Yesterday, for my French class at Wellesley, I read an excerpt of a book called Le Maître Ignorant by Ranciere, and the excerpt focused on a French professor, Jacotot, who, after the restoration of the monarchy in France, moved to the Netherlands and taught there. However, he spoke no Dutch, and his students spoke no French. Nevertheless, he was able to teach French literature by giving the students a bilingual copy of a book and having them read it and write about it. The essay then goes on to analyse the role of teachers in various manners of teaching, and it argues that explaining material should not be part of a teacher's role.
I found this reading particularly interesting because it's closely related to my experience at Olin. Some phrases that people use to describe the learning experience at Olin are Do-Learn, Just-in-Time, and project-based. These all imply a greater focus on learning from trying something than on a lecture model. Do-Learn is what it sounds like: learning from doing. Just-in-Time generally means that students are working on some project, and when they reach a point where they need information or a skill they don't have, then they learn it. Project-based is a term we usually use to contrast our classes with problem set courses, and it implies that the course is organized around the projects, not just theory. In reality, most Olin classes involve some amount of lecture or explanation on the part of teachers and/or NINJAs, but it's often less than in the vast majority of engineering, math, and science courses elsewhere.
I'm NINJAing Linearity I this semester, and the course has changed a lot from last year. Last year, there were three class periods a week, one each for an auditorium lecture, studio (problem set) time, and a quiz. This year, the class only meets twice a week, and there aren't formal lectures, just some brief discussion at the beginning of each class period. For the linear algebra part of the class, there was background reading to go along with the studios. For the differential equations part of the class, which just started, we've shifted to asking the students to do certain (more computational) problems before class then make conjectures, and then in class they'll do problems to try to link concepts together, and maybe they'll get evidence for or against their conjectures. The classroom is intentionally set up to facilitate students working together on the problems. The general idea is to make Linearity more of a Do-Learn course.
After French and before Linearity on Friday, I was wondering how Ranciere and Jacotot would view Linearity as we're running it this semester. Between the brief discussion at the beginning of each class and the fact that my job as a NINJA is to help students get unstuck on problems and to explain things people don't understand, Ranciere would probably think there's too much explaining going on. The essay about Jacotot also discussed the difference in Jacotot's method and the Socratic method, and it was against guiding by questions, which is essentially what the studios are. On the other hand, I'm not sure how one would translate a Jacotot method to math. One can learn French literature by reading French literature, but where to start with math? I'm not entirely clear on what Ranciere's thoughts on textbooks are, so maybe reading is the place to start. I think there's still a fundamental problem, though, because so much of math -- math as it is done, not just math in class -- is explanation. Mathematics is structured around proofs, and a proof is a logical explanation of how to reach some conclusion from a set of assumptions. In a non-proof-based math class like Linearity, though, does that really matter? I'm not sure. I'm also not sure where to factor in the fact that the most commonly given feedback by the students has been that a little more guidance would be helpful (which is actually what led to the framing at the beginning of each class) because they feel like sometimes they don't even know where to start.
I'm certainly not convinced by Ranciere that Jacotot's method is the best way to teach, and my thoughts on Linearity made me even less convinced. On the other hand, I was far less skeptical than the other students in my French class (all Wellesley students) about how broadly such principles of education could be applied. When I mentioned how many of Olin's classes use Do-Learn or similar ideas to some extent, one of the Wellesley students said that she's also in an engineering class, and it's easy to make those hands-on, but that you can't do much for, say, intro biology. We changed topics then, but I kept thinking about it, and I realized my bio class last spring wasn't that far off in format from my French class, which is discussion-based. We read the textbook before class, and in class we talked about some of the concepts from the reading and then discussed some recent research on similar topics, with only occasional lecture. In this French course we'll each give a short presentation on some related topic, and we did the same thing in Bio. Discussion isn't all the way in Do-Learn territory, but it's a middle ground between Do-Learn and a lecture-based course. It's experiences like Bio and this semester's experiment with Linearity that make me more open to Jacotot-like ideas.
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