When I was a boy I was extremely proud of one of my dad’s apple trees, the one onto which he had grafted three varieties of apples and a pear. By carefully attaching cuttings from these different fruits onto the stem of a single tree he had been able to make it bear a cornucopia. This is probably why I use the grafting metaphor to speak of what I see myself doing in the classroom.
Students come to us with a range of knowledge about many things (although many of us are much more concerned about what they seem not to know). I think it helps enormously to find out what our students do know and then put this information to use as starting points-the places where we can begin grafting on the new concepts we seek to impart to them. If we simply begin tossing out information, without having a sense of what students are able and ready to do with it, we run the risk of having it hurtle right past them, without finding any place to attach. If we take some time to find out what they already know, then we can graft the new material onto a trunk full of sap that will help the new ideas blossom and fruit.
I often come to a full stop before starting a new topic and spend a little time feeling the class out. I pass out blank index cards and ask them to answer a few questions anonymously. Then I read them out to the class, so that we all get some sense of what the group collectively knows and doesn’t know. In the course of this I’m able to begin planting seeds of interest, to provoke some of them into curiosity, and to help them reflect on what it is they’ve already learned somewhere else but thought they’d forgotten (and it also assures them that they do know something). And then I work to graft the new material onto what we’ve found they already know.
(Glenn’s caveat: I’m writing this for new teachers, folks still struggling to find their way in the classroom, and not for seasoned professionals, though the old salts among you are welcome to it.)
During my interview for this job, an insightful but ultimately untenurable colleague asked me how I would begin the first class of an introductory course in music. I blithely told him, “I’ll play a pop song that everyone knows and use that as a point of departure for discussion.” With his many years of teaching at Baruch under his belt, he smiled and responded, “You’ll find here that two students in your class listen only to Taiwanese pop, four listen to Heavy Metal, six listen to Rap, one exclusively to Dominican bachata and two only to merengue, five know just Korean pop, three follow one female singer from Hong Kong, four are R&B fans, etc. Baruch is so diverse. You’ll never find a musical overlap.” I’ll be darned, if he wasn’t right.
Occasionally, when I think I can tap into certain aspects of American popular culture using popular TV shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, The Daily Show, The Chappelle Show, and SNL in order to highlight a news item, I find myself still at a loss. Most students are just too busy to catch a satirical show, not to mention finding the time to read a newspaper (even The Ticker).
The two universals that always seem to work are sexual passion and an unfulfilled craving for material things. They know longing; they know desire. This makes them particularly susceptible to understanding 19th-century Romanticism (e.g., Tristan und Isolde).
So instead of Glenn’s grafting image, a wonderfully delicate and fruitful metaphor, I’ve always thought of teaching as being more violent and haphazard, like throwing mud (or whatever) at a wall. If you just keep throwing and throw hard enough, eventually you will get some material to stick.
Glenn has touched upon a basic adult learning principle – students have past knowledge or experience (and skills) as well as viewpoints that when determined and analyzed can lead to instruction that better engages students and therefore enhances learning. Glenn’s grafting metaphor makes this point in a very palatable way.
In the training and development profession, we are taught to conduct a target audience analysis as part of developing a training course. What we learn when we start practicing the profession is that you have to think on your feet and make adjustments based upon the knowledge, skills and experiences of individuals in each group that goes through a course. It is one of the reasons I am never bored even when I conduct the same class several times in a semester.
You’re absolutely right, Andrew, and it was careless of me not to have acknowledged that students in a typical Baruch class hold little if any knowledge in common. In anthropology, one of our traditional tasks is to compare society at home with societies abroad. But so many of our students don’t really know much about the U.S. So years ago I began starting each day’s class with an exploration of the day’s NY Times, as a means of (among other things) communicating to them what it is that Americans (of the sort that read the Times) assume each other know. It works well.
I have never found a musical reference, or any cultural reference, for that matter, that all my students are familiar with. But still, there are things they have naïve understandings of. If we were to take music as an example (and I know you know all this, Andrew; this is conversation for the sake of on-lookers), we could have the class try to distinguish between say, a tabla, a trumpet, and a samisen. Most would be able to detect the difference, and then we could explain to them that this shows they already know something about the categories of percussion, brass, and strings. Or a Gregorian chant, a Central American marimba ensemble, and Bob Marley; they can distinguish among vocal, instrumental, and whatever the technical term is for a combination of both. I’m sure this sounds appallingly simplistic, but most of our students actually do know quite a bit more than they realize, and there are ways of helping them find this out.
You’d be surprised how many students hear “piano” or “song” no matter what you play for them, but, on a more positive note, I think Glenn’s touched upon an important point.
It is true that our students know quite a bit. But perhaps it’s not so much what they do know individually as what it is they should know collectively. Getting students to believe that “the average [thinking] American reads the NYT daily” (true or not) will draw many of them to a “common culture.” I guess this brings me to thinking about that notorious, Bloomsian canon (“The Great Works”?). But that’s the subject of another post, I suppose.