Mild Luddism and Other Classroom Ideas

Pedagogical Experiments, Fall 2024

Welcome to Okeydoxy, I am back after an unintentional summer hiatus. As the academic year picks up again, I look forward to writing here more, wrapping up the Celluloid Christ series, and releasing the next batch of podcasts. But today, I wanted to share some plans I have for my pedagogy this fall.

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One of my teaching tasks every semester is figure out a way to improve a course or a topic I’m teaching. Sometimes it’s tweaking old syllabi, figuring out new in-class activities, or developing a new course.

This semester, I’m teaching a small-ish (16 student) course “Modern Faith, Modern Problems,” which looks in part at modern critics of religion (e.g. Hume, Marx, Freud) and in part at discourse around religion and secularization (e.g. Casanova, Taylor). It’s very reading and discussion focused, but not that writing focused.

However, some of the challenges I (and many of my colleagues) have had in the last couple years have been attention issues, limited reading, and the temptations of AI as substitute for effort. So in thinking about how to improve my teaching this fall in this course, I decided my goals would be to

1. Improve in class discussion

2. Promote better engagement with the course texts, and

3. Push students to reflect more critically and deliberately on their own positions.

In pursuit of these goals, I’m trying three interconnected experiments, all of which are new to me:

Experiment #1: Mild Luddism

When I go to conference sessions or meetings, I increasingly leave my laptop behind because it is very easy for me to get distracted, so I do email, look at Twitter, etc. And observing my classes the last several semesters, I can tell my students have the same basic difficulty avoiding distraction.

So for one of the policies on my syllabus I have the following:

No Electronics. Due to the risk of technological distractions in class (e.g. phones, headphones, tablets, and computers) making it more difficult to learn, students will not use these devices in class unless (a) they receive express permission from the instructor or (b) they have a documented need for electronic devices. This includes not using the devices while in the classroom prior to the start of class.

As you can see, my sense is that distraction makes it harder for them to learn in the class, and so banning the distraction can help. Moreover, by making the choice for them, I’m not asking them to overcome what I imagine are pretty ingrained habits through sheer will power on their own.

Moreover, there are certainly students for whom the technology does help them learn. This is especially the case who need note-taking software to help with learning disabilities, but there are other compelling reasons for why a student might benefit. I hope by framing the issue in terms of “helping to learn,” students will both be more on board with it (eventually) and also less sensitive to making exceptions for some students.

One consequence of this is that I’ll be making copies of all of the course readings (with the exception of the one required book) for students so that they are not responsible for procuring physical, non-electronic copies. This leads to the second experiment:

Experiment #2: Reading Levels

The amount of reading that students do for class ranges widely and is shaped by a multitude of factors. Two that I’ve noticed repeatedly are (a) they’re not sure where to focus sometimes and (b) if they can’t do all of the reading, they often won’t do any of it.

On the course schedule for this semester, I’ve put three levels of readings for each day. First, the “Expected” reading, is what I would normally assign for that day anyway. This is the standard reading, which, depending on the day, the text, the genre, could range anywhere from 15-50 pages for me.

The second level, “Minimum,” is a subsection of “Expected,” and is where I anticipate the focus of that class being. I’m describing it to the students as “if you do at least this reading, you should be able to follow along and participate in class discussion most of the time.” I’m hopeful this gets students to do at least some of the reading each day; I’m fearful that they will simply commit to only ever doing the minimum.

The third level, “Overachiever,” is an additional text (or texts) connected to that day. Sometimes it’s a fuller section of where the expected reading is from, sometimes it’s additional texts by the same author, and sometimes it’s a related text or an alternate view on the topic. It’s not required, it may or may not come up in class, but it gives options for people who were really into something for a given day to go further.

So, as an example, there’s a day we read Gotthold Lessing, and here’s what it looks like:

So the Minimum is Lessing’s “On the proof of the spirit and power,” the Expected is that plus his “The education of the human race,” and the Overachiever is from Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript where he addresses Lessing and the ditch.

As part of their typical exit ticket, one of the questions is “what level of reading did you do for today,” with the three options above plus “None.” I’ll be curious to see how it averages out, if it is predictive of student success in the course, and how it affects in class discussions. This leads me to the third experiment:

Experiment #3: Cold Pre-Calling

As much as I love running discussion driven courses, I also hate cold calling students. Yes, over time, the same small batch of students tend to dominate, and less vocal students can become complacent (or anxious) about speaking up in class. But I was always anxious about speaking up in class and hated being called upon, so I’ve tended to carry that forward.

The one version of cold-calling that didn’t bother me when I was an undergrad was used by Fr. Schall at Georgetown. In a 100 student political theory course, he came in every day with a list of maybe 8 names, and those were the people he called on for that day; once he’d had his half dozen questions with you, he moved on.

So I’m trying out something like this, which I’m calling “Expert Days.” Students will be randomly assigned one of the four classes in a two week period on which they will be experts. In advance of their expert class, they’ll have to submit a brief text that gives the thesis, summary, and strengths/weaknesses of the text, plus a question for the class. I’ll use these to help guide discussion, but I’ll also rely on the expert students for that day when cold calling.

For random assignment of a student’s expert days, I’ll deal cards from a preset deck; spades will go on Tuesday, hearts on Thursday, etc.

Photo by aceofnet on Unsplash

Will any of these work? Probably a little, and probably not in the ways I intend. I’ll report back after their final projects. But I’m hopeful that I’ll hit my goals of (1) better discussion in class, (2) better engagement with course texts, and (3) more critical reflection on their own positions.

Thanks for reading and supporting Okeydoxy. If you have any ideas or suggestions, or if you have your own pedagogical experiments you’re trying, please leave them in the comments below.