At Berkeley, I found that the more I let my students decide for themselves what to learn, the more they learned. What they chose to learn was more valuable to them than what I might have taught. A student with severe fear of public speaking decided to give a talk to a high-school class. Every step was a struggle, but she did it. “I have learned I can conquer my fears,” she wrote.
I told a friend of mine, a German professor of journalism named Lorenz Lorenz-Mayer, about this. He told me about some independent students in his department:
They were students in the class of 2007 in our online-journalism program at Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. [They had just graduated from the German equivalent of high school.]
During their very first term as freshmen, instead of focusing on new-media projects as we expected, they started producing a kind of city magazine for students, called Darmspiegel. The name is a pun on the unsavory name of the city we work in (Darmstadt = Bowel City), and Germany’s most important newsmagazine, Der Spiegel. Darmspiegel literally means colonoscope. Another idea we couldn’t talk them out of.
Because they couldn’t afford to print their magazine they started with a pdf version. After some experience with it, they started a marketing department, acquired advertising, and successfully printed something like four more issues.
After having done this for a year and learned their lessons, they chose their next project, which was to be . . . a book. This was when the group, something like 60% of the 40 students in the class, together with some two dozen friends from other departments, asked us to make them media partners for a term project, voicing the unforgettable threat: “You can of course coerce us to do some other project, but you should reckon with the possibility that our heart will not be completely in it. If, on the other hand, we do this thing together…”
So two of our professors negotiated a compromise: It would have to be a book on Darmstadt. The outcome:
“nachts in darmstadt” turned out to be wonderful book, full of moving stories, beautiful pictures, even an oil painting on the night the bombs fell on the city at the end of WW II was painted, dedicated to become one of the illustrations. A delegation went to far north of Norway to see the midsummer sun in Trondheim, a partner city of Darmstadt. They used a Wiki to coordinate their efforts and a weblog to promote the ongoing project:
They tried several old and new forms of marketing (like nightly “guerrilla gardening”, illegally planting flowers in Darmstadt city). The book was published and — predictably — soon sold out.
Some minor projects followed, then the class had to do their obligatory 6 months of internship in different media companies. After returning, some of them majored in Public Relations, others continued Journalism, never quite reaching the prior level of productivity, as a team. Three of the group have burnt the midnight oil again (while still finishing their studies) and together with friends started a bookazine publishing house:
They’ve already published one multi-lingual magazine issue, on fashion topics (each issue is going to have a different topic), collecting and curating texts and pictures from fashion blogs:
A second issue on travel is ready for print, they have started taking preorders.
Wow! They did so much. I get the same impression I got with my students: Something powerful inside of them had been freed.
This is the main idea behind the experimental liberal arts college I attended, New College of Florida. Control over coursework leads to flourishing. Three main features facilitate this.
1. There are no grades; classes are pass/fail and students receive narrative evaluations form their professors. This lets students decide for themselves when to put forth their best efforts (no bad grades for bad or uninteresting classes).
2. Students can design their own classes if a professor agrees to sponsor.
3. Passing criteria is determined by a contract each semester that students agree to after designing it with their sponsor. E.g., passing 3/3 hard classes, passing 4/4 or 5 moderately hard classes, or passing 4/7 if the student wants breadth that semester.
The format can be taken advantage of. When it works, however, there is nothing like it. And, like me, many of my fellow alumni report being better prepared for graduate work than many of their grad school peers.
The system described in the blog post seems like it would work well for highly motivated, inquisitive students. But what about students who perhaps lack a strong work ethic and a sense of curiosity? And what about subjects that may be important to know but may not appeal to otherwise-inspired students?
Alex, I did not encounter these problems (lack of work ethic, lack of curiosity). Every one of my students had something they wanted to learn about. As for subjects “important to know” but not appealing, in psychology statistics is one of those subjects. I think the problem is professors wanting to appear scientific. At Berkeley, at least, few psychology majors want to do research. They go on to law school, become high school teachers, and so on. Statistics isn’t actually important for them to know.