Death of Expertise?
I am thinking about the flipped classroom. Last week a teacher asked me to reflect on the challenges I encountered with flipping my classes. Challenges? We sat in a group with other teachers charged with trying new teaching methods. I answered the teacher's question. I said, although I flip parts of my course, I don't flip all of it. I found the flipped classroom fun, but flipping all of it was like erasing my expertise from the class as a content professional. I spent a lot of time becoming an expert in Interpersonal Communication, and Performance, so turning over the class to discussions with students, peer-to-peer teaching, team activities rather than lectures, felt like the death of expertise.
Tom Nichols' book, The Death of Expertise: the campaign against established knowledge and why it matters, reminds me of our need for balance in education and how the digital revolution (social media, and the internet) have helped to foster a cult of ignorance. That doesn't mean we throw out the baby with the bathwater. It means we need more rationality and political discourse, not less in the classroom. Flipping a classroom is not replacing the teacher with YouTube or audio PowerPoint lectures, and WebMD, or Wikihow. So many people think they can understand a complex topic with only a quick trip through a short reading or scanning Wikipedia. Average people believe themselves to be on equal intellectual footing with professors, doctors, and scholars. We have reached a moment in time where diversity means all voices demand equal consideration and any claim to the contrary is elitism. The educated are not better than the uneducated, but knowledge is a core value. Knowledge helps us live longer and raise our quality of life. Expertise is mastering knowledge and being wise about who we are.
As I work on flipping my classes I consider why the lack of expertise frustrates me. The increasingly democratic dissemination of information is creating a paradox. Rather than producing an educated public with all of the avenues of information, the system is creating an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement and distrust experts. Many politicians attack the intellectual as if intelligence is ruining America or controlling them. From attacks by "birthers", to antivaccine activism to getting our information on foreign cultures through restaurant attendance, we see the attacks on expertise weakening education. Look up the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which uninformed or incompetent citizens are unlikely to recognize their own lack of knowledge or incompetence.
It would be easy for me to pop-in YouTube on my Canvas (online learning system) rather than video record my lectures, but if I just guide the students to YouTube for answers then they will go there for all of their answers. YouTube will be a short cut to thinking. Thank goodness we have education and thank goodness students want to learn. It is our responsibility we teach them as experts in both content and design. We must remain content experts and pedagogical experts without being lazy and sacrificing one over the other.
Posted via Blogaway
Well said Kirt. With today's access to information one would assume that we would become more knowledgeable but learning how to think seems to be a key element and constant quest.
ReplyDelete