At the Heterodox Academy, Rebekah Wanic and Nina Powell stare down the face of student happiness and success by saying the obvious but unsayable.
Student-centered learning is intended to promote a more inclusive environment and to democratize the classroom. It is a broad philosophy, but its fundamental principle is the belief that education should involve a partnership between student and educator. Further, it advocates that education should be personalized to meet students where they are, with curricula design and course structure based on their individualized learning preferences.
Warm, fuzzy, exactly what many who believe in unicorns prancing on rainbows want to hear. Everyone can be special, if we just teach them in their own, special way.
Such an approach is increasingly hailed as the gold standard in higher education and is ostensibly well-meaning. It embodies the idea that education, as a route to social mobility and desirable careers, should be accessible to as many people as possible.
Accessible? Of course. Everyone should have the opportunity to be the best person they can be. But that’s where the ideals begin, not end.
Many will contend that technology and online learning offer a solution to the personalization issue, giving students the ability to self-pace using asynchronous content or dynamic tests that adjust to prior mistakes. However, such hopes are often belied by the messy reality of how students actually engage with such content. As for the issue of education goals, universities have in essence given up trying to tell students what is good for them. Fueled by the shift towards student-centered learning, student satisfaction is widely accepted as the primary indicator of educational success.
There are, of course, a litany of new fixes for old problems that their promoters swear, and will argue to their last breath, are the magic bullet that will make all these hopes and dreams come true. The problem is that these end up used in the real world where passionate, if usually vague, rhetoric doesn’t change the hard, cold fact that there is no magic that allows every student to blossom.
Take assessment, for example. Students find exams stressful, so we are told to reduce the number of exams. Neither do students like to read, so we are told to assign easier and shorter readings. Students find it hard to concentrate, so we are told to break down lectures into small chunks and intersperse activities in between. Students enjoy media content and are happy to engage with YouTube and social media, so we are told to incorporate more videos and make course material and assessments more creative and interactive. Some students don’t like to speak in class, so we are told to make sure there are myriad ways students can participate without having to actually speak.
If the point hasn’t yet become clear, it’s that there is an excuse for every student who fails and a concomitant demand that education be reinvented to suit every student’s idiosyncratic needs and peccadilloes. And this demand on profs, and expectations by students, that they are owed a world that caters to their needs, their wants, their feelings, and with such a world, they will succeed because why wouldn’t they?
For a time, I fooled myself into thinking that I could be a part of that world. And I did work hard, reading lots of papers, trying to get a handle on the extent of the field, attempting to learn its controversies and extant problems. But my limits were always staring me in the face. I had never taken calculus, and though I had learned to grind through math as an undergraduate, it was never intuitive for me. I had used a handful of premade programs to do some of the analysis I was interested in, but it was clear that I had to learn to code myself. I dutifully bought a book on Python and followed along with some online courses. And, over time, I had an experience I’ve had several times before and since: I learned my limits. After countless hours banging my head into my desk, trying to get the code to work, one drunken night I found acceptance. I would never be a computational linguist or similar. I worked my tail off, and yet my coding skills remained meager at best; I studied and studied, and yet inevitably found myself staring at algorithms I simply couldn’t understand. I did publish a study, but it was ultimately a simple correlational analysis, a bit of academic ambulance-chasing. My efforts at learning had taught me something, just not what I had hoped to learn—they had taught me that I would never be good at this.
For quite a while now, the insipid advise young people to “follow their dream,” advice that has caused many to feel the agony of defeat. Dream all you want, but that doesn’t mean you have the competencies to succeed. And no, it cannot be chalked up to skin, genitalia, missing daddy or peeling paint on the ceiling of your elementary school. It’s just that you, like everyone else, have limits. You may be good at some things but not others. You may not be good at much of anything. Or you are. But whatever it is, it is, and no reinventing the machinations of education is going to turn you into a math savant.
There is truth that we can, and should, do a lot better with educating students and recognizing that different people learn differently, as long as they learn. But not every student can manage organic chemistry. Or law. Or whatever. And it had nothing to do with following our dreams, but recognizing what Freddie deBoer learned, we have limits.
My professors were all smart, supportive, and kind, but the field simply didn’t respect the pedagogical work that I saw as core to its mission. No one wanted to write dissertations on the boring topic of how better to teach students to write research papers, and our journals and conferences were filled with esoterica that had no interest to me—high “theory” in the French style, pop culture analysis, research on podcasting and website-building. I liked my professors and my peers and generally enjoyed grad school, but I despaired at my inability to find a place for myself in the field.
Sometimes, the answer is that there is no place for you in a field, no matter how hard you dreamed. You need to find another field.
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