Author: Peter J. Fensham

Formerly from Monash University, Victoria

Keywords: Teaching, Christian education

Article style and source: Moderated

Contents

• Author's career
• Introduction
• Rememberings not reflections
• The constraint of lecture boardwork on learning
• Absorbing not questioning
• Encountering another way
• Learning through action and reflection
• An equality in the educational process
• A changing conception of teaching
• Acknowledgment

Author's career

Introduction

Rememberings not reflections

Accordingly, my conception of teaching was to share with the students in each class, in as logical a manner as I could, the appropriate chemical content of the course, most of which I had been taught in lectures like the ones I was now giving, and had learnt from my notes and from textbooks at some time after the lectures themselves. I assumed the students' tasks were to listen and to take good notes from what I said and from what I wrote on the blackboard.

Personally, I had, as a student, not been very dependent on my written lecture notes, but I discovered from others that they were almost completely dependent on them for their learning. I had had a chemistry master at school who would not let us take notes in class, and who encouraged us to read the topics he discussed with us, in any of the numerous chemistry texts he kept in a cupboard in the chemistry classroom. This stood me in good stead, compared with most of my peers when our first year lectures in chemistry at Melbourne University were about 60% in the dark, so that we could be bedazzled by the elegant and exciting demonstrations Professor Hartung and Mr Sachs conducted via a carbon arc projector.

In the late 1950s, Benjamin Bloom's hierarchy of cognitive learning became known to me and I decided to analyse my first year students' examinations using the hierarchy as an analytical tool. This was before multiple choice became an assessment mode of convenience, and the examination format expected five or six questions to be answered out of eight or nine. There was also a tradition, at that time, when we were setting the exam to word most of the questions so that they related directly to the lectured content, and then to design one or two questions of a less direct type - 'for the honours students'!

One of the surprising findings from my analysis was that most of the students whose marks were sufficiently high to get a first or second honour grade did not do these 'more difficult questions'. The few students who did, either got them completely correct or made no headway with them. For the 'correct' students I concluded that their knowledge was such that all the questions were 'easy' for them. The 'no headway' students were among the weakest achievers, and presumably they knew so little that they did not recognise these questions as 'difficult'. As for the majority of the students, they probably did recognise them as unusual, and hence ones to avoid since the element of choice did not require them to be done.

The constraint of lecture boardwork on learning

After three hours, no student had left and I noticed most of them writing rather continuously as they consulted their notes and the recommended texts. Not one of these able students was able to do the proof inversions, although they all, of course, reproduced the proof as given in the lectures, probably without reference to their notes. Instead of my expected four pages from each student, I had the usual dozen or more pages of faithful reproduction of the relevant section of my lecture notes. The failure of these excellent students to cope with this novel exam situation was, I realised, more to do with the whole system of their education, and with the lecture setting of our more recent teaching of them, than it had to do with their basic cognitive abilities and chemical knowledge. From personal dialogue with a number of them in their research projects in chemistry, I knew just how lively their minds were, and how quickly they could now grasp new ideas in chemistry.

Absorbing not questioning

Each of these examples revealed aspects of learning in my classes that was less than I intended but, at that stage in my career, I had no conceptual means of reflecting these back onto my teaching so that it could be changed to make my intentions for learning more likely.

Encountering another way

The text also implies very clearly that teaching and learning are reflexive processes. The teacher needs to be learning while he/she is teaching, and the learner needs to have a sense of contributing to the teacher and not just receiving. Finally, the 'us' in the text conjured up a sense of a learning community of teachers and learners, that contrasted with the individualistic sense of learning that dominated all my earlier experience of education.

It was one thing to get these new insights, but it was another to be able to put them into practice. Through several training sessions I experienced techniques that revealed where members of a group were, and a variety of ways of engaging with the Bible. I also participated in procedures that assisted me to relate and evaluate whatever I believed to the life of relationships I lived personally at home and at work, and to those involving social justice I could perceive in the larger society. I also began to get a glimpse of the power for learning that being part of a larger, personally caring group generated, when we were all engaged in learning together. Thus I had some insights and some techniques and procedures with which to embark on the practical experience of what Cliff called praxis - practice leading to theory to modified practice, and so on.

Learning through action and reflection

One was a didactic teaching context where the leader spoke on the theme for 20-30 minutes, and then was questioned by those who wished to do so. The second had a discussion group format in which the leader was more of a facilitator, encouraging participation around questions that explored the members' reaction to an issue that had been briefly introduced, orally or by some text material. The third was known as the 'non-verbal' program, and involved a number of more unusual modes of learning such as meditative, experiential, practical activity, and listening.

As Bible study was an expectation of many of the participants, we always had one program that directly involved the Bible. We worked hard to ensure, however, that the Bible appeared in turn in all three of the learning modes, and thus sometimes tempted more traditional members to venture into learning contexts that were novel for them. Usually, in parallel with the Bible study, there was a Social Justice theme and a more personal growth one.

With such a rich kaleidoscope of teaching and learning going on, there was lots of opportunity for me to reflect on what 'worked' and what did not. One thing I found difficult to accept was associated with the learning community we had created. This was so different from the individualistic learning that I, personally, had indulged in for so long, using those pedagogies that I knew would enable me to meet, better than most, the external criteria that defined what success in learning was. A successful learning community, on the other hand I slowly learnt to accept, was more conditioned by the degree to which its members felt comfortable in each others' presence, and became aware that others had insights and knowledge in which they could share, than it was by the personal acquisition of new knowledge by each, or most of the members. In other words, members could come to feel they had a share in knowledge they could not personally articulate.

An equality in the educational process

As a Christian educator of adults I had thus no right to assume that there was something basic I had that my learners did not have. This contrasted markedly with the sense I had, as a teacher in secular education, of subject knowledge that my students initially did not have. The members of our Sunday groups, however, expressed their faith in such different ways that it was not easy for me always to acknowledge that we did have something in common, albeit articulated so differently.

A changing conception of teaching

There is an irony in what I have tried to share here. Many members of my Christian community would say that I have been able to give them the educational leadership I have, because I was a professional educator. I, on the other hand, ascribe whatever I have been able to contribute, as a secular educator of adults in my many years in the Faculty of Education at Monash, to the insights I gained through reflecting on the basic conceptions of Christian education and my attempts to put them into practice as I have described above.

This article was first published in REFLECT: The journal of reflection in teaching and learning, Volume 2, Number 2, August 1996, published by Hawker Brownlow Education. It is reprinted with permission of John Baird, Editor of REFLECT. Queries about the article or about the journal should be directed to him.
Copyright © 1996. For uses other than personal research or study, as permitted under the Copyright Laws of your country, permission must be negotiated with the Editor of REFLECT