Entries Tagged with “learning research studio”
What data, observations, or feedback from students have you received regarding your approach?
I always encourage them to have the laptops open on the table in front of them. I love that “deer-in-the-headlights” look when you ask them “Well, what was that reading about?” And the reading is on an article database, or it’s on electronic course reserve. And they just stare at you and wonder, “Is this a performance? Am I supposed to perform now?”
After about two weeks of saying “You got a computer in front of you. Look up the reading, look up the answer. You have these resources, you have the tools, you have the technology—literally.” They really got into that, using the technology in a dialogic fashion during class meetings.
So it wasn’t a question of “Did the students bring the readings?,” or “Are they doing the research?,” because they could do it right there in class while discussions were going on. And I think it allowed more types of learners to succeed in the classroom—the tech, that is. Students who perform well and think on the spot tend to be the ones who rise to the top in the classroom environment. But a situation like this allowed students to think in the classroom environment, to use the resources there in front of them in order to answer questions and to engage the process of being a historian.
— Beth Pollard, History
Did you encounter any problems implementing your approach? If so, how did you resolve them?
Now, there was a problem with this as well—I’m sure you want to know the problems. One of the things I found in this class—I’ve taught the class before, I taught 400W twice, this historian’s craft course—when I taught the class in the past, I was frustrated with students’ skills with research. The students were supposed to write a book review, and consult two other professional reviews of the book in order to write their own. But I would have students, even though they had been to a library research session, even though they came to meet with me, who couldn’t do the basic skill of finding a book review of another book.
The same thing with the research: I would have students write their historiography paper and they could only maybe find a couple of books and a couple of articles. It was a long, drawn-out process. It was me meeting with each student trying to facilitate their research.
Now, I had signaled that as a problem, the students didn’t fundamentally know how to do the research they needed to do to understand what history and historiography were, so I was trying to figure how this room could help do that. Now, the problem I ended up with at the end of the class that I did not expect is that students who took this course could find so much more research then they had been able to in the past because they had had that hands-on work, because we had focused so much, both through my modeling of showing them how to do searches, and through their in-class work of doing searches. They knew so well how to do that they were able to produce more research than they knew how to process. And this was truly a problem I had not expected.
So when I teach this class in the future, I’m going to have to work more on the integration of what they’re learning because of the tech with what they’re supposed to be learning in terms of content. So in the past when I taught the class, maybe a student could find two book reviews, if I helped them. This last time I taught the class students found 10 book reviews, and weren’t particularly good at sorting out what was useful and what was not. Same thing with their final papers, their final large research projects, where they tried to do the historiography of a particular topic. In the past, maybe they’d have 15 sources, in this course they had 50, and the problem became how did they work with the volume of materials they were able to generate.
Now, I would much prefer to have the problem I have now, than the problem I had in the past. Using the tech to get past the research problem by modeling it in class allowed me to now work on what historians do, which is the processing of the information now that they know it.
— Beth Pollard, History