Understanding Today’s Students, 2

Part 2 in the Series: Implications for Our Teaching

Technology as part of life

“Growing up in an always-connected cloud-based environment of data, friends, and entertainment is what distinguishes [them] from generations before them.”¹

For students in the iGen generation, technology has been simply part of their daily lives. More specifically, the onset of the smartphone in 2007 and the relatively easy access to information have shaped their experiences.

As a result, the following are familiar: uninterrupted connectedness, easy access to information and answers, instant results, quick and constant feedback, shortcuts (“Cheating and hacking are considered brilliant…”²), and infrequent in-person social interactions.

Erica McWilliam’s “Teaching Gen Z” has a fascinating section contrasting Freddie Mercury’s (singular, charismatic) 1985 Live-Aid performance with the more current Blue Man Group performances (“playfulness,” “relentless … activity, with multiple things going on at any one time and multiple identities performing in multiple ways, including the audience”) as illustrative of the shift in what engages this generation’s attention — “’hands on, minds on, plugged in.’”³

Their technology-infused lives have many implications for our teaching, some of which I describe below and in subsequent posts in this series. These students don’t necessarily want technology to dominate their learning environments, but since it’s been part of their regular experience, its absence is noticeable—especially when it would facilitate or improve learning.

Being protected & becoming risk averse

Much is written about iGen’s expectation for “safety.” Their youth is largely spent as “’home bodies,’ staying close to their digital gadgets and … their parents,” spending time in the unsafe outside only when it’s structured and coordinated by adults, and “stay[ing] dependent and vulnerable well into childhood.”⁴ The frequent awards, rewards, and congratulations to promote self-esteem in their earlier years (similar to the previous generation) reinforces and extends this expectation of protection, safety, and risk-avoidance. As a result, they have far less experience with alcohol, drugs, driving, and sex than previous generations of students.

When they come to college, then, these students aren’t used to discomfort, uncertainty, failure, and struggle. They prefer “’low challenge’ learning tasks leading to ‘easy success’ over ‘high challenge’ tasks that demand intellectual risk-taking.”⁵ This doesn’t mean they’re lazy. It doesn’t mean they can’t be challenged. It does mean we can’t simply teach challenge and difficulty the same way we always have and expect the same result.

Chunked time, not narrative time

“Learning activity … moves beyond the singular, silent individual working routinely, to engaging with communities of shared interests which are themselves liable to fragment and/or merge with others. … learning action is more sideways, slippery and short-term than vertical, linear and lasting.”⁶

iGen’s experience of time is punctuated. Episodic. Chunked. Staccato. As McWilliam suggests in the quote above, in learning and other activities, they dip in, skip over, engage, disengage, and reengage. They multitask (or task-switch, actually), and they move–and move on–quickly.

In Present Shock, Douglass Rushkoff describes this experience of time as part of “presentism” in which “Everything is live, real-time, and always on” because the past and future are out of mind. It’s about being “’of the moment’” rather than “in the moment.”

Rushkoff would also point out that this chunking of time predates the internet in a different kind of surfing: “the remote control changed the way we relate to television, its commercials, and the story structure on which both depended.” A consequence is “narrative collapse”: we’ve lost the old stories and narratives, which are longer and more labor-intensive, and which frame time as past-present-future. But a new kind of narrative, Rushkoff says, provides meaning now:

“Computer games may, in fact, be popular culture’s first satisfactory answer to the collapse of the narrative.” Gamers have taken on narrative authority: “Instead of finding new storytellers, they become the equivalent of the storytellers themselves.” Computer and videogames “engage with players in an open-ended fashion, they communicate through experience instead of telling, they invite players into the creative process,” and they are infinite without rules, “boundaries,” and “fixed endings.”⁷

Class periods focused on a single activity—especially if the students are passive—will struggle to motivate this generation. Varied in-class practice and participation (e.g., interactive games, collaborative activities, individual and team challenges) are more likely to motivate them.

Here’s also where the notion of multimodal presentation comes into play for me. Integrating visual elements and activities when relevant and possible will help break up singular modes of communicating with students and enhance what they can take in by dual-coding. It will also help keep these students motivated, engaged, and in somewhat familiar territory. (Note: this does not mean they are “visual learners.” That whole idea of being a “kind of learner” who does better when we teach to their specific learning style is bogus.)

Co-Inquiry with Peers & Professors

“Faculty need to acknowledge that students possess great ideas about how teaching can be improved to increase their engagement in the classroom.””⁸

This generation’s everyday experiences also affect how they may best interact with their classmates and with us. Although they are “used to solitary research on a smartphone or computer,”⁹ purposeful, well-designed team-based and collaborative activities—especially virtual activities—will resonate with them.

McWilliam describes the “meddler in the middle” as a generation’s alternative to “guide on the side,” which was an alternative to “sage on the stage.”¹⁰ This approach to teaching is “both interactive and interventionist, positioning the teacher and student as mutually involved in assembling and dis-assembling cultural products.”¹¹ It gives students some level-appropriate choice and flexibility in their learning. It also sets up a collaborative dynamic between teacher and learner—now co-inquirers, “co-directors and co-editors”¹²—in which “the faculty is learning and doing, making mistakes, and engaging in trial and error, alongside students.”¹³

McWilliam also enumerates how model has implications for what’s considered “’good teaching’”:

“less time giving instructions and more time spent being a usefully ignorant team member in the thick of the learning action;
less time spent being a custodial risk minimiser and more time spent being an experimenter, risk-taker and learner;
less time spent being a forensic classroom auditor and more time spent being a designer, editor and assembler of high challenge tasks;
less time spent being a counsellor and ‘best buddy’ and more time spent being a collaborative critic and authentic evaluator; and,
less emphasis on grades and more emphasis on the achievement of PBs (personal bests).”¹⁴

In Part 3, I’ll describe some of what this means for “learning” for this generation.

Read Part 3.

Citations
¹ Christine Chun, Kelly Dudoit, Shirl Fujihara, Mariana Gerschenson, Ann Kennedy, Brad Koanui, Veronica Ogata, and Jeff Stearns (2016) “Teaching Generation Z at the University of Hawai’i” (available online here)
² Darla Rothman (2014) “A Tsunami of Learners Called Generation Z” (available online here)
^3-6 Erica McWilliam (2015) “Teaching Gen Z” (available online here)
⁷ Douglass Rushkoff (2013) Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
⁸ Chun et al.
⁹ Charlie Sweet, Hal Blythe, and Rusty Carpenter (2019) “Creating an iGen Pedagogy” in National Teaching and Learning Forum
^10-12 McWilliam
¹³ Chun et al.
¹⁴ McWilliam