I.

Why active learning?, Part I 1. For one, the Trustees are amused with it. Need I say anything else? During one or another Trustees Meeting the Trustees forwarded a demand. For the sake of our egos well call it a challenge: they want to be able to open any classroom door and see evidence of active learning. Lets be cynical and say that this is the essential reason why we must do active learning: Schools are run by the administrator-military-financial-industrial complex, not teachers. Administrators keep the funds flowing from the Trustees. The Trustees, then, have distinct powers to influence or steer the Administrators. The Administrators can fire us teachers. So this is why active learning: if the administrators want something done, we either do it or pack our bags and turn in our library cards. 2. Why this isnt all that hard a blow to the ego. Active learning really is the best form of learning and teaching out there. It is the form of learning and teaching that will best benefit our students. If youre not in this job for the students, you may as well get up right now and get out of here. Turn your library card in before exiting the schools property for good. Shannon, may I fire a few people right now to show that I mean business? 3. So that this doesnt seem too Stalinesque, relax in knowing that the burden of proof will be on our research group to convince you of this last claim, that active learning is the best form of learning and teaching out there. Plus, there is an incentive for you to believe us. You can go home believing that what you do is magnanimous and philanthropic. You may even believe, by God, that you really want to do it anyway; that you enjoy doing it. 4. Summary: Why active learning? Its not a choice, you must do it (so in parentheses, the why question isnt really that important). Its the best thing you could be doing anyway (in parenthesis, sure, it keeps the machine whirring but god damn it, the students will benefit and so, no matter how cynical you become, remember that youre not the only one out there). Lastly, youll learn to feel good doing it (in parentheses, if you can do something enough times, youve no doubt already tricked yourself into thinking that its good for you). Proviso: many of us fancy

weve been doing active learning all along after all, our institution defines itself as an institution that spearheads active learning, whenever we become unaware that we teach it in the classroom, our administration provides the occasional reminder that we do in fact teach through active learning. And as it turns out, some of us actually have been implementing active learning techniques. So in sum, this preamble has been largely redundant. II. What is Active Learning? 1. Let me remind you that whether or not we know what active learning is, were sort of stuck in this awkward place where we say that we do it, where we define ourselves by it, if not in our personal teaching styles at least in our institutional identity. We have already jumped on board the active learning boat, what Id like us to do is to be able to captain the ship. Should you wish to head for open pedagogical waters or let the currents draw you back into the administrations safer harbors- where there is more plenteous booty- you must at least know how to chart the course. That is, even those of us who might resist active learning, must still know what it is. Do we? Do we have a consolidated understanding of what active learning is or what we teach when we teach it? I dont think we do, and I think thats a damn shame. Do our students know what it is or why we will teach it? If not, this isnt a shame, but closer to pathetic: but regardless, if the faculty dont know what it is, we cant recognize it even if the students do. 2. Active learning is not a unitary entity amenable to strict definition because it can vary across contexts and depends on the aims. This is one of the points of our research: we want to define active learning for us here, SNC, given its unique structure and core themes. What we would like to do is to discover which active learning techniques best suit SNC in general and across departments. And again, the Trustees and administration damn well want to see it here. We must be able to fake it! 3. So, our research group has been figuring out how to bring us the right kind of active learning, the kind that works for us. So in the Introduction to our grant proposal we wrote: For the Trustees challenge to be met with success, SNC must have a clear and distinct notion of, 1) just what

active learning is, 2) [we must be able to assess ] the benefits and risks to both students and faculty that come with incorporating active learning methods, and 3) [at a highly specific level, we need to know which strategies will be most effective in our classrooms]. 4. So lets begin with a basic notion of what active learning is. It may as well be arbitrary or abstract, although its not. We have to start somewhere. If we presuppose we know what active learning is, as I fear we have been, were betraying the principles of active learning that we say we practice. So, today, we present a certain notion of active learning, and we examine it critically, weeding out whatever poor assumptions support it simply because THEY DO NOT WORK to deliver active learning. In the process we bring a refined notion of active learning to the fore, we teach through it we adapt as we must. Anyway, if we remain true to active learning today and as we try to develop it here at SNC over time, we cant convince you that some content is right and that youve been teaching the wrong way. No, we begin with a notion of active learning and then we critically engage it: we ask whether it makes sense, whether it works, so that we can modify it in accordance with our particular needs. This is already a method of active learning. Perhaps Plato invented it with the Socratic method. 5. So here is the definition of active learning. We hang it out there for your criticism. We say, active learning is a learning that is self-caused. The push to active learning is the push to teaching the students to learn how to teach themselvesNOT CONTENT, traditionally defined, BUT LEARNING ITSELF. Stated otherwise, the basic premise of active learning, for a teacher, is that we teach students how to teach themselves how to learn. Henceforth, whatever methods you may have been or will eventually deploy under active learning, it is THIS that you deploy them for. Here, active learning also becomes active teaching. Ask yourself, am I teaching the students how to teach themselves how to learn? If yes, you are teaching active learning. Congratulations. 6. Here, content becomes independent of what is essential in the learning experience, sorry. But for those wedded to content, dont fret, a simple adjustment of perspective allows you to sneak

content in through the back door, though you may have to teach it in a different way. To be clear, this is not to say that we no longer teach content. We do teach content, its just that now the content we teach is: self-caused learning. Here, then, the stakes of the debate- and a debate it will be if it is done right- will revolve around us asking and trying to determine: what is learning? If learning remains the mastery of content, then how is content learned under the conditions of active learning? Not to be left out, active learning demands that we ask if learning is hindered by any variables? If, for example, learning is hindered by a distinct sort of politics, for instance, that which undermines the conditions of the learning experience- as when rampant neoliberal policy turns colleges into businesses that must cut costs as a precondition of delivering a product in the first place, then part of our teaching must become that which teaches how to overcome the hindrances to active learning. If we ignore the hindrances to active learning, we also fail active learning. III. Why Active Learning?, Part II 7. To repeat, in active learning teaching content no longer holds center stage pedagogically, although students still learn content, content is now the vehicle for learning. Im not simply trotting out the distinction form-content and saying content is bad or passwhat an insult to intelligence. Im saying we no longer enter the classroom fretting over our capacity to deliver content, we now fret over our capacity to teach the students how to learn the content for themselves. This is the active learning shift. Its actually a huge one. New things come into the foreground of teaching, others pass into the periphery-- designing lesson plans, managing class time, etcetera, and we can work on that stuff in here, but if you havent made the shift to active learning, youll be out at sea. For example, if the course is designed to have students learn the content of the periodic table, realize the periodic table cannot simply be approached as the content of learning- get that notion out of your mind, there is no periodic table-content-neutrality here simply because, overwhelmingly, the students are not entering the class to learn the periodic table as an end in itself, they enter it for a whole range of other reasons like wanting to become a

scientist with all the perks that profession contains, at best, they may wish to solve a particular problem using the periodic table, but here table is mere means and not end Besides, even if you can convince a student that learning the periodic table is a goal in itself, you have already taught more than the content of that table. 8. So heres what a lot of researchers are figuring out, students do not take in information as processors of inputs, that is, neutrally-- why teach it that way? Students create and construct worlds. If your information communicates in that world, you will be heard. If it does not, you wont be. The idea that students learn best by mastering content may have held for a world where the dominant ideology was that appreciating content in itself was the best world to be in. Few students any longer even recognize that world much less give it credence. In active learning, we learn to ask, What world do the students live in, for it is here that there cognitive architecture has been traced out, and is my content going to impinge upon their worldthat is, does my teaching enter the domain of that world where my constructions of meaning are valid? Moreover, thats not enough. I cant rest content to teach my content, even if they are open to it. If theyre open to it, they can already learn it themselves. The question worth its salt and essential to any active learning is, how do I get students to teach themselves the content of teaching themselves the content I would wish for them to learn. 9. Here is the necessary shift, a shift in perspective one can make if one still wishes to teach content in some neutral way- and damn well that you should teach basic content, but note, if you dont want to walk the planks of the SNC ship, then you must understand: .whatever method or techniques enable the student to use her own faculties to learn- IS THE CONTENT of active learning. Plain and simple. Abandon this principle at your peril. BREAK!!! 10. Really the techniques weve begin to develop today have to be forged and tested out in the classroom. In active learning, students construct what they learn rather than uncover it; thus they participate in precise types of worlds, with their own languages and modes of discovery, that we

as teachers do not necessarily belong to. We cant simply teach the content of the world, but must enter the domain of co-belonging where the content of worlds is shaped in participatory doing. If we fail to enter this world of co-belonging, we cant begin to access or activate the higher order levels of thinking like analysis, criticism, and creation. We must find out who these others are and how they create. We participate and construct worlds together or we advocate for the decay of worlds, our own solitary, barren and lonely islands of desperate, failing echolalia. 11. This is to say, finally, that we teachers, we need a clarified theoretical and practical program of research and communication through which we might better learn how to teach active learning. To do this, we must clarify the notion of active learning so we may approach the concrete applications we would like to put it to use for, methodologically and in professional development. At the very least, Id like us to be able to know what we mean by active learning so that, even if we wish to, we can reject it on principled grounds. If a Trustee, Lynn or Shannon, or a student parent, asks us what active learning is, we want to be able to tell them and to tell them why we do it here. To do this, we must begin to do active learning. Our research team has been trying to sketch out a kind of communal territory in which we can begin to actually do active learning and we welcome your feedback.