Ah, back to pedagogy.  After poetry and comics it’s like having to get up and return to manual labor on an August hot summer day after a proper southern lunch.  But to get movin’:

Dr. Sample’s brief essays got me thinking back to my undergraduate education, and I think I can see which courses were made with learning goals and significant insights in mind (or something near to backwards design) and which weren’t.  One thing I’ll say is that I belive survey courses lend themselves to the learning-goal orientation of backward design more than Wiggins and Mctighe (I believe) give them credit for.  I know the suggestion wasn’t that survey courses are necessarily all breath and no depth, and I do agree that the survey course can lean toward that American jack-of-all-trades master-of-jack-shit phenomenon.  However,  it seems to me there is almost no way to take a course oriented around one (or a few) of these and not come away with a number of crucial or important insights.  A professor, with his expert knowledge, teaches certain books (the ones he loves the most, thinks the students would benefit from the most, or which will most readily offer his expert insight to the students) of a particular era, theme, concept, or society—and these, given their cohesion, are designed to transfer.   In a British literature course I took we delved first into thematic issues, and then into social movements, how to read literature, and the function of literature in society—all by going through a carefully selected, chorological reading list.  I couldn’t bring myself to read Mrs. Dalloway—I know, I know—but I remember The Good Soldier especially well.  Aside from a few insights that I took away—most of which I emulsified in my history studies at the time—The Good Soldier is what stayed with me.  If the course was especially focused on (rather than involving or conducive to) some greater insights that the instructor specifically designed, I wonder if I would have come away with that same love for The Good Soldier.  Would it have been grouped or subsumed into the larger concept—could something have been taken away from The Good Soldier?

Of course, it is totally possible that The Good Soldier would have had an even greater impact on me, have been an even more influential and insightful work otherwise.  I don’t mean to assume the role of pessimist so regularly, but isn’t being critical the mark of a good student?  Just two things: One, to me the “digging” focus of the backward design seems to smack of something like a post-New Critical New Criticism approach; an effort that, like New Critical teachers, has an agenda, a right and a wrong, but relies more on the teacher rather than the teaching.  Second, I take issue with that idea that backward design is moving away from the “prepackaged observations and readily digestible interpretations” of the traditional book-based method.  Of course, that would certainly be the case if the instructor was a New Critic, or something there-about, but it seems to me that if you arrange your course around what you want your students to learn then you have essentially oriented your course towards somewhat “automatic” and “prepackaged observations.”  How can students actually be “self-directed learners” if your determining the direction; aren’t they therefore teacher-directed learners under the guise of self-direction?  I wonder if the backward design, in identifying goals for a literature classroom, could potentially limit the scope of that classroom—foreclose, if you will, uncoverages that lie outside of those predetermined ones.  I suppose there is a danger behind literature being second to understanding.  I’ve returned to my eternal struggle with literature instruction: Will the literature still be enjoyable (will it be able to remain itself or will it be transformed into an academic-variant of itself)?

The irony to all this, however, is that my opinions/insights come directly out of the enduring knowledge I received from the better classes of my undergraduate education, all of which included, to be sure, a backward approach.  However, they were also based on wholly tentative syllabi.  I was taught that goal-orientation was problematic precisely because envisioning an outcome predetermines it in some way which will not allow for other outcomes to be as acceptable and, in doing so, undermines the natural value of whatever process is used to get there.  I guess the case I’d like to make is simply that a course design, in the best of all possible worlds (where the teacher has the desire, determination, and time to teach it as he/she sees fit), ought to have a purpose, direction—a goal, if you must—but not in such as a way as to limit the potential that is manifest in a literature classroom.  I wonder what a literature class that had only one required reading from the beginning would look like.  A class that has the first 2-4 weeks dedicated to one book and the next dedicated to a book that the teacher (and students?) will be selecting based on the previous readings?  Everyone has an Amazon prime account, don’t they?  In two days everyone could have the next book—easy as that.  I wonder how students would respond to that kind of class as well—would they be naturally more inclined to be involved?  It seems to me that they would be.  It also seems like it would be in keeping with some of the other concepts we’ve covered thus far.

I totally agree with Fink’s “forward-looking assessment questions” and it reminds me of what I imagine would have been the pedagogy of that history professor Dr. Sample mentioned in class a few weeks ago.  I also studied history as an undergrad and I think I did mainly story-telling for all my lower-level, non-primary-research (what a snobby student would not call “real” history) courses.  I would have liked that kind of assessment as a student; I don’t think students want to regurgitate, because there is no fun in it.  This, I think, goes back to Gee.  There’s never regurgitation in video games—there’s painful repetition (as in online Call of Duty or something)—but even then it’s a utilization of what you know to perform an act working towards victory.