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Classroom Culture
Lowry Pei, Anthony Friedmann, David Lee Rubin
To the Editor:
In reference to Susan Ostrov Weisser's discussion of classroom culture in the January-February issue, imagining that "it's all about personal opinion" is not a new feature of college student life. Re-search on students' intellectual development during college by psychologist William Perry and his colleagues (1970) and by psychologists Blythe Clinchy and Claire Zimmerman (1981) shows that this kind of thinking has been with us since at least the 1950s. "It's my opinion and I'm entitled to it" seems to be a necessary, if maddening, stage on the way to a more complex epistemology marked by the student's ability to think about her own thought and, in Clinchy and Zimmerman's words, "to construct one's own knowledge with the responsibility to construct it in a careful, contextual fashion."
For me, the crucial point of the developmental literature is that the student is a meaning maker like me, whether I like it or not. She is not thinking as she does just to irritate me with her stubbornness. Her epistemology is somehow bound up with her personal integrity. Dialogue is what eventually enables the student to move beyond the solipsism of expressing what she feels. If saying, "Hmm, interesting" can get the dialogue started, then I'm willing to say it. In teaching literature and writing, we are always able to go back to the text and hold students responsible to it, knowing that the text will not support just any old interpretation. If the student and I succeed in communicating and form some kind of productive teaching-learning relationship mediated by the text the student reads or writes, then we may come to shared understandings by the end of the semester. There are never any guarantees, but when everything works, these understandings have more standing than mere opinion and do not come off as impositions of authority.
Lowry Pei
(English)
Simmons College
To the Editor:
Susan Ostrov Weisser has neatly pinned the dilemmas of contemporary teaching, showing how major assumptions of higher education have been destroyed by academe's own postmodern ideology, student-centered learning, and cultural attacks on authority. All this, coupled to the "managed education" enforced by administrations that follow corporate models and link pay to performance, more or less mediated by student evaluations, forces many to choose between integrity and intellectual values on the one hand and remuneration and tenure on the other. My experience is that I betray a minority of real learners by accommodating the consumers. How did this come about? Surely, it's the administrators, whose goal is managing where none is needed and growing their salaries, not learning. Weisser showed me that I am not alone. Thank you. Her article, together with "Personal Philosophies of Teaching" by Daniel Pratt made for a hot issue.
Anthony Friedmann
(Communication)
Mount Ida College
To the Editor:
One solution to the problem Susan Ostrov Weisser describes in her article is to hold students to generally accepted standards of rhetoric. In my first-year Great Books class at the University of Virginia, for example, I devote the two opening sessions to the art of interpretive question framing and argumentation (for eventual responses). Thereafter, I require the students to develop original questions that address their ex-perience of each successive work's pro-blems of form and meaning. The students critique and revise their questions (often in consultation with peers or me) to improve clarity, specificity, open-endedness, discussibility, breadth of interest, and doubt. Their equally original responses—which we debate in class—are schematic, consisting of claims, grounds, warrants, and qualifications, plus answers to possible objections. This phase of their work is evaluated for compliance with such criteria as accuracy, completeness, coherence, clarity, and relevance. As discussion leader, I seek to keep the level of discourse as high as possible and to introduce the class to critical pluralism as a way of dealing with the ambiguity of works and the range of potentially valid approaches to it.
Resistance to the format is rare, enrollments high, attendance usually 100 percent, class discussion free of solipsism and facile relativism. In their evaluations, students state that the approach validates their curiosity and opinion as points of departure, while drawing upon (and enhancing) both to develop a personal culture and broadly transferable ways of reasoning and communication, especially in collective problem solving.
Needless to say, I do not claim that this is a panacea, though it is more effective than any other method I have tried in a career-long effort to reconcile the personal and the disciplinary.
David Lee Rubin
(French), emeritus
University of Virginia
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