Jason’s Response to Teddy’s reading log from 2/7
Posted by jbishop4 on February 8, 2010
Filed under Uncategorized
Reading Teddy’s posting outlining his experience in a less than ideal graduate course, I thought to myself “this is why all of this teaching and learning stuff is so important”. Most people would agree that education is important for any society. They may outline economic benefits or democratic advantages to having an educated public, but are our college courses really achieving the goal of education? Having a degree is nice on a resume, but are we truly educating. If we are to rely on the kind of course that Teddy outlined, in which a professor blindly assuming that meaningful learning is occurring and consciously chooses to ignore a structural inequality in the course design, I think the answer is “no”.
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Darren Cambridge on February 16th, 2010 1:42 pm
The broader issues about the social importance of education Carrie Ann introduces here raises an issue for me I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last couple of years: The relationship between “education” and “learning” and the scope of our responsibility as teachers for either or both. Even assuming we’re teaching well–and, of course, defining that is hard–is our job limited to just the pre-specified learning outcomes of the specific courses we teach, or do we have a broader responsibility to cultivate students learning throughout their lives (a.k.a. their lifelong and lifewide learning)? Part of the rationale for promoting deep learning, I think, is not just that it helps students learn course material in a more lasting and useful way, but also that instills habits of thought that may support learning and performance in disparate contexts, beyond and classroom and also beyond the discipline.