The note cards I handed out to students in my hybrid class last week drew astonished looks.
Each contained a hand-written list of three things: events, people, animals, objects, locations, movies, songs, television shows. All were random, created one evening in a stream of consciousness. For instance:
Earlier this week, I wrote about the unlikelihood of competition and cultural forces pushing higher education to “unbundle” its degrees and services.
Jennifer Roberts first noticed the difference a few years ago in Geology 101.
James Burns of Boston College uses a term I hadn’t heard before: “swirling students.”
Writing in The Evolllution, Burns says swirling students are those who move in and out of college, collecting a few hours here, a few hours there as they move toward a degree. They often have full-time or part-time jobs, families, health problems or financial challenges, he says.
At workshops for graduate teaching assistants on Monday, I shared one of my favorite quotes about education.
It’s from Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab. In a TED Talk on innovation last year, he said: “Education is what people do to you. Learning is what you do to yourself.”
Doug Ward
Asked to describe the things that help them learn, students provide a remarkably consistent list:
That’s hardly a complete list, but those ideas came up again and again during a focus group at KU’s recent Student Learning Symposium. Not surprisingly, those same components come up again and again in research on learning.
Education changes people.
Those of us who teach know that well. We see students transform during their degrees, and sometimes during a semester. Their skills improve. Their thinking deepens. Their confidence blossoms.
For many students and educators, this year’s election felt personal.