Two sides of the same coin: Engaging students beyond the traditional classroom

Carolyn Haynes is a faculty member at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Peter Sands is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Interview with Dr. Carolyn Haynes

Berg: Dr. Haynes, I would like to do is start out with an easy question. How do students learn best?

Haynes: Well, in my view, students learn best by having their own knowledge and experience valued. With teacher helping them to link that knowledge and experience to existing knowledge that the teacher has and by helping them to reconstruct what they already know, they can make that link from past experience and knowledge to new ideas.

Berg: How does moving outside the traditional classroom help them learn better?

Haynes: Interdisciplinary teaching focuses primarily on larger, real-world problems and issues that can't be addressed by any one single discipline. As a result, those kinds of problems and issues are often more relevant to students' lives, so they're more motivated, I think, to learn, to find evidence, data and knowledge that will help them solve whatever that issue or problem is at hand.

Berg: Can you give an example of how that could work?

Haynes: A course that would address issues of, say, terrorism today is one example. When looking solely from a sociological perspective, you wouldn't get at all of the reasons, causes or solutions. You would need to bring political science to bear, psychology, maybe cultural studies or anthropology to gain a more cultural understanding of the topic. By doing that, you have a richer knowledge of view, a comprehensive perspective on the problem at hand.

Berg: That begs the question, can't a person do interdisciplinary teaching as an individual teacher in a classroom?

Haynes: Actually, you can, but I think one of the keys to interdisciplinary teaching is really having in depth understanding of the discipline. By having a variety of teachers with history and background in one disciplinary field, you'll end up having a better perspective on the topic. That does not mean that one person cannot teach an interdisciplinary course; I just think the most ideal structure is a team taught one.

When I've taught interdisciplinary courses by myself, I had to go out and seek the expertise, advice and guidance of people in other disciplines with which I'm not familiar, or bring in guest speakers or have students go out and interview experts in a variety of disciplines so they can really bring those to bear. One of the attacks on interdisciplinary education is that it tends to be superficial, that you don't really delve into the disciplinary knowledge bases as much as you could. So, to counter that, you really do have to have credible expertise available for the students, either through the instructors or through some other means, to help them get the best knowledge at hand to work toward understanding whatever the topic is.

Berg: As an instructor who wants to teach an interdisciplinary class, what kind of skills does a person need to effectively teach in that situation?

Haynes: Well, my view is that you need a broad education and a wide-spanning intellectual curiosity, an ability to be a perpetual learner. I think most interdisciplinary teachers are not as concerned with presenting students with a large content base, but rather to help students through an interdisciplinary process. You need to be familiar with ways of going about interdisciplinary learning- drawing on disciplines, finding common ground, helping students find ways to integrate knowledge, to compare and contrast critically the disciplinary knowledge at hand. And I think you have to be really comfortable with ambiguity because you're always going to be moving into territory with which you may not be totally familiar. You have to model good skills of investigation and inquiry for your students because you're not going to know all the answers at any given time. You have to have a fairly strong ego, too, because you're going to have to be able to say, "I don't know, but let's go and try to find out." Be assertive about willingness to ask questions. Try new things, take risks, and so forth. I think it takes a certain kind of person; it's not everybody's cup of tea.

Berg: How can a teacher who does not have a strong interdisciplinary background get started?

Haynes: For one thing, there is professional literature out there on interdisciplinary thinking, teaching, and learning that is small, but growing. One of the things I would encourage is reading that. There's a very good volume of essays entitled Interdisciplinarity: Essays from the Literature edited by William H. Newell.1 I think it's a good starting book for getting a broad sense of what other people have already done so you're not reinventing the wheel. Looking at models of interdisciplinary learning helps and looking at examples of other syllabi. The Association for Integrative Studies2 is a professional association for interdisciplinary thinkers that has a lot of good resources on its web site.

Additionally, it's important to realize there are a lot of other people that go through this and have learned a variety of techniques. I had been in English and history and then combined those in a certain way for my dissertation. But when I first started teaching, I really hadn't taken courses that modeled interdisciplinary techniques in a self-conscious way. I didn't actually know what I was doing. I wanted to create a book that would have helped me when I was starting out.

Berg: If I had not had models in my own academic work, your book would be a good place to get those ideas. I've often found that I want to help my students by trying something, but I don't have enough knowledge myself on how to do it.

Haynes: Right, and I think the key is not necessarily having to understand all the disciplines in play but to have many techniques for helping students find creative ways to integrate knowledge. Some things just won't work or they'll work in one classroom context and then another group of students won't respond well at all. For me, it's finding a whole range of approaches that I can use.

Berg: Are there special skills that a student needs entering an interdisciplinary classroom rather than a more traditional classroom?

Haynes: I think so, but I tend to shy away from thinking that they already come with those skills, knowledge or predispositions. Some do, but to cultivate that in students you need to be clear about how a course will be very different from other courses and help them through that.

If students have never done this before, you need to provide a lot more structure and a lot more explanation. You need to say, "Here's what we're doing and here's why." Also, you need to explain that your role as a teacher and their roles as learners might be different from traditionally based classrooms. You know, I'm not going to get up and lecture in the same way or present them with multiple-choice exams. Instead, I'm going to expect a different kind of learning and work than what they traditionally might expect. The way I present that information varies depending on their level of experience. You have to work harder to motivate the kind of student that is not very adventurous-pretty passive, without much intellectual curiosity-to see that they actually can be an inquirer, an investigator. I think there are some students who more easily gravitate toward interdisciplinary classroom, but I think anybody could respond to it with the proper guidelines and guidance.

Berg: Most of the readers of our journal are going to be teaching introductory courses at the freshman and sophomore level. How might they promote that type of interactivity in their classrooms?

Haynes: One of the first things I do is try to build trust and a sense of community in the classroom, a sense that their experiences and knowledge are valued. Without that, they're not going to speak out; they're not going to feel comfortable enough disagreeing with me or with their peers. I used to teach kindergarten and, as a kindergarten teacher, really came to understand that students learn in different ways. Then when I began to teach college, I thought, "Why am I only teaching this one way?" Now I really try to vary my pedagogical approach, to speak to a variety of learning styles. That way students have a chance to succeed, to be challenged in their preferred mode of learning, to validate what they're saying, giving them a chance to talk or write about their own experiences relative to the topic at hand. Then I slowly push them to integrate new knowledge with what they already know. That helps them move off the idea they are looking for the answers in me and helps push them to realize that they have to uncover the answers for themselves. I believe firmly that you have to think about the cognitive development of the students hand-in-hand with intrapersonal and interpersonal understanding. If they don't know who they are and haven't thought about what they think about a topic, they're not going to have a whole lot to add to the classroom discussion. You have to help them understand that they have knowledge and something to share. And you have to help them gain skills and trust enough in their peers that they feel okay saying, "You know what, Jack? I disagree with you on that and here's why."

Berg: I just came from a class where students are starting a major team project. One of the teams asked, "Is this the way we should do it?" My response was, "Does it work for your team?" That's not the answer they wanted.

Haynes: Exactly. After each seminar I come in and give them feedback on the seminar and I ask them for feedback on my role. I try to push them to talk more to each other, to challenge each other, to add in ideas. Those kinds of things are really important for first-year students.

Berg: Are there any specific curricular design issues that would assist students in adjusting to a non-traditional setting?

Haynes: Yes, building in trust and allowing the chance for students to somehow relate their own experiences and ideas to one another, building in a lot of reflection time especially if you're doing team projects or collaborative learning. You need to take time to do meta-level discussion or analysis, that is, "How's it going?" "What was difficult?" You can't expect students to naturally know how to collaborate or naturally know how to go about an investigation or inquiry. You really do have to build in reflection and accountability, as a group, as a whole class, and as individuals. That can take some trust in student-to-student contact but also student-to-faculty contact outside the classroom. You have to focus the course on a more pointed issue and go more deeply into that issue. Allow time for reflection rather than trying to take on a coverage model where you're thinking, "I've got to cover Chapters 1 through 15 by the end of the semester."

Berg: Have you found that the less traditional the class, the more groundwork you have to do before the semester begins?

Haynes: Right. You have to be somewhat flexible, too, because you just don't always know where they're going to take the discussion or the class. I'm teaching a class right now that seems to have moved in a much more theoretical direction than I had anticipated. So I have to find ways to continue challenging them in that vein. I have to be flexible which is always hard for someone like me who's pretty anal-retentive. But it makes the process fun and challenging.

Berg: You were talking about the ego to stand up in front of a group of undergraduates and say, "I'm clueless. Let's look it up." That's quite a challenge.

Haynes: Or, if you are team teaching and have your teammate completely disagree with you in front of a class-which happens to me all the time. You need to see the disagreement as a wonderful opportunity for students to see contradictory view-points on the same issue and then to have to make decision for themselves.

Berg: A colleague and I occasionally combine classes for seminars. We have different approaches and sometimes disagree with each other in front of the students. Students learn how to disagree professionally.

Haynes: That's exactly right. This semester I'm teaching an upper division honors class, and a lot of the students have never had an interdisciplinary course before. I've taught with this person before, and we're very comfortable working together. The first time he said, "I think you're all out to lunch!" I saw the students' eyes get huge and I laughed and said, "But here's my view as a literary person." I think it was a great moment and was thrilled that they were so excited by that disagreement.

Berg: We have discussed faculty and students. Let's end with a question about administration. The interdisciplinary, non-traditional approaches to teaching don't happen by magic. They can't be successful without institutional support. What kind of support does a college have to provide to make this work?

Haynes: Teaching an interdisciplinary course, whether it's team taught or individually taught, is an incredible investment in time. It's an amazing faculty development opportunity. It should be seen as a major scholarly project and development project that's worthy of time. Ideally, you need to have time off before you teach the course for planning and preparation time to learn the new discipline, learn to interact with your team teacher and design the course. There needs to be substantial support and some development opportunities-consultants that might come in- opportunities to attend conferences where people would be talking about this.

Berg: What has been your most rewarding experience moving out of the traditional classroom and into the interdisciplinary classroom?

Haynes: It's that moment in every course when I see the students not needing me anymore. They're talking and are excited whatever their topic is. For the first time, they are integrating disciplines and for the first time are beginning to see themselves as legitimate learners and scholars. I know it's been a major achievement after having researched for months and figuring out a way to bring together all the varying knowledge bases they've worked through. It is a real reward for me.

Interview with Dr. Peter Sands

Berg: How do you feel students learn best?

Sands: I feel students learn best when they have an intrinsic motivation, a desire to learn something. You can't always guarantee that students will have that motivation, especially in a required course that they may not find appealing. But we can work hard to generate interest, tying activities and assessment to shared goals, taking care to make connections and explain them so students can contextualize those required courses with respect to a larger interest and goals. I also believe that students learn best when they have at least some measure of control over how their time is spent. This might have something to do, or much to do, with the kinds of independence and self-direction that we value in our culture; but for whatever reason, it's one reason why I think the hybrid courses, or those that combine in-class work with significant online work outside of the classroom, are very effective.

Berg: How might moving out of the traditional classroom help their intrinsic motivation?

Sands: Well, it wouldn't necessarily help their "intrinsic" motivation. Part of the instructor's path is to find ways to determine what their students' motivations are and not to shape courses just so that they pander to student motivations. But I think it's important to understand when you have a human being in front of you who's learning from you that you make some effort to understand what motivates that person and make some effort, some attempt on your own part, to connect what you're trying to teach them with what motivates them, especially, if it's not readily apparent. For instance, I teach at least one or two required courses for the English education program. One of them is a course in advanced writing. It's a workshop on their writing skills, and it's pretty apparent to anyone who thinks about it how this is relevant. Another is an early American literature course, literature to 1865, a lot of 18th century material, early 19th century material, and it's not readily apparent to most of these students how this is directly relevant. It's not a period they would choose to read themselves, and so on. It's not necessarily that moving outside the traditional classroom plays into intrinsic motivation but that as you're doing so, you have to find a way to connect it to students' motivation.

Berg: Are there any specific curriculum design issues that could assist that!

Sands: I think they would be pretty much the same curriculum design issues that you would need in any other classroom: doing some surveying and initial work with students to find who exactly is in there, knowing which students are taking courses, things like that. I think the problem of finding out what motivates people and working toward motivating them to do work in your course is not intrinsic to hybrid education, it's intrinsic to education.

Berg: One criticism of hybrid education is that students will not be motivated to do the online component if the teacher is not there in the classroom.

Sands: I don't think it's valid to say that's a criticism of hybrid education so much as it may be a criticism of students' own sense of responsibility. They pay for these credits and they have a responsibility to do the work wherever the work is assigned. Also, it might be a criticism of how the course or the curriculum itself is couched and presented to the students. If there is neither an incentive nor a reward to perform a task, people's self-interest will dictate that they probably won't do it unless they have some sort of inherent curiosity about that particular task.

Berg: With that, do students generally know they've signed up for a hybrid class before entering the first day?

Sands: That varies from institution to institution. At Milwaukee, we try to make sure that everyone who's teaching a hybrid course identifies it as such and that it's identified in the course bulletin. There's a stable URL3 that students can visit to learn more about hybrid education, some sort of self-analysis questions to find out if it's really right for them, that sort of thing.

Berg: As we look at students, are there students who shouldn't take a hybrid, who would be better served in the traditional classroom?

Sands: There will always be people who will thrive more in one environment than in another. We know that even about traditional classrooms, that some people do better in a lecture situation while others do better in a studio situation. For students with poor study skills or poor ability to divide up their tasks, or manage their time, to set goals and meet those goals throughout the week, more time in class seems to work better because it helps shape their experience, sort of overcome some of those problems by not posing them. The hybrid model requires effective time and information management.

Berg: Realizing some of the skills that students need, what is the instructor's responsibility for helping students survive in the hybrid environment?

Sands: First you have to be up front about the shifts that are required: the shifts in thinking, in time management, and so on. I include in my syllabi an explanation that the hybrid course takes the week and the month as its basic units rather than the day. Students have to think about what that means for them, so we spend some time on the first day going over how this is different from the course that meets traditionally. Rather than having a Tuesday/Thursday class, they may have the physical meeting every other week or just on Thursday and not on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If we meet once a week, we might meet for half of our time and then distribute the rest of the time during the week. It's pretty easy for students to get overwhelmed by that because it's fundamentally different from what they've been doing the first couple of decades of their lives or what they remember returning to school. So instructors have a responsibility to lay that out for students, step by step, preferably in writing, provide mechanisms to guard against possible problems, including simple things like going into the online work very slowly, over a couple of weeks, offer one-on-one consultation time to make sure students have the requisite computer skills, writing emails to students on a regular basis, particularly in that first month in case it looks like someone is getting in trouble, and just sort of generally paying attention, providing stable email and telephone contact information where you can be reached, so students can reach out and talk to you if they need to. You have some responsibility, particularly early on, to help students make that shift, but also to clarify what the shift is. You have to be clear about the fact that some of that responsibility for their own learning is being shifted from you to them. That's why you've given clear written guidelines, clear written rubrics for assessment, so students know what the target is, what they're aiming for. Then you have some common ground you can return to and say, here's what's spelled out on the syllabus, here's what your performance has been, this is why you're not meeting the criteria or this is why you're exceeding the criteria. I'm very happy with your performance and so on. There are limits. At some point the student has to take responsibility for her own learning. But particularly in the beginning stages of the course, or with non-traditional students, instructors need to approach the hybrid as a shared enterprise, one in which all the parties have a responsibility for laying the groundwork for success and for making sure they understand and check their knowledge. To me, it's not that different from the traditional classroom; I have to explain specific things, things that are specific to the hybrid model, but I also have to do many of those warming-up sort of things in the traditional classroom as well.

Berg: I could imagine one of our colleagues saying, "But, I never email students." Sending e-mail is something that a hybrid instructor needs to be prepared to do. Are there other skills that instructors need to effectively teach a hybrid class that might be different from what they've been trained to do in the traditional classroom?

Sands: You need the same skills that the students do. You need good time management and good information management, because your time is distributed throughout the week as well. You need patience-computers fail and phone lines go down. If something goes wrong, you can't hide it, just like a student can't hide the fact that she hasn't posted for 6 weeks. You have to be up front about that and be willing to use that to improve the course. If you're using an off-the-shelf course management system such as Blackboard or WebCT, then you really only need rudimentary computer skills. You need to be able to start and end computer programs. You need to be able to cut and paste between applications, send and read email and email attachments, although attachments are not necessary, and be able to use your mouse to navigate around the various screens of the system-your basic Windows or Macintosh computers skills. If you're creating your own content management system, or modifying someone else's product on your own, then you probably already have the requisite skills if you're that technically literate. For someone who's using an office suite, Microsoft Office and email and a Web browser, he has the requisite technical skills.

The rest of it is learning habits, like providing unique filenames. If 15 students email their papers to you and they're all labeled "draft1.doc," it's a problem. So you have to develop some of these file naming, file management strategies-think these things through explicitly and check yourself throughout the semester to make sure you haven't missed something. You also need teaching skills that are appropriate to online work. You need to be able to read a lot of email and online postings fairly quickly, perform some sort of triage in deciding what needs a personal response, what does not, what might make effective visual aids in the next in-class meeting.

Berg: In "Inside Outside, Upside Downside,"4 you make a point of saying that people need to connect what is being done online with the classroom, and that instructors have to move back and forth.

Sands: That's very important. Even students who sign up for hybrid-again, if it's a required course, they may not have wanted to, but there they are-you have a responsibility to them. You're asking them to do something that's fundamentally different from what they've done in all their other classes. That's sort of a value-free judgment. It doesn't mean that it's fundamentally better or that what we ordinarily do in the classroom is worse or whatever, but it is fundamentally different and all the parties involved have to recognize that.

Berg: Before teaching hybrid courses, I was using some online supplementation to the traditional classroom. I assumed the students could make that connection because I could make the connection. Often they couldn't. In the classroom, I would have to say, "I gave this online assignment because . . . ." I think that's some of what you're getting at.

Sands: Absolutely. We often assume the secondary readings we have in a course are transparently relevant to the primary text. Or the recommended readings are transparently relevant or even that the primary texts are transparently relevant to the students' course of study or to their lives or to whatever you're doing in the class, but this isn't always the case. Students don't have the benefit of the time, energy, education, and effort that we've put into designing the course. They're not there yet. There are things the students don't know that we do know. It's always useful to step back and ask, do I need to explain this? Is it going to be apparent?

Berg: Moving more of the non-traditional elements into class, I've become a better teacher because I explain things better to students, because I have to make those connections.

Sands: People, we hope, grow as teachers. I know that I lecture more than I used to, and I'm pretty sure that my students are learning more because I'm not making assumptions about what they know. I'm better at explaining things and better at writing down assignments. We should be asking students whether it's clear, asking for anonymous feedback each semester or even each class meeting so that we can continually improve.

Berg: It would seem, by looking at it, that there would be less interaction among students if they're only in the classroom half the time. How would you respond to that?

Sands: Take the example of an early American literature course. There were 33 or 35 students the last time I taught it. In a class period, you can only have so much interaction between those students. You can't just have open, unstructured conversation for an hour and a half. Even if you do, it's not necessarily high-quality interaction. Just because people are talking doesn't mean that learning is taking place. Just because the teacher is talking doesn't mean that learning is taking place. Just because the students are listening doesn't mean that learning is taking place. There is interaction of all kinds, but it's not necessarily beneficial to any of the parties.

When we move into a hybrid environment, you can set it up so there's very little interaction-just put your lecture online, all your video files, throw a bunch of slide presentations on screen and ask the students to do the extra reading. You can imagine a worst-case scenario. I've seen versions of this and invariably people find that it doesn't work as well. What really adds value is some form of written interaction. It's relatively low cost. You can certainly teach a hybrid course with text-based emails alone. You can even do it without university-based email; everyone can get a free account on Hotmail or Yahoo! But hybrids offer so much more.

As an example, I split a class into groups and some members of the class will be responsible in a given week for posting an initial commentary on an assigned reading. This commentary has a set length and it has explicit guidelines for what on-task means. It's evaluated according to that, pass/fail, as to whether it meets the length requirements, the referentiality to the text requirements, and so on. The rest of the class is responsible for writing a response. Right there I've forced some interaction, but I've also reduced the amount of reading and writing the students have to do. Only some of them are responsible for part of it and the rest are responsible for the rest. Over the course of a month or every four weeks, I'll have the students in a slightly smaller group write a short self-evaluation letter to their peers, say a group of 3 or 4. What did I learn? They're required to write a short letter back, any time in the week after they get the letter. I set up fairly frequent, small, low-stakes writing assignments that I then bring back into the classroom or I use as a means for me to write to the students. In a larger class, I make sure that when those monthly letters come in, I write a personal note to every single student in the class. That sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but it only occurs every four weeks, and I don't necessarily then, have to take the time to respond to every student's message every single day of every single week for the rest of the semester because I'm also meeting with them face to face.

Berg: We've been talking about faculty and students, but to have an effective hybrid program, it seems there needs to be institutional support. What does the institution need to provide in order to have an effective system?

Sands: Obviously you need the infrastructure. You need computers available and, at a minimum, dial-up access. If you're asking students to do something, you have to provide them with some of the infrastructure necessary. This is on the order of providing them with a room if there's going to be a class. More than that, what faculty needs from the institution, most importantly, are time and recognition. Now, recognition can come in the form of financial incentives, it come can come in the form of recognizing work spent in the development and teaching of hybrid courses at promotion/tenure/merit time. Those are certainly good things; everybody would like a little more money in their paycheck. But the biggest thing that an institution can give to its faculty is the time to guarantee success in the enterprise. Even a one-course reassignment to develop a course or a summer grant to develop a course or a summer grant to travel to, say, Michigan Tech where they run a wonderful computers and writing intensive classrooms workshop every summer will help guarantee that the faculty member has success in creating the hybrid course and that the faculty member can help teach others on campus how to do it. So you start to distribute the knowledge. It's a pretty minimal investment if you have, in the first couple years of your program, a group of faculty who have reassigned time to do some curriculum development, to do some scholarship review, to sort of step back from the hustle and bustle of their ordinary activities and work strictly-or at least partially-on the curricular improvements. They can also distribute their knowledge and ability consulting, if you will, with other members of the university. It's that kind of time and the institutional investment that the time speaks to that says, "We value what we're doing so much that we're going to ask you to do this as part of your job responsibilities. We're going to take it seriously enough that we're going to relieve you of something else in recognition that this is a serious enterprise."

Berg: Finally, what for you has been the most fulfilling aspect of teaching hybrid courses?

Sands: For me, I think it's the amount and quality of the writing I see from students, particularly good writing and good feedback that comes in from students who are initially frustrated or who don't see the value, but come to teach themselves the value as they do the work, with very little coaching from me. There does seem to be something about the sort of writing intensive, high interaction activities that I have been designing and implementing that helps students see the value of taking responsibility for and engineering their own learning. That's very gratifying.

Notes

1 Newell, W.H. (Ed.). (1998). Interdisciplinary: Essays from the Literature New York: College Entrance Examination Board.

2 http://www.units.muohio.edu/aisorg/

3 http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/LTC/hybrid.html

4 Sands, P. (2002, March 20). Inside Outside, Upside Downside. Strategies for Connecting Online and Face-to-Face Instruction in Hybrid Courses. Teaching with Technology Today, 8(6). Retrieved January 13, 2003 from http://www.uwsa.edu/ttt/articles/sands2.htm.

Steven L. Berg

Dr. Berg is an Assistant Professor of English and History at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan

Copyright Schoolcraft College Spring 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved