By: Rebecca Bromwich, Instructor, Department of Law and Legal Studies
On preparing for a new teaching term as the summer of 2016 turns into fall, I have a new challenge. Perhaps it’s a good problem to have: I’m teaching things I have taught before. This gives me some breathing space to reflect on, and improve, what I have been doing.
On reflecting about how to incite student interest and engagement with the material, I got to thinking back to my own undergraduate experience, which began 20 years ago, before the Internet really took hold as a dominant technological means of communication, back when academic research involved actual heavy lifting, and a search for a text was a physical thing taking place first in a card catalogue, then in the sweaty space of muggy, yet dusty stacks. I am not the first, and certainly not alone, in articulating concerns about the uses of technology and in particular social media by students.
Perhaps it is because I am getting older that I feel a profound sense of nostalgia for the golden afternoons of the first fall of my undergraduate degree, where I spent time reading and napping, lying on the still green grass of the campus where I studied, while yellow leaves swirled gently on the autumnal breeze.
When I took my first undergraduate degree, I read many texts: textbooks, treatises, novels, monographs, excerpts and articles. I read them all on paper, not on a screen, and I read many of them outside. However, out of all of them the one that stands out most is the book I read on the first day of my post-secondary studies, sitting outside.
Because I was interested in human evolutionary history, I had picked up a copy of Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape: A Zoological Study of the Human Animal (1967). I read it all in one sitting. I wrote longhand notes. And, despite the fact it has been debated and debunked, I still remember this book in great detail. About any and all of the assigned readings I did in my undergraduate years, I remember much less. I think I remember the Morris book because I was interested in it, and because I read it without interruption, while otherwise at rest.
My disproportionately detailed recall of this one text makes me wonder about ways in which the combination of physical rest, even sleep, and intellectual exertion, are somehow crucial to learning. As recent studies have shown, shutting out electronic distractions, and even writing longhand, can help us acquire and retain information, as well as cognitively process analysis, better.
Scroll forward 20 years and I am teaching undergraduate students in a world filled with laptops, where each of us has access to the electronic equivalent of the library of Alexandria at our fingertips, and is in constant contact with our peers and family members via the hive minds of social media and text messaging. Messaging happens quickly. People live tweet conferences – not just undergrads, but academics.
I’m no Luddite. I participate actively, even avidly, in the world of social media. I tweet; I blog; I love to do research online. And yet, in my teaching, in recalling my most cherished moments of undergraduate learning, I’ve come to think that the learning came from the creation of space and rest, and silence, without interruptions, all of which are anathema to our socially mediated, rapid-fire electronic world.
This thinking has prompted me to encourage students to turn off their devices when studying, to really carve out time to sit in silence, to allocate time to read an entire text without tweeting about it mid-stream. In consequence, I’ve made a commitment to myself for this term to set time aside in lectures for laptops to be closed, no matter how large the lecture hall, and for face-to-face communication to take place. And I am committed to encouraging students to read without interruptions, preferably outside.