not approve of. But you are always free not to do them. But why should the private lives of other consenting adults, even total strangers, matter to you?

And yet, it seems that many people are concerned about just such things. To me, one of the more disturbing features on last November’s election was the adoption of so many anti-gay measures across the nation. In Ohio Issue 1, that sought to prohibit gay couples from getting some of the benefits that married heterosexual couples take for granted, was adopted by 62% to 38%, an alarmingly large margin.

It seems pretty clear that there are at least two groups who currently run the risk of open discrimination – non-heterosexuals and Arabs/Muslims. It seems to be perfectly acceptable to say disparaging things against either of these two groups without being shamed or called to account.

When it comes to Arabs, for example, Third-Tier Pundit™ Hall of Famer Ann Coulter recently in her column referred to veteran journalist Helen Thomas as “that old Arab.� James Wolcott speculates as to the outrage that would ensure if that kind of language was applied to other groups. And Coulter’s fellow traveler on the Third-Tier Pundit™ circuit Michelle Malkin’s approval of the internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II and her advocacy of racial, religious and nationality profiling now is another example of this appalling tendency to select specific groups for discriminatory treatment.

Back to the issue of ‘safe zones’, I am not naïve. I know that people who are not ‘straight’ run the risk of being discriminated against, or much worse, in the broader society and that they are justified in being cautious about who knows about them. But it is a little disheartening that even in a university there is this fear of intolerance. A university should be different, even though it is populated by the same kinds of people as elsewhere, because in the university there exists something that does not exist outside in any organized way and which should act as a uniting force that overcomes the friction and divergence that can be caused by differences.

This unifying force is the love of learning and a respect for academic values that universities are built upon. If we immerse ourselves in that shared love of learning, then we will find that people who are sometimes very different from us can be the very sources of our own intellectual, spiritual, and moral growth.

In a university you will find people who are different in many ways, not just in terms of their sexual orientation. It is such individual differences that make life so interesting and enjoyable and these same qualities have been the fuel for some of the most creative people that ever lived. Our society, and our universities, should find room for all these people and not seek to shred them of their distinctiveness and make them conform to some idealized ‘norm.’

In other words, we need to make the whole university a safe zone for everyone.