Posted on 09/13/2015 8:01:32 AM PDT by reaganaut1
DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent?
The notion may seem absurd on its face. The lecture is an old and well-established tradition in education. To most of us, it simply is the way college courses are taught. Even online courses are largely conventional lectures uploaded to the web.
Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students. This is not a matter of instructor bias; it is the lecture format itself — when used on its own without other instructional supports — that offers unfair advantages to an already privileged population.
The partiality of the lecture format has been made visible by studies that compare it with a different style of instruction, called active learning. This approach provides increased structure, feedback and interaction, prompting students to become participants in constructing their own knowledge rather than passive recipients.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
many women memorize rather than learn
memorizing a lecture is more difficult than from print
“What would the world be like if it was inhabited only by women and minorities?”
Elect Hillary in 2016, followed by Julian Castro and we’ll find out.
Ho-Lee-Crap! If someone cannot learn by lectures, notes, memorization, then practice; they are mentally challenged. Period. In some way, shape, form, or severity; there is a mental disability that needs to be a dressed. There is no bias it’s just the way it is.
There may be a grain of truth there.
If you went to a school where the teacher did well to merely prevent riots, rapes and gang fights during class, and somehow graduated, you may be completely out of your element trying to learn from a lecture. Even if you are bright, motivated and somehow got into a good college despite coming from such a hell hole.
It SEEMS like the natural and normal way for someone like me who went to decent schools, but I’ve tutored people who, while intelligent and motivated, weren’t very good at taking notes, a skill I had mastered by 9th grade.
Just as I know people much smarter than myself who score nowhere nearly as well on tests as I do, I like taking them and test so far above my actual ability and knowledge that sometimes I’ve ended up placed in classes that I was in no way ready for.
Yes, a silly premise on the face of it, but maybe it makes a bit of sense to spend resources in finding the intelligent and motivated students who need the study skills that someone like myself who went to good schools- and had both parents highly interested in my academic progress- assimilated early. IMHO, there’s a germ of truth, however horribly perverted to the cause of political correctness.
Just a devil’s advocate .02 :-)
I think so!
Lectures needs to be stimulating in order to pass the information on. I do them on-line all the time. I stay with the good people who use humor, irony, etc. to explain their field and quit the dullards. I like lectures. To hear Camille Paglia give a two hour lecture on a subject such as art history - I’ve done this in person - is to really understand how education should be taught.
Okay. So they are challenged to try harder.
I imagine that college lectures discriminate most against stupid people, so it’s completely outrageous for the NYT to insinuate that everyone who is not white, male and affluent are stupid.
"I'm OK, you're OK. My Reality is not your Reality."
"Whatever"
(we must not be oppressed by facts and objective truth!)
/sarc
The author is trying to garner support for “active learning” which “provides increased structure, feedback and interaction”. “The instructors may pose questions about the week’s reading, for example, and require students to answer the questions online, for a grade, before coming to class.” In other words students are spoon fed information online ahead of time and forced to draw the same conclusions that the instructor has decided are correct if they want a passing grade. You will get graded on your “global warming” class based on agreeing with the material before even hearing your leftist professor’s “lecture”. The author believes that the professor will be able to spend more time at home smoking or eating his medicinal marijuana and not have to face the discomfort of speaking in front of a group with possibly skeptical individuals in it.
Throwing racial and sexual discrimination in at the beginning was just away of capturing the target audience of gullible morons from the first sentence. The author’s goal was to stir them up so they would accept everything else that followed.
These wackos need to leave.
ANNIE MURPHY PAUL thinks it’s 1973...
no SAT's or prerequisites required i take it... make them take a survey to see if they are even capable of taking the course before they sign up
Lack of a penis apparently is as well; that is why they are permitted into schools without proper qualifications and given jobs for which they aren’t qualified. This is all about outcomes (primarily financial), so every employer is expected to have some white & Asian guys doing the work while the race/gender tokens “play office”. On the government level, it is primarily race/gender tokens pretending (which is why it is so inefficient/ineffective).
I assume any “preferred minority” is unqualified until they prove otherwise; too many credentials awarded for melanin & genitalia...
So. Those Teaching Assistants who do the actual work are being unfair to students, ehh?
Drum circles and Tupperware parties should level the playing field for women and minorities. Or science can become science again, math can become math and disparate impact, wise Latinas, and foreign law can no longer be used to trump the Constitution. That might help restore some sanity to students and schools.
Like that ever happens.
I was thinking the same thing.
Socrates and Confucius both used discussion not lecture.
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