Sometime towards the end of the fifth century BC the young Athenian Xenophon encountered a man in a narrow side street. The man blocked his way and asked where every kind of food was sold. Once he had received a reply, he asked another question: ‘And where do men become good and honourable?’. Xenophon was rather puzzled by this. ‘Follow me,’ said Socrates, ‘and learn’ (based on Diogenes Laertius 2.6.48).
Rafael: The School of Athens. Socrates and pupils.
The rhetorical questi0n about directions to the market – where food was sold – made sense in ancient Athens, since Socrates did indeed teach in the Agora – the city’s major marketplace. He spent his time there chatting to people – passers-by and a number of young men who regularly came to hear him, including, from this day on, the young Xenophon. Socrates’ teaching, at least as presented to us by Plato and Xenophon, consisted of questioning, of teasing out answers, of leading others, step by step, to new ways of seeing and understanding.
Today academics working in UK universities are also finding their way to the marketplace. But now it’s not fish and lentils that are being sold with incidental teaching merely going on at the edge of the square: we are getting ready to sell education itself . I have just come across a story from the USA which suggeststhat in such a market Socratic questioning might not always be quite so agreeable to the customers.
Inside HigherEd reports that an assistant professor at Utah Valley University was denied tenure (in effect this means he was sacked) because the students did not like his teaching.
They complained that … he asked them questions in class even when they didn’t raise their hands. They also didn’t like it when he made them work in teams.
Apparently, this university teacher deviated from the usual routine of lectures; he tried to stimulate discussion, asked students to prepare and made them engage actively with the arguments – a ‘Socratic’ method of teaching.
As we in the UK embark on our new adventure of teaching in a marketplace, do we have to worry that something similar might soon happen here? At the moment, innovative teaching styles are very much in demand, and – to give credit to our students – the general response to experiments and to attempts to break the routine of the lecture is usually very positive. And the most Socratic of all university teaching methods, the tutorial as practiced in Oxford and Cambridge, remains the gold standard in UK higher education.
There is, however, one sign that customer satisfaction might not always follow the traditional ideals of higher education: students and their parents are increasingly eager to measure the fees they pay against the hours they spend in the presence of a lecturer. It is clear that in past years, when research was the only aspect of academia which was highly valued, some institutions neglected teaching; hours were cut and in some areas, students clearly had legitimate reasons for complaint. I understand that people now faced with increased fees want to know whether they get value for money. But merely counting hours, no matter the quality and type of teaching, is not a very effective measure of a good higher education. As universities collude with students in focusing on contact hours as a crucial measure of quality, we should be careful what we make them wish for. The customer is king – but how do we make sure that customer-students understand the crucial properties of the product they are buying?
If higher education can give a student anything, it has to be independent thinking – a skill which has to be learned by, well, thinking independently. Lecturers and tutors have to make students think and engage – and then send them away to think some more on their own, work out problems on their own and start to look for information for themselves. No doubt, this is more work for individual students and might be awkward at times if you get caught out in a group discussion – but higher education ought to be an adventure, a journey of discovery, and the best of those can’t be undertaken without a willingness to take a certain amount of risk. Passive presence should not be sufficient for any student. Yet, this is what the students in Utah expected, and the university backed them up.
If the Higher Education market ends up encouraging a demand for more spoonfeeding and less independent thinking, as it seems to have done in Utah, the system will have failed. Socrates would not have found it acceptable in his marketplace, so much is certain.
I noticed in the comments to the original Utah News story the following posted by Scott Seare;
“I am an MBA student at Westminster College and currently enrolled in Dr. Maranville’s course. I have 10 yrs work experience and 5 of those as the accounting controller for a reputable Salt Lake City business. I have to agree with UVU’s decision to let Dr. Maranville go. I am at the end of the masters program and have had much more challenging classes, which have taught me a great deal and felt to be very rewarding. I am not apposed to hard work and learning but I have to say that I am baffled with his teaching approach. I enjoy the Socratic style as long as it is supported with clarification when necessary. This class leaves me more confused each week as to what he is trying to teach us. He belittles students until the comments are verbatim what he wants to hear, which to me is not Socratic, but simply a waste of class time. It will be interesting how all of this goes as well as the remainder of the course but as of right now, I feel I deserve my money back.”
I suspect its therefore not as simple as ‘assistant professor sack for using the Socratic method’.
My favourite professor from my university experience was hated by other students for exactly this reason. He told us anyone can read the text book and memorize a bunch of stuff, oh and by the way read the text book and memorize it all, but his classes consisted of him posing a problem to us and then us trying to solve the problem. “Salmon numbers have decreased – Why?” was how he would start a lecture. This would then be explained with slides of power point showing data of decreasing numbers of salmon. Then we needed to figure it out. Many students in the class complained about his teaching style to the University powers that be, he wasn’t fired or denied tenure, but I think he probably had some uncomfortable meetings with university officials. Like you point out Maria, he was teaching us to think critically, to design experiments, to see through problems; not just having us route memorize trivia so we could spew it back to him. I worked in his lab a year later and he was the same there, one on one, with the questions and the need to critically think it through.
Mark,
I agree with you – it’s clear that the article is hardly telling the whole story. But it made me pull together a few thoughgts about the situation here, so I thought I’d use it. As I point out, our students seem pretty sensible when it comes to evaluating teaching methods – although I have to say that I have come across perfectly authentic stories about problems with students’ customer expectations in the USA which seem quite outlandish here. The effects of marketisation are an issue that makes academics over here in the UK worry.
… and, as a friend pointed out in response on facebook: the academic in question was merely sacked, while they executed Socrates…