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Why "Active Learning" Can Be Perilous to the Profession
Faculty and administrators are paying new attention to student learning, sometimes for the wrong reasons.
By Kevin Mattson
You've probably heard the terms "active" or "engaged" learning at your college. If you haven't encountered them yet, beware. Worry especially if you teach at a big university with large classes. The terms translate into the following command for professors: it is your responsibility to pioneer new techniques that can "make large classes seem small," as a set of educational researchers recently put it with utmost seriousness. That is, simulate the feeling of a seminar, or nurture "dialogical" processes, amid a sea of five hundred faces in a large lecture hall. "Active learning," as I have learned, is more than just an empty buzzword used by educational administrators. It is a philosophy and movement that portends trouble for the future of higher education and the American professoriate.
Partisans of "active learning" often assert that they constitute a "movement" in higher education. Fair enough, if the purpose of social movements is to identify problems in society and galvanize people around ideas (often slogans) and solutions. Consider the civil rights movement's exposure of "white supremacy" and simultaneous argument for racial reconciliation within a "beloved community." Or recall the feminist movement's critique of "male domination" and "patriarchy" and its faith that the "personal is the political." Now, consider the advocates of "active learning." Their enemy is the big classroom lecture fronted by a distant-minded professor—the "sage on the stage" who commits the sin of "chalk and talk," as the slogans go. Such professors need to be replaced by the "guide by the side" or the teacher as "co-learner." Replacing them will require institutional change. Active learning proponents, like their counterparts from prior movements, have highlighted a problem and crafted slogans to combat it.
The educational bureaucracy has embraced the movement. Often, administrative centers on campus will work across departments, assuming titles like the Center for Teaching Excellence or the Center for Writing Across the Curriculum. Staffed by administrators, these centers teach professors better ways to teach, often through "workshops." As a professor, you'll learn, for example, to integrate writing and discussion into big classrooms; sometimes leading figures in educational theory will give talks on "critical thinking" and the large lecture class. You'll also be exposed to vast numbers of books and articles promoting active learning, including an international journal with the straightforward title of Active Learning in Higher Education. The movement has thus acquired academic and professional legitimacy.
Although the term "active learning" has gotten a lot of play over the years, I didn't catch wind of it until it came to my own campus—Ohio University, a publicly funded institution in Appalachia—during a drive for "general education." When I arrived in 2001, I heard administrators and some faculty members castigate the lecture class as "passive" learning. But the significance of active learning hit home only when a story ran in Ohio Today, a glossy magazine published for alumni. The story described a young assistant professor of sociology who teaches an introductory course with almost four hundred students. It provided scary insight into the future of college teaching.
Remarkably, this young professor—whose energy struck me at times as miraculous—would wear a microphone and engage her students in dialogue about sociological concepts. For example, students brought in items conveying "status" and commented on them. It seemed almost as if this professor was an intellectual Phil Donahue—running around, calling on students, and then expanding on their comments. Then came the really overwhelming point: this professor, the reporter claimed, knew every one of her students by name. How? She met with each one over coffee during a ten-week quarter. One student explained, "Not only does she know your name, but she also knows who you are, what you like to do, and other random information. Simply by having students go to coffee with her, she defeated the large classroom setting." The reporter added, "Simply, it seems, by caring."
The phrase "simply by caring" disturbed me. I couldn't help but conclude that professors who didn't go to coffee with students, learn four hundred students' names, or scurry around the classroom asking students for their ideas simply didn't care and were to blame for student passivity. To get this point, the reader had only to listen to the provost at the time, Steven Kopp, describe what active learning meant to him: "Engaged learning has far more to do with the predominant organizing principle for the course and curriculum than the seating capacity of the room." In other words, by caring, professors make "large classrooms" seem small. Don't blame the problems of large classes on the underfunding of state higher education, the hiring of fewer full-time faculty, skyrocketing enrollments, or political decisions. No, indeed, the responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of the professor teaching the class.
Admittedly, Kopp wants to see state funding of higher education increase, and the professor discussed in the story expressed reservations about its message. Nonetheless, the story's central tenor revealed the problems of "active learning" in higher education today. My colleagues continued to learn the problems over and over as they ventured forth into workshops on how to incorporate writing into big classrooms or hold discussions in large lecture classes. They would report back about big opening messages—"You can change the dynamic of the large classroom in a few easy steps!"—followed by meager attention to practical details. One colleague told me that during a writing-in-a-large-classroom workshop, the facilitator admitted professors couldn't really read through every writing assignment so recommended just skimming assignments. Not exactly inspiring advice. Yet money was allocated to these workshops rather than to planning ways to scale down the student-teacher ratio in writing classes.
Deep Roots
There's a reason why "active learning" is such a popular idea. Unlike other pedagogical fads that come and go, it has deep roots within American educational thought, making it prone to constant recycling. At the turn of the century, the granddaddy of American pedagogy, John Dewey, studied what worked best among young students and came up with a central principle of "active learning," framed by his philosophy of pragmatism: the belief that thought and action, ideas and the use of ideas, can never be separated. Dewey's views about "learning by doing" framed a broader movement for "progressive education" during the early twentieth century. In his own lab school at the University of Chicago, Dewey saw how students mastered math skills when faced with problems demanding solution. For example, his students learned about right angles and how to measure proportions much better through constructing a model farm in a sandbox than through rote memorization. Dewey inspired organizations like the Association of Progressive Education, which declared, from the 1920s and onward, that the teacher should be a "guide," not a "taskmaster." There is the pedagogical touchstone of active learning.
Dewey's faith in participatory education came to the world of higher education with a bang. During the 1960s, college students started calling into question the "multiversity"—the large, bureaucratic university more interested in pursuing defense research than in teaching students. During the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, student leader Mario Savio gave a now-famous speech defending the right of college students to educate themselves about political affairs. When the university banned the tables that held literature used to recruit students into the civil rights movement, Savio didn't just condemn the administration's meddling. He called its response an example of "the greatest problem of our nation—depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy." Big institutions induced passivity, and students wanted something more, Savio argued.
The point was heard during the 1960s. Groups like Students for a Democratic Society, prominent in the New Left, organized on campuses and embraced "participatory democracy" (an ideal also indebted to John Dewey). Students wanted to learn more about issues like the Vietnam War, so they organized "teach-ins" outside of normal class times and invited speakers onto campus. Passivity and bureaucracy became the enemies, participation and activity the goals. Posters from the 1960s criticized the large university by depicting a mean-looking professor ripping open a student's head and using a funnel to toss in ideas. Traditional college education needed to be changed as much as misguided foreign policy. The struggle for a more active conception of education was even linked to problems of the developing world in Paulo Freire's classic work on his efforts in Brazilian education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in English in 1970.
The New Left began to transmogrify in 1970. Its utopian visions fizzled out, and those once marching and protesting on college campuses became college professors and administrators themselves. As the historian Russell Jacoby put it, "The New Left that stayed on the campus proved industrious and well behaved." But it held onto aspects of the critique of the multiversity and student passivity from its headier past. Those who argue for "active learning" today might not descend directly from the free speech or teach-in movements of the New Left, but the active learning movement has much in common with the complaints of student protesters from the 1960s. The utopian dimension might have diminished, but not the desire to confront the problem of student passivity.
Take, for example, an article published in Change, the magazine of the American Association for Higher Education, in December 1995. Entitled "From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education," it is often cited in contemporary literature about active learning. In many ways, the article captures the split personality of the active learning movement, mixing, as it does, grandiose claims— the kind you would expect from the New Left of the 1960s—and bureaucratic realism. As the title makes clear, the authors want a "paradigm" shift to take place in higher education. They condemn piecemeal reform as insufficient, and their attack on the passive lecture format as inhumane and passé is sweeping. They argue that the "sage on a stage" must be replaced by the "coach interacting with a team."
Alongside these grandiose calls for paradigm shifts, however, the authors do something uto-pians typically chafe at: they set things out in nice clear charts and checklists. There's a sort of "do's and don'ts" of active learning provided in a dichotomous chart titled the "Instruction Paradigm" on one side and the "Learning Paradigm" on the other. You can just imagine the authors' PowerPoint presentation for university presidents (indeed, I came across one of them on the Web). The article culminates in a claim that undoubtedly pricks up the ears of university administrators (who might have fallen asleep with all that talk about paradigms). None of this is very "expensive," the authors assure us. After all, what you really need to do is change the attitudes of professors to fit the new paradigm.
The article reflects the tenor of much writing about "active learning" today: grandiosity mixed with realism. In general, however, it seems that realism takes precedence. Increasingly, justifications for active learning seem less interested in questions of democracy and active citizenship—the ideals animating the critique of the multiversity back in the 1960s—than in the "new" realities of the American economy. Active learning is necessary now because employers need people who can retool quickly. Therefore, teachers in today's classroom must teach not just information but also the process of learning and relearning.
You also hear much about the increasing diversity of students today and the idea that certain teaching styles no longer work. Sometimes, the realities of pop culture seep in to help justify active learning techniques. For example, in the November-December 2001 issue of Change, author Larry Spence writes, "Kids raised in the visual and highly interactive environments of today's sophisticated computer games are used to this mode of [active] learning and its joys. Expecting learning to be about doing, to relate to their interests, to be fun, and to pay off immediately, they resist traditional teaching."
This line of reasoning reminds me of the worst justification used during the 1980s and 1990s to incorporate popular culture into humanities courses. Rather than argue that popular culture had become a central experience in peoples' lives meriting attention, some English professors and historians seemed to believe that because it was so pervasive, it was the only medium through which to reach their students. Music videos trumped Shakespeare; movies replaced written texts. The disturbing message that active learning supporters rekindled with such arguments is that students need not be challenged; instead, professors should go along with students' preexisting interests and modes of understanding, even when that means a short attention span and a love of entertainment over all else.
My criticisms here aren't meant to denigrate the common sense of arguments for active learning. There are some good ideas among the reams of articles and books about active learning. Who could deny the basic idea that learning is an active process (indeed, isn't it oxymoronic to say otherwise)? I know of committed professors who teach "service learning" courses in which students perform community service and reflect on their experiences in discussions about ethics and political theory. These professors have gained much from teaching these classes. Other creative experiments in teaching exist as well.
But these examples do not counteract the recent misuse of active learning principles, or how these ideas help cover up deeper problems in academe. These good practices shouldn't let us evade the tougher questions about how we justify importing active learning techniques into the classroom. That is, why do we see interest now in this pedagogy? And just as important, how do those who argue for active learning think about the responsibility of the American professoriate in terms of the future of higher education? To that question, the response can be especially troubling.
New Professoriate Emptor
If you read through active learning literature, you can't miss the disdain for those stuck in the "chalk and talk" method of conveying information to undergraduates. Take, for example, a 1990 article, "Active Work and Creative Thought in University Classrooms," published in Promoting Cognitive Growth Over the Life Span. It explores the findings of cognitive psychology in studies on active learning and techniques used to encourage students to learn to engage. There's a section on obscure terminology like "deviation amplifying systems" and a description of two experiments in active learning. Then the article ends by fretting about the possibility of professors embracing active learning principles. "As far as the teachers are concerned," the authors worry, "we are less optimistic" than about students. Why? The teachers "work under the heavy weight of tradition" and the "great majority of the professoriate remain unmoved" by active learning and cognitive research. The final sentence asks, "What can be done about the teachers?"
The question—and the way it seems to be posed—should concern our profession. It illustrates how the burden of active learning is clearly placed on the shoulders of the professoriate. The central message of so much active learning literature seems to be: Change your attitude, even if you're staring out at four hundred students! If there's passivity among your students, it's yours to change. At its worst, the literature portrays the professor as a rusty wheel ignoring the paradigm shift. As one article in BizEd magazine, a national business school publication, put it in November-December 2002, new faculty members—annoyingly referred to as "service providers"—cannot be contented with having a PhD but must subscribe to the active learning plan. The professor ready for competition must have both "intellectual" and "interpersonal" skills and must be ready to do more than just convey information.
Active learning is part of a wider change in academe. It's about the "new professor," whose outlines became clearer during the 1990s. As most of us know, expectations for younger professors are changing. The typical career track no longer consists of acquiring a PhD and getting a job but rather a series of teaching assistantships, postdoctoral appointments, adjunct positions, and, then, who knows? Even if you get a full-time position, that's no reason to operate according to the assumptions baby-boom academics held. Universities that once demanded teaching and no research are suddenly demanding research. Universities that expected one book for tenure are now expecting two. University administrations have ratcheted up expectations, because the abysmal job market allows for it.
It's within this context that the recent demand for active learning must be understood. It's certainly a healthy sign that higher education's leaders expect a new generation of professors to become good teachers rather than disorganized rambling lecturers standing distant at the podium. But something much more than that is happening here. It's no longer good enough to teach well; instead, professors must be ready to embrace newly developed methods of "engagement," even as class enrollments skyrocket. The "new professor" must make large classes as entertaining as video games—or else take students out for coffee and memorize their hobbies. In other words, professors must do whatever it takes to secure their jobs.
The dawn of the "new professor" militates against a better response. Our question shouldn't be, What can be done about the teachers? The question instead should be, What can be done to ensure that the working conditions of young professors make it possible for them to do their jobs? Just like doctors who ask about the parameters set by HMOs for patient care, we should ask ourselves about the conditions set by university administrators. If we want active learning, then we need smaller class sizes. We need to stop pretending the attitude of professors is the only thing that matters.
I realize that we as Americans don't like to hear that if we want something-be it active citizens, smart kids, people who can think and be prepared for democratic action-we need to spend money on it and recraft our institutions to reflect our goals. Many of us prefer quick fixes or a change in attitude. We're willing to listen to chatter about "paradigm shifts" but not about spending more money and reforming institutions.As professors, we have the responsibility of pressing tough questions, not just on our students but on society as a whole. We must shape the debate about the future of our profession and the goal of educating young people. And if we really want active learning, we need to resist quick fixes and ask some difficult questions about the future of higher education. Our students and our society will benefit from our doing so. So will we.
Kevin Mattson teaches American history at Ohio University. He is author, most recently, of When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberaliam and co-editor of Steal This University! The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement.
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