"Frustration Control"

Near the end of their study, Wood, Bruner, and Ross list six so-called scaffolding functions of tutoring. The fifth is frustration control:

“There should be some such maxim as ‘Problem solving should be less dangerous or stressful with a tutor than without’. Whether this is accomplished by ‘face saving’ for errors or by exploiting the learner’s wish to please’ or by other means, is of only minor importance. The major risk is in creating too much dependency on the tutor” (98). 

Frustration control has been one of the more frustrating aspects of my classroom in the past week, in part due to my fear of putting my students in a position of dependence on my experience with creating research questions. Two groups of students were particularly frustrated. The first group came up with a small handful of mildly interesting potential research topics; when I asked them what the associated question would be (to whom is this subject important and why?) they became noticeably agitated. Their responses indicated that they saw this as a matter of the instructor “knowing the answer” and being in the position to give that knowledge—and, for some reason, not doing so. They seemed ready for me to simply tell them what I thought their question should be. What’s difficult, I believe, about teaching students to develop research questions is that the type of instructor-student interaction that takes place is “the usual type of tutoring in which one member ‘knows the answer’ and the other does not, rather like a ‘practical’ in which only the instructor knows how”—but with the added element that the students kinda sorta do know how: will be using pre-existing writing skills and knowledge (which they know they have, but according to their diagnostic essays, think that they do not have (89). It seems, for the most part, that they’ve never been asked to use their skills in this way. 

Since my frustrating experience last week, I resolved this week to try some new approaches to frustration control: one particularly helpful method was making the students themselves responsible for controlling one another’s frustrations. When the groups presented their topics and questions in front of one another two things happened: (1) the students were able to see that everyone struggled to some degree with the assignment, even the groups who hadn’t chosen to write about squirrels, and (2) the students held one another responsible for discussing the relevance of their research questions. By the end of the period, my students had slightly more developed questions and seemed more comfortable with the assignment in general. I’m wondering, though, if I could have somehow lessened their frustration earlier on or whether frustration simply needed to be built into the course in a more overt way. 

Maybe I’ll know when I get that paper about squirrels? 

Works Cited:

Wood, David, Jerome S. Bruner, and Gail Ross. "The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving." Journal of Child Psychology 17 (1976): 89-100.

 

Is this Scaffolding? & thinking about failure

"In the terminology of linguistics, comprehension of the solution must precede production. That is to say, the learner must be able to recognize a solution to a particular class of problems before he is himself able to produce the steps leading to it without assistance" (Wood, Bruner, & Ross 90).

I've spent most of my prosem prep time puzzling through this quotation from this week's reading. I want to respond positively, but to be honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand the implications of this passage. Initially, I took it to mean that students must be able to understand a solution to a problem before they can adequately reproduce it without my assistance. Translating this into terms comparable with Rhet 103 (or 105), I take this to mean that students cannot successfully write an observation essay if they cannot comprehend the steps necessary to completing that goal. This might become helpful to me if, say, a particular group is struggling to identify a productive research question embedded in their observations. If I were to point out a particular observation to them -- one that I know will lead to an interesting topic -- and encourage them to focus on it, my actions would only be productive if they understood the process well enough to see why I chose that detail for them to focus on. This kind of scaffolding I can certainly support. (pun!)

However, this attitude is somewhat at odds with Zach's post, which emphasizes the importance of independence and potential failure in the college learning process. Ideally, scaffolding provides students a structure that enables them to make sense of their mistakes when they fail; wouldn't instruction without this sense of escalating skill-building create an environment where failure results not in learning but in blinding frustration? Failure is an integral part of the learning process, and this failure has to occur in a setting that's been constructed to make sense of that failure.

I wonder how much of this is really, truly "scaffolding," or if there's even a difference between this vague support structure I describe here and what is called "instructional design." Is it somewhere on the continuum between a carefully-constructed syllabus that builds skills and the primarily K-8 phenomenon differentiated instruction?

Scaffolding as Crutch

Perhaps due to its now-ubiquitous usage as a teaching technique, the scaffolding metaphor, as explicated by Wood, Bruner, and Ross, does not seem particularly revelatory to me. Instead, many of the aspects seem rather self-evident: eliciting the interest of the student, focusing on mastering the area of knowledge just beyond the student’s comprehension before advancing, and maintaining direction as an educator all seem standard fare. Granting that much of what Wood, Bruner, and Ross propose is perfectly reasoned, I will use my blog post to play devil’s advocate and discuss shortcomings I find in the scaffolding method at the heart of our Rhetoric 105 courses.

Typically, after going over a certain portion of material in my class, I will stop to ask my students if they have any questions. In the vast majority of instances, they do not. While this may be due to social anxiety, lethargy, or other factors, I believe that, mostly, they do not have any questions because the material covered is not challenging. This is where I believe the scaffolding method falters. In an attempt to avoid student failure and frustration, scaffolding has the potential to undervalue the intellectual capacity of students. Relating somewhat to a point Alex brings up in her post: how do we properly institute scaffolding (a technique devised for individual learning) in a class of 19? Do we gear the scaffolding towards those with the least knowledge? If we do, does it alienate the rest of the class?

In my own experience, I have made the most gains as a student when I have been challenged and allowed to fail. In our rhetoric courses, we ask our students to “consider stakes” when attempting to establish exigent research questions. If scaffolding eliminates frustration (if students know the pace of the course is dictated by them) then what are the stakes? If there is no possibility for failure, how are the students challenged?

The first tenet of the scaffolding proposed by Wood, Bruner, and Ross is “Recruitment.” They state: “the tutor’s first and obvious task is to enlist the problem solver’s interest in and adherence to the requirements of the task” (98). This sounds perfectly reasonable, but when taken to excess, it could pose a problem. Relating this to the Rhetoric 105 course, I believe that the attempt to reach the students “on their level” is potentially taken too far. Not because it caters too much to the interest of the individual students, but because I have found it to be ineffective as a teaching device. I highly doubt that the etext elicits more engagement from the students due to its technological and interactive nature; on the contrary, my students seem completely disinterested by the videos embedded in the etext. In addition, the simplicity and brevity of the material as well as the informal tone (presumably attempting to reach the students “on their level”) in the etext seem to foster a similar indifference.

I am aware that there are other issues that come into play with the Rhet 105 course. There are many non-native speakers who would have difficulty in a more challenging class. I wonder, though, if our students are being infantilized. After all, the subjects of the scaffolding study were 3,4, and 5 years old. 

"Scaffolding" in a large classroom environment

Getting students to recognize the solution.
Source: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/09/15 

"Scaffolding" as it is laid out in the study "The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving"[1] is a method of tutoring that not only considers, but also teaches, the individual "component skills" (89) required of a student in order to be able to complete a larger task. In this particular study, scaffolding involved ensuring that 3, 4, and 5 year-olds were able to assemble appropriate pairs and then groups of blocks in order to construct a pyramid, but it is easy to see how this method can be usefully applied to range of other teaching situations at all levels of learning. What is particularly interesting to me, however, is the question of how to apply scaffolding, which is described in the study in terms of a one-on-one tutoring situation, to a larger classroom setting.

As it is described in the study, scaffolding should allow for trial-and-error, allowing students to figure out certain tasks on their own before tutor intervention either corrects or builds on the student's progress. This means that each step is determined in response to the student's success with the previous one, and not predetermined. But what is the best way to go about this when you have a class of 19 students, whose responses to each step may vary widely? How do you develop a single task in response to 19 different assignments? Is it possible to address everyone's needs this way?

One way to deal with this may be through the use of examples in class. Wood, Bruner and Ross note that "the learner must be able to recognize a solution to a particular class of problems before he is himself able to produce the steps leading to it without assistance," and also cite a study that illustrated the ability of students to "discriminate between good strategy and bad" in a game of Twenty Questions, "even though unaided they could not produce good strategies or even good questions" (90). I have already found it useful to be able to use essays written by previous Rhetoric students to illustrate points in class and encourage my students to think about the smaller activities we engage in as a class in the context of the sort of graded writing they will really have to produce. Using good examples from the work of students currently in the class may also be useful, although I would not want to use current examples of bad work in the same way. This way, students can compare their own writing with examples of well-written work (it would be important here to use varied examples where possible, so as to emphasize that there is not a single, correct mode of writing, but many) and recognize the ways in which their own work could improve. Even this, I feel, would be better paired with individual written feedback, in order to properly prepare students for the next assignment.

And what of those students whose work produced the good examples? I worry that too many levels of scaffolding would not provide enough of a challenge for them. How can we create a classroom environment that is challenging and stimulating for these students, while also taking advantage of the clear benefits that scaffolding presents?

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[1] Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976) "The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving." Journal of Child Psychology.

Haters

Even though social networking sites have been around for years now, students still remain unaware of the repercussions of posting hateful messages on Facebook and Twitter. Six years after four Syracuse University students were reprimanded for creating a Facebook page criticizing a teaching assistant, at least one Ohio State University student is facing the consequences for racist tweets. 

As an Ohio State graduate and a Chinese American, the tweets made me furious, since several of them are directed specifically at Asians. Racism is intensely complicated for me because most people wouldn't consider me a "real Asian" since I speak English "properly" and was born in America. Still, I get questions like “Where are you from?” and even after I insist that I was born and raised in Maryland, I get the follow up question, “Where are your people from?” For me, those questions are offensive, but in light of the Ohio State tweets, they pale in comparison.

After noticing numerous racists tweets, students created a tumblr (OSU Haters) so people could report offensive tweets that they saw, which eventually lead to administration taking action against one student posting on Twitter and a conversation on racism in the university community. Even though the administration took action, what lessons did the student posting the racist tweets really learn? Will the dialogue at Ohio State really have a lasting effect on the community? or is this another issue that we'll face again in a few years in a different form? 

  

While the Ohio State tweets have started a conversation, it will probably be intensely difficult to alter or educate diversity and tolerance. Is it my job as an educator to bring up this dialogue with my students? Richard Miller’s “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone” addresses the difficulties in confronting students as an educator. Is there really a right way to go about it? Avoiding discussing racism doesn’t remove it but will I really be able to educate if I go about it the wrong way? Miller points to examples where issues have been discussed in the classroom, but nearly 20 years later, have the tactics changed?

The OSU Haters tumblr is definitely a step in addressing racism in the university community, and the idea is spreading to other universities. As a teacher, I do have the ability to bring up the issue to my students, but if it starts with race issues, will it lead to gender issues, social classes, politics? I only have one semester.

The 'Where?' Response

Antigua Beach. Image Source: http://www.onecaribbean.org/

While I have not had a chance to read Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone”, I trust that Miller has hit the highlights for us in his analysis of it and I think he uses it productively to call for a reconfiguring classrooms and teaching styles to generate more interplay between the various interpretative systems that students and instructors carry into class. In doing so, he makes some key points about viewing potentially offensive discourse within the context of the course work and a student’s life.

When we’re offended, when we feel a line has been crossed, we often have a knee-jerk reaction of assuming a malicious intent behind the statements or actions that bother us. And this isn’t always the case. As Miller stresses, we need to be aware of the contexts that students are writing in (and from) and of the influences (personal, cultural, situational etc.) that shape their work. Students’ apparent breaches of political correctness (and other, often implicit rules and expectations for academic conduct) can stem from a lack of awareness or confusion over new material they are encountering. We might think about calling such instances ‘unintentional’, rather than ‘unsolicited’, oppositional discourse.

 As a TA for an anthropology of the Caribbean class, I read a large number of student response papers (essentially in-depth book reports with some analysis of larger themes and a little room for personal reflection) to ethnographic texts about several islands. Many of them had just returned from spring break, so this was a topic that students were interested in and felt that they already knew something about. There were also several students of Caribbean descent in the class. The majority produced responses that summarized the assigned texts, made a few connections to themes like globalization, and reflected on the darker aspects of tourism and agricultural industry. Others wrote comments that seem to blame indigenous groups for political corruption, poverty, and environmental destruction. These same students had trouble summarizing what they’d read; many also began their response papers with the words “this novel”. I suspect that their comments came in part from an inability to fully engage with our texts (some of which were dense and probably overwhelming). It was hard to tell, however, what came from panicked skimming and what, if anything, might be expressing insidious or overt racism and hostility. Since I had been instructed to assign grades based upon whether or not students appeared to have completed their reading and connected it to ideas from lecture, many of the response papers that expressed this prejudice also received low grades. At the time, though, I wondered if my own shock at their comments blinded me to other, more valid and insightful, comments they might have made. I also think this might have been a missed opportunity to discuss stereotypes and the tourism industry’s portrayal of Caribbean people.

While I think that we need to differentiate (if possible) between what is inadvertent and what is intended as an attack in order to shape appropriate responses (rather than reactions). I think it’s also important for us to stop and consider where are own responses come from rather than immediately red-flagging certain kinds of student responses as problematic. I like what Miller says about beginning “where students are, rather than where one thinks they should be”. That said, sometimes it’s difficult to figure out just where students are.

Miller and required self-reflexivity

image source: http://www.glasbergen.com/education-cartoons/?album=4&gallery=86

I appreciated Miller’s endorsement in his article of a pedagogy which, as he says, “closely attend[s] to what our students say and write in an ongoing effort to learn how to read, understand, and respond to the strange, sometimes threatening, multivocal texts they produce while writing in the contact zone.” (21)  This is a progressive notion for an environment where a large number of presumably progressive individuals are placed in positions of authority as educators yet fail to recognize on occasion, when faced with an adversarial viewpoint, the incredibly complex ways in which individuals form their world view. This is obviously not a problem relegated to the relationship between educators and their students, either. It’s an issue which may get to the heart of any conflict: those who are “in the know” and take for granted that others will have been provided with the same tools they were to reach the “correct” conclusions; and those who aren’t, those who presumably had the tools but failed to use them properly or, worse, simply choose not to. Ignorance or hatred can be willful, of course but there’s usually an origin story, so to speak, and I think it’s useful for any human in relationships with other humans to remember this, particularly educators. 
          I was actually surprised, after Miller revealed several key biographical facts about the author of “Queers, Bums, and Magic” that there was still a call from some to have the author removed from the classroom, rather than wait and see, by engaging with the student, if there was anything else to be done. I don’t discredit the need for a space in which both students and their teachers feel safe and it’s intimated by Miller that the professor, Lankford, was indeed personally affected by the violent rhetoric of the essay. Whether he handled the situation ideally or not, I find it interesting that someone who did have a personal stake in the matter would not choose, as others say they would have, to bar the student from his class.  The result of that choice was also interesting in that the student appears to have received an education of sorts after all. To what degree this “education” changed the student’s thinking is unknown but certainly what was achieved through Lankford’s methods are preferable to what would have been achieved had the student exited the classroom altogether, knowing only that his work was "wrong" somehow but completely un-rehabilitated, so to speak, otherwise.

            As Miller points out after discussing at length various strategies for asking students to become engaged with and critical of their own views and interpretations, he admits that “required self-reflexivity does not, of course, guarantee that repugnant positions will be abandoned.” (20) Regardless, it seems more logical to develop methods for working in the "contact zone" which move students toward more inclusive beliefs and thought processes, rather than seeking to simply sweep the bad stuff out of the picture because it is offensive to a professor who may be, in many ways, privileged by his or her own education and worldview.