Lecturing

Now that I'm on the downside of my fellowship and will be leaving Latvia in less than a month, I've become reflective of my teaching practices and what I did well and not so well here. This is one of the questions that you have to answer for the final Fulbright report, and I am grappling with it.

One my students described my class as a "conversation," which pleased me immensely. I am unsure if it pleased my students equally as much. It was surely a new model for them coming from this crazy American professor; I remember seeing the mild bafflement at the beginning of the term when I would ask them a question about their own language use that was clearly not asking for information that I had already given them. I think that they very much appreciated being able to join in a scholarly conversation, as, for example, we did when discussing how people navigate two languages when we discussed how the English and French did the same thing in the Middle English period. They do this all the time in their own lives (sometimes they're navigating three languages), and I think that it pleased a number of them that their own experiences were actually relevant and a valid source of scholarly inquiry in themselves.

At the same time, I think that some of them were equally frustrated by this conversation model. In a scholarly culture than emphasizes lecture over discussion, students seemed to be unsure what exactly they needed to know for their essays and final exams, and it's also a culture that emphasizes final exams in particular. Many students did not really take notes all term, and I wonder if they simply were not clear that class "conversation" doesn't mean idle chitchat: this is lecture in itself. I think that in retrospect, I would have done more to state unequivocally that everything said in the class is potentially relevant. I think that I would have used the blackboard more too, though I certainly used it a lot, making the point that if I bother to write it down, you better do so too. I sympathize with them if they were unfamiliar ground, but I think that 90--minute lectures every day would have been deadly for them and boring for me. My conversation model is undoubtedly different; in my colleague Jeļena's literature class, this distinction between lecture and discussion (here, known as "seminar") is actually built into the schedule, every fourth class or so devoted to specifically discussing a piece of literature. Jeļena would discuss medieval culture, and I would lead the discussion of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's tale, for example. I enjoyed guest lecturing, er, leading discussion immensely,  but I remember thinking that this separation of the two was not a model I ascribe to. Discussion leads to lecture and back to discussion and back to lecture. I would start with the Wife of Bath, letting student repsonses lead us to discussing the position of women in English medieval culture and medieval marriage, in turn taking us back to the tale. My own students who take notes take them frantically, as I tell them everything I say could be used in an essay somewhere. The ones who don't take notes pray at the end of the term that they remember everything. So I think that being more clear about what's important and saying so intentionally, encouraging my Latvian students to be very intentional themselves about note-taking, with me leading more recap of each class's major points at the end, would help a lot. I wish that I had done more of this.

When I return, I also want to look more closely at the art of lecturing and see what's out there in terms of scholarly discussion about how to lecture effectively. The commonplace in American higher education is that lecturing is passé and passive, generally ineffective as a learning tool. Students learn my doing and not by listening. I certainly do not agree with this stance because I remember lectures from my undergrad days that have stayed with me decades later simply because they were so good. However, I do agree that many university instructors are not effective lecturers. (I count myself among them. I am a good lecturer but not a great one.) But I do think that there is value if you're a student to listening with intention, which to my mind is a form of doing, and in particular processing a lot of information, deciding what's important, getting it down in some kind of readable and comprehensible form, and then going over the notes later and cleaning them up so that you end up owning the material. There are ways to lecture that are not simply passing on information by rote, though sometimes even that is necessary. Students here respond to lecture mode pretty well, unlike their American counterparts. It is worth doing some research to find out why.