KR Stunkel's "Point of View" in the June 26, 1998 "Chronicle of High

Education" raised a number of controversial issues--not to mention voices

and blood pressure! His seeming condemnation of student collaboration,

cooperation, and group work was just a starting point. He characterized

developers as wanting to "eliminate the professor." His portrayal of our

profession (its research and practice) was both unflattering and untrue.

Lynn Sorenson threw out a challenge to faculty developers world-wide to

respond--and respond they did. A letter to the ("Chronicle") editor has

been sent; an article is brewing, and a draft of a more formal response is

attached/included here. The authors are: Richard Tiberius (University of

Toronto), Lynn Sorenson (Brigham Young University), Ed Neal (University of

North Carolina), Mike Theall (University of Illinois), Liz Miller (Texas A &

M). Feel free to distribute this to colleagues--especially those with

questions regarding the Stunkel article. Please cite authors and posting to

the PODlist.

Reply to Stunkel: A Matter of Metaphors

Richard Tiberius Lynn Sorenson Ed Neal

University of Toronto Brigham Young University University of North Carolina

Michael Theall Liz Miller

University of Illinois, Springfield Texas A & M University

On June 26, 1998, "The Chronicle" published KR Stunkel's "Point of View"

arguing that, although the lecture is a powerful teaching tool, it is being

shunned by educators in their blind rush toward interactive methods. The

article has stimulated vigorous discussion on the Internet among college

teachers, educational researchers, and faculty developers. A number of us

(above) take exception to this characterization of interactive methods as

misguided attempts to "eliminate the professor altogether," but we

sympathize with Professor Stunkel's criticism of writers who fail to see

lecturing as a viable teaching method.

Professor Stunkel wrote that the "teacher's role is to transmit," that

"learning is imparted," that the "student's role is to pay attention," to

listen and to remember, and that lecturing is an excellent way to "deliver"

learning. Such pure expressions of the "transfer metaphor" are becoming

hard to find in scholarly writing these days. Until recently the transfer

metaphor was the dominant metaphor for teaching and learning for nearly

everyone. We viewed the content of learning as abstract concepts or facts,

stored in "boxes in the head," independent of the situations in which it is

learned or used. Knowledge was viewed as a commodity that could be

transferred from one to another. The learner was the container to be

filled, and the teacher was the vessel of knowledge that filled it.

Teachers delivered learning. As if "learn" were a transitive verb, they

learned their students.

The transfer metaphor is steadily losing ground to various metaphors we will

call "relational." Relational metaphors suggest that teachers facilitate

learning, and learners actively contribute to their own learning. The

learning process is viewed, not as a passive process in which knowledge is

absorbed, but as an active process in which learning is "constructed" by the

learner. Finally, knowledge and skills are seen as inseparable from the

activities and culture in which they are learned and used.

The consequence of this shift in the concept of "learning" is that

"teaching" is increasingly viewed, not as a transmission of knowledge but as

a process of facilitating learning through interaction--a coaching process.

The teacher's job is to use the learners' experiences, abilities, motives

and objectives to help learners make more sense of the subject matter.

Interactive and small-group activities, planned carefully by a professor who

is not "eliminated" (as Stunkel suggests) but vigorously engaged, often

promote a "deeper" learning.

Principle among the relational metaphors is the growing metaphor in which

the teacher is likened to a gardener. The gardening metaphor puts more

emphasis on the intellectual growth of the student. The driving force for

learning is internal to the student; the role of the teacher is to construct

a "fertile" environment in which the students' knowledge can grow.

These metaphors of teaching and learning hold great power in shaping our

thinking and attitudes about the educational process. Teachers who hold the

transfer metaphor tend to view their central responsibilities as preparing

material, organizing it, and being up to date. Such teachers tend to

believe that what they say is what is learned. "If the tea has been poured

the cup must be full." Teachers holding the gardening metaphor will tend to

be more interested in developing learning activities and experiences than in

sharpening their speaking performances. They will especially be interested

in experiential learning opportunities that enable students to explore their

own attitudes and experiences about the subject matter.

Why do people hold different metaphors? What drives changes in these

metaphors? Are educators following the latest fashion or are they

responding to contemporary research and understanding? Metaphors are

surprisingly durable. They change, but very slowly, in the face of

persistent, contrary evidence. A metaphor expands because it is more

encompassing than the one it replaces. It can handle all the phenomena that

the previous metaphor could as well as phenomena that the previous metaphor

could not. Although it is difficult to appreciate some phenomena in our own

time, an historical perspective reveals the pattern. We appear to form our

metaphors about teaching and learning from models of the mind that we

observe in our environment. The earliest philosophers tended to classify

what they saw around them into two categories, those that moved and those

that were still. The moving creatures either breathed, like animals, or

were propelled by some kind of wind or spirit, like clouds or leaves shaking

in the trees. It is an easy step from this sort of observation to the

theory that the prime mover is some kind of wind or spirit. Appropriately,

the goal of learning during that period became the development of the

spirit. Development of the spirit may be a laudable goal for education but

it became obvious that even very highly developed souls might have trouble

calculating the area of a circle.

A few thousand years later, during the age of machines, the mind was seen as

a kind of complex machine. Some of us are old enough to have vestiges of

this mind set lingering in our vocabulary, unless, of course, we have become

"a little rusty up there." Some of us can recall our teachers speaking of

the "gears turning" in our minds as we "ground away" on our lessons.

Appropriately, during that period, students were drilled in Latin and

general problem-solving exercises to "sharpen their minds" as one would

sharpen a tool. The machine metaphor also had its shortcomings. Several of

us remember justifying our Latin studies with the argument that our minds

were general purpose tools that could be sharpened by exercise. The

argument, vigorously supported by Latin teachers, was that Latin was the

best "discipline" for sharpening it. We learned lots of Latin but managed

to be less than exemplary in some of our other subjects.

Within the last hundred years the metaphor of teaching and learning changed

again, from mind as machine to mind as storage room. Recently this

storage-boxes-in-the-head metaphor has been rejuvenated by the appearance of

the computer disk drive. Loading the computer disk is an ideal model of the

transfer metaphor of teaching, as illustrated by the following quote from a

teacher (slightly edited): "If information is fed to students at a

reasonable rate they should be able to process it-providing, of course,

their circuits aren't fried from partying the night before class."

However, the mind is no more a computer than it is a mechanical device. It

is not so much a "thing" as a "process." For the purposes of teaching and

learning, a more useful conception is of mind as a "meaning maker." The

learner has to "construct" new knowledge. Human memory and problem solving

are distinctly different from computer memory and problem solving because

human memory takes advantage of meaningfulness, organization, and the

effects of context and emotion. If one must conceive of the brain as a hard

disk, then think of it as one that is "full." New information does not

reside in empty space but interacts with similar material that is already

there. The more your learners know about a subject, the easier it is for

them to learn more about it. If their brains are empty in a particular

area, they will have difficulty taking new knowledge into that area.

If learning is the active, constructed process that cognitive researchers

now think it is, then teachers must interact with learners to help them

learn. Teachers can help learners toward constructing new meaning in a

number of ways: by showing them ways to connect new material to their

previous knowledge and experience; by helping them organize the material

into meaningful chunks or sequences; by demonstrating the appropriate

contexts for the material; and by invoking emotions that will trigger

long-term memory. In order to facilitate learning in these ways, teachers

must learn about their learners-their previous experience, motivational

orientation, knowledge, skills and emotions. The more teachers know about

their learners the more effectively they can help them. And since knowledge

about learners is gained through interaction, effective teaching is

inherently interactive-it is a process of facilitating connections between a

subject matter and active, growing minds. This line of logic has drawn

teachers, educational consultants, and scholars to the relational view of

teaching and learning.

The great traditional lecturers championed by Professor Stunkel understood

the inherently interactive nature of teaching. They knew that it took more

than the delivery of a "perfect" message to impress content on their

students' minds. They used coherency, logic, narrative, example, drama and

other devices to connect material to their students' previous experiences,

to help organize material, to stimulate context, and to trigger emotions.

They taught interactively. The best of them were able to "read" their

audiences and then carefully construct lectures that engaged their students

in thinking, feeling or believing. Professor Stunkel is perhaps not aware

that most educational scholars and consultants also appreciate the value of

a well-planned lecture. Indeed, we spend a great deal of time helping

lecturers. We sympathize with his criticism of those writers who condemn

lecturing and individual learning on the grounds that learning must include

interaction between the teacher and the learners. Such writers confuse

teaching with learning. Teaching must be interactive; learning need not be.

Although students can learn without interacting with teachers or other

students, we believe that social interaction can have a powerful effect in

engaging students actively in a subject. And active engagement is a primary

condition in the construction of learning. Note that we are not arguing

that these methods "deliver learning" or "make learning happen" any more

than a lecture does. Professor Stunkel's article serves as a reminder to us

not to get carried away by our enthusiasm for interactive methods. It is

useful to remember that under the appropriate conditions both reading a book

and attending lectures can engage learners and that under inappropriate

conditions, small group activity may not engage learners.

Our point in these comments is that the most appropriate conditions for the

construction of teaching and learning are captured by the relational

metaphor. Whether in collaborative student groups, a graduate seminar, a

computer lab, a lecture hall, or the quiet of one's room, the ultimate

relationship is of student to subject. The process is internal. The

teacher may provide access to "raw material" in any one of many forms, but

without the learner's interaction, the material remains dormant. Those with

training and experience in the design and development of effective

instruction realize that current theory and practice do not ask us to

abandon any teaching method or to concentrate only on a few "new"

techniques. They know that the most successful instruction creates

situations that illuminate, challenge, excite, and most importantly connect

learners and content. It is then and there than learning occurs.

Posted to the POD Network mail list by "Faculty of Medicine,Centre for Research in Education" <r.tiberius@utoronto.ca>.