From Entitlement to Engagement E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B TL Single Issue Teaching and Learning
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 198

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This volume addresses theories and practices surrounding theentitled, self-absorbed students called Millennials. StereotypicalMillennials are often addicted to gadgets, demand service more thaneducation, and hold narrow perspectives about themselves and thosearound them; when seen through this lens, Millennial students canunderstandably frustrate the most dedicated of professors. The contributors show how new and better educational outcomescan emerge if professors reconsider Millennials. First andforemost, many of these students simply don't fit theirstereotype. Beyond that, the authors urge faculty to questioncommonly held assumptions, showing them how to reevaluate theirpedagogical practices, relationships with students, and the normsof college classrooms. Contributors focus on practical means toachieve new and more evocative outcomes by treating Millennialstudents as serious collaborators in the learning process, therebyhelping those students to more closely identify with their owneducation. The assignments that professors give, the treatment oftopics that they broach, and the digital tools that they askstudents to employ can shift students' concerns away from anarrow focus on impersonal, technical mastery of content and towardseeing themselves as Millennial thinkers who fuse their lives withtheir learning. This is the 135th volume of this Jossey-Bass higher educationseries. New Directions for Teaching and Learning offers acomprehensive range of ideas and techniques for improving collegeteaching based on the experience of seasoned instructors and thelatest findings of educational and psychological researchers.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

From the Series Editor

About This Publication

About This Volume

Editors' Notes

Purpose of This Volume

Theoretical Frame of This Volume

Overview of the Chapters in This Volume

Conclusion

Chapter 1: Rethinking the Structural Architecture of the College Classroom

Entitlement in the Professorial Psyche

The Foundations of Entitlement in Classrooms

The Psychological Architecture of Conventional Classrooms

A Checklist for Structuring an Ego-Engaged Classroom

Transforming Entitlement into Engagement

Chapter 2: Navigating the Paradox of Student Ego

Ego Entitlement as Closed Aloofness

Ego Engagement as Opened Allowing

Do Professors Have Ownership in Perpetuating Ego Entitlement?

Guidelines for Leveraging Student Ego in the Classroom

Conclusion

Chapter 3: What Students Say about Their Own Sense of Entitlement

Focus Group Participants and Format

Customer Service and Consumer Mentality

Classroom Environment, Rules, and Courtesy

The Role of the Student

The Role of the Professor

Implications for the Classroom

Chapter 4: The Syllabus: A Place to Engage Students' Egos

Tone and Style

Conceptual Unity

Creating Early-Semester Engagement with the Syllabus

Conclusion

Chapter 5: Facilitating Class Sessions for Ego-Piercing Engagement

Require and Grade Participation

Learn and Use Students' Names

Invoke the Orienting Reflex

Conclusion

Chapter 6: Immersion in Political Action: Creating Disciplinary Thinking and Student Commitment

Introduction

Millennial Students, Immersive Activities, and Nursing

The Political Activities Assignment

Implications of Immersion Assignments

Chapter 7: Selves, Lives, and Videotape: Leveraging Self-Revelation through Narrative Pedagogy

Digital Stories to Build a Collective Understanding of Culture

Narrative Pedagogy across the Higher Education Curriculum

Conclusion

Chapter 8: Activating Ego Engagement through Social Media Integration in the Large Lecture Hall

Ubiquitous Technologies in Perspective

Ubiquitous Media in the College Classroom

A Note to the Detractors

Conclusion

Chapter 9: Affirming Ego through Out-of-Class Interactions: A Practitioner's View

Come Early; Stay Late; Hear Their Voice

Be Still and Use Silence

Promote Depth in Students' Voice

Show Compassion While Promoting Accountability

Conclusion

Chapter 10: Engaging Millennial Students in Social Justice from Initial Class Meetings to Service Learning

Building Trust during Initial Class Meetings

Personalizing Unproductive Attitudes and Expectations

Combatting Cynicism and Building Student Confidence

Empowering Students with Service-Learning Projects

Conclusion

Chapter 11: From Consumers to Citizens: Student-Directed Goal Setting and Assessment

Citizenship and the Importance of Authentic Assessment

Student Goal Setting

Scaffolding Discrete Skills

Assessment by External Stakeholders

Course Critique as Opportunity for Reflection

Conclusion

Chapter 12: The Bruised Ego Syndrome: Its Etiology and Cure

The Source of the Bruised Ego Syndrome

Professorial Incivility

The Need for Reform

Conclusion

Index

From Entitlement to Engagement: Affirming Millennial Students' Egos in the Higher Education Classroom

Dave S. Knowlton, Kevin Jack Hagopian (eds.)

New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 135

Catherine M. Wehlburg, Editor-in-Chief

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From the Series Editor

About This Publication

Since 1980, New Directions for Teaching and Learning (NDTL) has brought a unique blend of theory, research, and practice to leaders in postsecondary education. NDTL sourcebooks strive not only for solid substance but also for timeliness, compactness, and accessibility.

The series has four goals: to inform readers about current and future directions in teaching and learning in postsecondary education, to illuminate the context that shapes these new directions, to illustrate these new directions through examples from real settings, and to propose ways in which these new directions can be incorporated into still other settings.

This publication reflects the view that teaching deserves respect as a high form of scholarship. We believe that significant scholarship is conducted not only by researchers who report results of empirical investigations but also by practitioners who share disciplinary reflections about teaching. Contributors to NDTL approach questions of teaching and learning as seriously as they approach substantive questions in their own disciplines, and they deal not only with pedagogical issues but also with the intellectual and social context in which these issues arise. Authors deal on the one hand with theory and research and on the other with practice, and they translate from research and theory to practice and back again.

About This Volume

Millennial students (those born between 1982 and 2001) come to our institutions with different needs and experiences than previous generations. Millennial students tend to spend more time with technological gadgets and use them in ways that give them an almost instantaneous response to questions or problems. These students can be frustrating to faculty who might be more accustomed to a different response from students. This volume outlines some practical methods for teaching and learning that can perhaps be used by faculty to reevaluate pedagogical practices and rethink the norms of a college classroom in the twenty-first century.

Catherine Wehlburg

Editor-in-Chief

Editors' Notes

When the two of us met in 1991, we both were teaching first- and second-year writing courses; we regularly discussed the lack of true student engagement in our courses. Students were excited about their fraternities, churches, political activism, and whether the Memphis Tigers won the previous night's basketball game; yet, they were relatively unmoved by the opportunities provided within their formal educational pursuits. During our time working at Memphis State—now the University of Memphis—we regularly huddled in our basement office in Patterson Hall, lamenting the lack of involvement and conspiring to motivate more substantive intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional connection between our courses and students' lives. Our means to motivate seemed sure: We regulated attention from our students, and we demanded that they be in the right place at the right time with the right set of notebooks; these mid-1990s regulations and demands compelled still, quiet, and focused receptivity.

Over the years, students have changed in their norms, values, and expectations. Our overregulation of old became ineffective with Millennial students. As we came to realize this new landscape created by the unique needs of Millennials, the tenor of our discussions waned from traditional overregulation and reinforcement of hierarchical power structures and grew toward student liberation and engagement of a personalized ego involvement—a level more interpersonally powerful than mere achievement of grades, adherence to syllabus-driven policies, and accumulation of accolades from those in positions of authority. Tradition and overregulation suppress Millennial students' sense of self; suppression contradicts the type of exaggeration of self that we came to value.

Purpose of This Volume

Millennials are those who were born between 1982 and 2001 (Rickes 2009). They began entering the hallowed halls of the academy about 12 years ago. The purpose of this volume is to bring readers into the conversation that the two of us have been having over the course of the past decade, as we continue to find problems in traditional overregulation as a means for teaching this new generation of students. Our deeper approach—an approach that fundamentally occurred at the ego level—is based in passionate action, zeal, enjoyment, flow, and the surprising intellectual rigor that expands from this seemingly loose learning space. This approach requires students to see the relationship between self and other in new ways. Aiming to bring this approach to fruition has become a meaningful path for us, as we hope it becomes for the readers of this volume.

Yes, this deeper approach motivates changes at the level of instructional methods, and many chapters of this volume will address those methods; but method change without innovative reconsideration of the implied social contract that reinforces conventional norms of the university classroom will ring thinly with Millennials. Learning will be hindered. Indeed, the college classroom is at the nexus of immense social change. It is a change that Millennial students willingly and emphatically push through. Our choice is either to fight it, thus raising Millennial students' sense of entitlement, or to cooperate with it, finding new avenues and raising to new heights the opportunities for ego-driven engagement. The ideas within this book focus more on organically changing the norms that students and professors have come to expect on a college campus. By changing the norms, inventive ways of learning will emerge.

Theoretical Frame of This Volume

Chapters 1 and 2 delineate concepts and themes that become a strong theoretical base for this volume. Here, we wish to explicate a few more concepts that might enhance an understanding of the book.

Ego liberation and engagement do not simply mean “letting the students run the classroom.” Instead, productively affirming students' egos offers new opportunities for deep learning and ever-strengthening intellectual rigor. Ego is the term that we use to promote the notion that students should feel entitled to express themselves and their own essence in the classroom. That is, this volume is not overly concerned with the denotative ontology of ego; rather, for us, ego represents a sense of enlightened solutions that allow students to affirm themselves and be affirmed by professors.

Another concept that undergirds almost every chapter in this volume is the notion of positive affirmation through classroom relationships, particularly between students and the professor. Through relationships, authoritarian and dominant tendencies of professors are lessened. For instance, this volume lends no credence for professorial attempts to create compulsions by holding grades, scholarships, or other credentials over a student's head as a point for manipulation. Similarly, the many ideas in this volume encourage students to set aside their own sense of entitlement in order to better capitalize on opportunities for engaging themselves by becoming a part of the enterprise of learning in college classrooms. Faculty and students share responsibility for the patterns of entitled student behaviors now seen in higher education classrooms. Both the professor and Millennial student have draconian and empathetic powers upon which they can act. Relationships support the types of empathy to which meaningful learning aspires.

What is Millennial about the notion of ego and these relationships that surround it? For professors, Millennial thinking is a new realism of understanding students and classroom relationships as a glass-half-full proposition. The mere conscious acknowledgment of student ego is what creates the Millennial professor. To be sure, as many of the chapters in this volume point out, this new realism and acknowledgment can be uncomfortable for both professors and students, as the classroom routines, productivity tools, and communication norms often conflict with our deeply ingrained experiences; but both realism and acknowledgment can propel a stronger unity between a student's very definition of the self and learning processes. For these reasons, the theoretical call of this volume is clear: to realize and acknowledge the value of the change that is advocated within these pages.

Overview of the Chapters in This Volume

One of the many things that is exciting to us about this volume in the New Directions for Teaching and Learning series is that the various contributing authors all share a common trait—they define themselves as “teachers” at an ego-engaged level. Teaching is not something that they “do”; it is a part of who they are.

Theory and Empiricism.

This volume begins with two theoretical chapters and one empirical chapter. In Chapter 1, Kevin Jack Hagopian brings insights into the process of rebuilding a classroom milieu from dysfunctional convention toward something that can be, as he notes, “an intellectually enchanted space.”

Whereas Chapter 1 focuses on the classroom space, Chapter 2 focuses on the psyche of Millennial students. In that chapter, Dave S. Knowlton contrasts a psychology of ego entitlement with one of ego engagement. The chapter provides broad structures for moving students toward ego engagement.

In Chapter 3, Darren S. Fullerton reports the results of focus groups with Millennial students. In this chapter, readers learn about students' sense of entitlement as customers of their college or university.

Practice and Application.

The next nine chapters provide guidance for professors who want to productively engage students' egos and become more aware of the role that ego plays in the learning experiences of Millennial students. In Chapter 4, Mark Canada helps readers see that the syllabus can bring a course to life for Millennial students—helping the student engage with the course content and its processes in meaningful ways, even as the course is just getting started.

In Chapter 5, Stephen Lippmann shares numerous during-class practices that can fundamentally engage Millennial students' egos. The type of engagement that he describes is not one of pandering; his practices appeal to the pacing that Millennial students have come to expect, and bring focus to ideas that allow for individualized connections with course content.

In Chapter 6, Karen Kelly addresses the issue of “disciplinary thinking” as a means of ego engagement. She shares her design and implementation of an assignment that engages nursing students in the world of political activism. Such an assignment penetrates students' egos by taking them outside of their own expertise and educational interests. While her specific context is nursing, her chapter concludes with advice for faculty members across the academy.

In Chapter 7, Alison G. Reeves shares her approach to using narrative pedagogy by requiring students to create autobiographical digital stories. This chapter provides vivid insight into a process that entices self-revelation from students. Ironically, through self-revelation, Millennial students are provided with an entry point for transcending a self-indulgent commitment only to themselves.

In Chapter 8, C. Michael Elavsky addresses the use of social media in large classrooms. Specifically, he focuses on media-driven lectures that allow PowerPoint and other presentation software to become more of an impetus for soliciting student participation. The chapter also describes the use of Twitter as a medium for providing a complimentary forum to supplement during-class discussion. As a final use of social media, Elavksy describes how he requires students to use virtual bulletin boards and Google applications for out-of-class communication.

In Chapter 9, Heather M. Knowlton provides techniques for interacting with students outside of class. The techniques described in this chapter promote cogent and honest relationships between professor and student. They also frustrate Millennial students' tendencies toward self-proclaimed entitlements by offering strategies for putting students in psychological check.

In Chapter 10, Jonathan J. Cavallero addresses the important topic of social justice. His chapter provides insight into establishing and maintaining a focus on unfairness, bias, and privilege. His approach is far from perfunctory, as he emphasizes the importance of meaningful relationships, personalization techniques, and a mission of combatting student cynicism. Pointing specifically to service learning, Cavallero offers an approach for empowering students toward charity and compassion.

In Chapter 11, David R. Coon and Ingrid Walker provide approaches that shift assessment away from measuring a student's performance and toward creating a sense of classroom citizenship. This sense of citizenship distracts Millennial students from a constricted focus on simply earning a grade and refocuses them, instead, on learning processes.

In Chapter 12, Bruce W. Speck offers a more in-depth look at the professor's ownership in perpetuating notions of entitlement in the classroom. Explicating notions of professorial authority, he provides important points for all professors and administrators to consider as they work through the difficult conceptual issues presented in this volume.

Conclusion

Millennial students' assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors have caused the two of us to revisit many of our ideas about teaching. Surprisingly, one conclusion that we have reached is that addressing the needs of Millennial students and their egos has created a setting in which some of our earliest ambitions for a truly engaged classroom could come to fruition. In some ways this book is a moment in the history of that 20-year conversation that we've been having.

Dave S. Knowlton

Kevin Jack Hagopian

Editors

Reference

Rickes, P. C. 2009. “Make Way for Millennials! How Today's Students Are Shaping Higher Education Space.” Planning for Higher Education 37 (2): 7–17.

Dave S. Knowlton is professor of instructional technology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Kevin Jack Hagopian teaches cinema studies and media studies at the Pennsylvania State University. While teaching at the University of Memphis, he was the first winner of the University's distinguished teaching award.

1

Rethinking the Structural Architecture of the College Classroom

Kevin Jack Hagopian

This chapter provides a structural architecture for reducing ego-based conflict in the college classroom.

How bad has it gotten in your class? Students eating steaming plate lunches, kissing passionately, conducting loud phone conversations, playing video poker? Students refusing to complete group work, ignoring demands to appear for an office session, or using obscenities in e-mails and on evaluations? How about claiming that an undiagnosed learning disability made it impossible for the student ever to attend the class for which she is enrolled? Asking to be excused from class to “barbecue chicken at the go-kart track for a radio station” where the student interned last summer?

The term we use to describe these student behaviors is entitlement. It is a word we speak with rolling eyes and shaking head. Anecdotes—all of the above are ones I have witnessed either in my own classes or in classes I have observed—are offered to show that students have grown disrespectful of education, virtually in front of our eyes. This disrespect, we complain, is derived from American society at large. Society's indulgent child-rearing norms, noisome political culture, and sensationalist mass media endorse an ethos of unfocused, confrontational personal expression and selfishness at the expense of personal responsibility and civility (Hedges 2009; Twenge and Campbell 2009).

Entitlement in the Professorial Psyche

For many faculty members, the culture of modern student entitlement is a profound threat. But for some of us, this moment is an opportunity to join students in looking closely at the unquestioned social contract of the classroom. Together, we can ask essential questions of this contract: Does it matter? Does this contract arouse, liberate, and then help to shape the intellectual consciousness of the individual student as a learner and a citizen? Or does it merely reenact desiccated rituals of academic order from another century—the nineteenth? These empty rituals are an important aspect of what I refer to as faculty entitlement, or the assumption of a position of social rather than intellectual authority within the classroom. We may feel that such authority is earned by our advanced degrees and appointments, but these are not organically meaningful in the social sphere to our students. Faculty see their course treated as a generic exercise in certification by students who adopt the stylish disengagement and anti-intellectualism modeled by peers; more than anything else, those faculty are angry at being ignored, personally and professionally. Strictly speaking, then, the problem is a lack of student ego involvement with the experiences of the course, and we are co-owners of that problem with our students.

A growing culture of self-esteem, arising from indulgent practices in child and adolescent socialization, is widely held to be a character fault of the contemporary cohort of the Millennial college student (Gottlieb 2011; Twenge and Campbell 2009). In our injured view, students import this ethos to college, making our classrooms a site of conflict between the selfish student and the selfless professor (Gordon and Sahagun 2007; Krueger, Vohs, and Baumeister 2008).

But too often faculty feel entitled, as well. Many of them disengage from the life of the individual student in the name of “more important” intellectual projects. This choice mistakenly denies the classroom as an intellectual space and makes inevitable entitled behaviors by our students in response to that denial. Sperber (2000, 112) calls this cycle “the non-aggression pact,” a state of détente in which the needs, aspirations, and pathologies of individual learners are ignored so that professors may use the energies conserved to conduct and publish research. In turn, students are tacitly encouraged not to seek selfhood in the classroom, but in the dorms, bars, Greek houses, stadia, and other social spaces of the university (Currie 2004; Moffat 1989).

The various attitudes we designate as student entitlement share two common behavioral effects: They mark student disengagement from the mindful experience of the individual classroom, and they block student capacity to imagine a psychologically enabling relationship with the ideas and experiences of the course. If we truly want an end to the behaviors of student entitlement, then we must also be ready to surrender some of the historical prerogatives of faculty entitlement.

The Foundations of Entitlement in Classrooms

The attitudes we decry as entitlement have been facts in the academy for a long time. Here is how one analyst of American education summarizes it:

There are, of course, students … who take their academic work seriously, but their personal interest is outside the general current of campus approval. The preference and norm on most college campuses is toward maximum exertion in activities and minimum adjustment to academic requirements. Mediocrity is the rule in the classroom. … Only in exceptional cases is [the professor's] real influence more than marginal. … Certainly the structure of academic learning, the limitations of the lecture method, and the formality of interaction between students and faculty aggravate a situation that leads to fence-building, but the situation seems to go beyond a failure of communications. The anti-intellectual values of the students result in hostility, contempt, and suspicion toward the faculty. (Fass 1977, 180–181)

Most of us would consider this an incisive portrait of college students of the 2010s. And it would be, had it not been written about college students from the 1920s. In Fass's brilliant social history of the emergence of an American middle-class youth culture in the 1920s, higher education played a pivotal role in empowering young people, but not in the ways their dismayed faculty preferred. Instead, in Fass's account of that era, college became a social laboratory where young people incubated new gender, sexuality, and class mores. They made visible, often through irrational, transgressive behaviors, the exhaustion they felt at inherited doctrines. For them, college was not the cloistered place where they learned the genteel traditions of previous generations, but a dynamic modern space to discover themselves precisely through opposition to those traditions. Classroom authority was the emblem of those traditions. Thus, students rebelled through “an ethos of hostility toward the faculty” (Fass 1977, 180).