Part 3 in the Series: Implications for Our Teaching
Yesterday, I described some overarching experiences and the resulting traits found in this generation of college students called iGen. Today, I’m going to consider what learning might look like for these students.
From Learning by Consuming & Reproducing to Learning by Applying & Producing
In many ways, they’ve been educated in consuming or reproducing what’s already known:
“With moral panics around declining literacy levels and with policy settings fixed on standardised curriculum and testing, young people could be forgiven for presuming that learning is about passing tests or pleasing parents and teachers. Moreover, students can be a most powerful force for conservatism once they have been enculturated into schooling as passive consumers: ‘Just give us the 10 main points and we will serve them back to you in exams!’”1
Their learned approach to school—“allocating most of their effort to graded assignments, seeking information about the grading criteria and trying to negotiate over instructors’ grading decisions”—make sense when considering these experiences.2
Now, although they’re accustomed to quick answers and shortcuts, they want to get beyond what’s already known or “’Ungoogle-able’”3 and do something beyond what’s known–or beyond what they know. This may come out as the following:
- frustration or boredom with memorization, worksheets, anything with a hint of reviewing “old” knowledge,
- “intolerance for being lectured to or talked at,”4
- “prefer[ence for] engaging with multi-functional gadgets and with websites, apps, and social media outlets that invite them to be interactive creators, disseminators and evaluators of ‘stuff’ – of texts, sounds, images and any combination of these.”5
Mike Neary’s notion of students as producers rather than consumers of knowledge is a way of thinking about the possibilities that directly responds to this change in how students want to experience learning. Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching has embraced this approach as its annual theme for the last year years.
Learning as Play: A (The?) Skill of the 21st Century
“The ability to play may be the single most important skill to develop for the twenty-first century.”6
In “New Learning Environments for the 21st Century,” John Seely Brown describes play as “a questing disposition,” which is “learning to be” and not “learning about,” “innovation” and “not typical problem solving.” It is the “ability to engage in experimentation.”7
The play of iGen is embodied by what an ethnography by sociologists Horst, Herr-Stephenson, and Robinson8 describes as three different “genres of participation” in “different social groups and cultural affiliations” and in new media. These three types of participation (which became the title of the broader book9) are in the table to the right.
These familiar activities “could,” say Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, “frame a progression of learning” or even a New Culture of Learning, as suggested in their book’s title.11 What might this look like?
| “hanging out” |
| the social spaces & activities of getting together (online, offline), often with friends, sharing information and stories, and “work-arounds, back channels, and multitasking” |
| “messing around” |
| “fortuitous searching” or “looking around,” “experimentation and play,” finding new times and spaces for these activities |
| “geeking out” |
| growing “expertise and geek cred,” “rewriting the rules” and other limitations, and “having what it takes” within a “highly social and engaged…community of expertise” not necessarily made up of friends but mostly with peers with similar interests10 |
- We would “re-imagine the learning process as one in which our students … experience the pleasure of the rigour of complex thinking through serious play.”12
- We would develop learning environments where students–and where we!–can be “curious, energetic, creative, dynamic, synergistic, imaginative and fearless in the face of an unpredictable, competitive, fast-paced, technologically-demanding, emergent world.”13
- Our courses would “[engage] in ‘serious play’ with slippery concepts across and beyond traditional disciplines.”14 For example, a class that’s built around the question,
“‘How would you explain plastics to Henry the Eighth?’ moves both the History teacher and the Science teacher away from their traditional turf. It is valuable not only for the fact that it is ‘Ungoogle-able’, but also because there is no one correct answer. And its value lies in the space it creates for imagining and creating as well as for investigating both the properties of plastics and Tudor times. This sort of play is predicated on holding incompatible ideas together to create a third unanticipated space or idea.”15
We might thus think of teaching and learning as the joint pursuit of creative complexity.
But really, this is just a start. So much more work is to be done on how we can expand our approaches to teaching and learning to draw on the strengths of this generation of students.
In Part 4, I’ll offer some ideas for how we can address their experience gaps and faulty expectations.
Read Part 4.
Citations
1 Erica McWilliam, “Teaching Gen Z” (2015), available online here
2 Rebecca D. Cox (2009) The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another
3-5 McWilliam
6-7 John Seely Brown (2005) “New Learning Environments for the 21st Century” (available online here)
8 Heather A. Horst, Becky Herr-Stephenson, and Laura Robinson (2010) “Media Ecologies” in Ito, et al.
9 Mizuko Ito, Sonja Baumer, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Rachel Cody, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Heather A. Horst, Patricia G. Lange, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Z. Martínez, C. J. Pascoe, Dan Perkel, Laura Robinson, Christo Sims, Lisa Tripp (2010) Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out
10 Horst, Herr-Stephenson, and Robinson
11 Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change
12 McWilliam
13 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)
14-15 McWilliam
Featured image credit: Napina Biceps Icon Free – Bicep Png
Nancy L. Chick 