(cross-posted at the Stanford CMEMS)
How much do we know about the students we teach? How much
should we know? Our optimistically named "Spring" semester has just
started at the University of Iowa, and this semester I asked my students to
complete an online pre-course survey (through Surveygizmo.com) to find out more
about their goals, their preparation, and their reasons for taking my Milton
class. Some of the results were really surprising, others were disheartening,
and all of them challenged me to rethink my syllabus and my approach.
Which raises a question: literary scholars like Franco Moretti have proclaimed that the age of "big data" will change the way we do
literary research -- but should it also change the way we teach? It strikes me
that the typical university English classroom is in many ways a data poor
environment. Or rather, it is an environment rich in data that we never
quantify: we constantly gauge our students' reactions -- we even collect their
evaluations at the end of the semester -- but then after gaining an
impressionistic sense of those evaluations, they usually go into a drawer.
So what do you learn
from surveying an incoming class like mine and then crunching the numbers?
In this case, that most of my students (63%) feel their
research skills are their weakest academic area, as well as that 51% of them
have never had a university class in early modern literature, including
Shakespeare.
And then there's this:
Remember, these are mostly English majors, in Iowa City, the only UNESCO City of Literature in
the United States, a place where we erect sculptures of books and literally have
poems engraved into the sidewalks. Yet a third of my students read books for
less than 30 minutes per day -- and this led to a frank and, hopefully,
productive discussion with them about how they'll have to change their reading
habits to do well in a class on Milton.
Now for another unexpected result, but one that will be less
likely to depress your spirits:
When asked what would improve the English courses they've
taken so far, more students said "More theory discussion" (34.3%)
than any other category -- although "more discussion of close
reading" was a close second. I think the conventional wisdom in my
department is that students have lost interest in theory (after all, it's
pretty tough to digest Heidegger in 20 minutes a day!). But that response was
strong enough to revise my syllabus: as I told my students, the critical
history of Paradise Lost is in some
sense the history of critical theory, and it is a history I'll be happy to
explore with them.
I know that many of us probably consider teaching to be a
bit like dancing or conducting an orchestra -- an art exempt from the age of
big data. Of course, we used to think of baseball like that too, before Billy
Beane showed what could be done with sabermetrics. And this makes me wonder what might be
gained, and lost, if we mined our classrooms for data in the same way we're
beginning to mine the archive.
