Thoughts on the role of an instructor in teaching are a dime a dozen all over the internet. You’ve got your advocates for flipped classrooms, lecture capture, scaling up – it goes on and on. In this post, I want to express some thoughts I’ve had on another angle: that instructors are transmitters of a scholarly tradition.
A few weeks ago we had Faculty Development Day here on campus. It’s a day that is set aside each semester for, well, faculty development, which can mean many things. This time around, Maryellen Weimer spoke to us about “Reinvesting: Career-long Growth in Teaching.” After some introductory remarks we polled the faculty (using clickers) to have them vote for five out of nine topics that most interested them, such as classroom management, how to keep up with pedagogy findings, and best practices for guiding discussions. We chose the five topics that had the most interest, assigned tables where faculty could gather with other faculty of the same interest, and learned from each other.
I joined a guiding discussions group and was pleased to see that a wide variety of disciplines was represented: another colleague from physics and others from mathematics, history, ancient languages, foreign languages, English, and theology. We talked about challenges we faced and shared ideas. One challenge described by a colleague from ancient languages struck me as particularly poignant: she said that once on end-of-semester evaluations a student had commented, “I didn’t pay to take this class from other students. I want to hear what you have to say about this topic.” She said the comment had made her pause and ponder.
She told our group that she had realized that, as professors, not only are we teaching knowledge and the ways of getting knowledge, but we are also the embodiment of a scholarly tradition that passes down a line from our advisors to us, from our advisor’s advisor, and further on back, and another similar line that passes through our teachers. And she realized that that passing on of scholarly tradition is part of what a student is signing up for in a class, whether they realize it or not. I’m a different physicist than any of my colleagues because of my background of having been trained by an engineer who became a physicist, an astronomer, a physicist-turned-all-around-imaging guru, and many others. My colleagues are different from me because of their training. Ostensibly we all took the same types of core graduate courses, but how we took in that knowledge was in some part affected by who taught it.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since my colleague brought it up. My contributions to my students are more than just the knowledge I help them learn. Whether they’re physics majors or not, they are picking up from me the ways of doing physics – really, of taking on knowledge at all – that can in some ways be greatly affected by more than just the formal coursework I took. I chose a profession that is always ensconced in learning. I (attempt to) model for them how to learn, and my ways of doing things have been developed by many threads of people, all with incredible nuances and personalities that affect their approach to physics, and science in general. It’s marvelous! I’m subconsciously (or now, more consciously) passing on those traditions to my students. And that element of teaching can’t be replicated by textbooks or online learning modules.
[Image of Boltzmann (who is in my physics lineage) Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user martinroell. HT to my friend Jason Ingalls for the post title.]