Teaching

As Labour Day approaches, thoughts turn to teaching. There are those who think research is what academics really prefer to do, that research entails hiding in the lab or library far from real problems, and that we teach only under duress. However, that has certainly not been my experience with either teaching or research.

“Teaching” is not synonymous with “lecturing” (as I have found myself arguing to many people over the past year while I have been teaching, but for much of the year unable to lecture). While a lecture can be an effective and engaging “live performance” of a text or reading, there is a limit to lecturing in the sense of spreading new knowledge over the outside of a learner, like orange paint on Snooki, and hoping it soaks in.

The most effortful and important approach to teaching is creating experiences for a student to have that will cause the student to discover something so authentically that she feels she’s known it all along. It can be thankless, and requires an enormous sacrifice of ego and recognition! One has to have a strong inner commitment to the importance of discovery.

Some of the most effective experiences I had as a learner often began as sheer exasperation, and even utter mystery about their purpose, until suddenly, pieces connected to make sense. In many ways, the regimented course outlines with explicit learning goals and evaluation criteria threaten to deprive students of this experience. Sometimes the process of figuring out why a learning activity was assigned is more valuable than the skill demonstrated or work product created in the assignment.

Research gives students tangible and memorable learning experiences whether as a curricular project in a credit course, or a co-curricular opportunity as a research assistant or volunteer. Research does not compete with teaching for professors’ attention, nor does research diminish teaching. Research is another medium of teaching.

As the THRILL lab prepares to suit up for “hard labour” on the carnival midway for the CNE construction week and periodically during the 18 days of The Ex, I can see it in the students: the anticipation of more than a field trip, but an opportunity to see the “real” versions of the projects they have been working on, or the real problems that they will be working on, to observe and listen to the practices and the experiences of the diversity of interconnected professions and trades, and to critically reflect on their own questions that integrate all of their formal and informal learning to that point, and to visualize their place in the system as a whole: I can’t think of a better learning experience.

What is my role? Am I teaching? Not in the sense of preparing a syllabus and standing on my hind legs barking a lecture or marking a test. But absolutely, in the sense of designing and contriving and facilitating to cause that learning opportunity to exist–getting the grant funding, cultivating and returning value to the partners representing those interconnected professions and trades–through research.