Teaching Broader and Deeper thinking; my reflections.

As I was sitting in my first class for the year, I was feeling a little confused. It was a third year Media studies class, media research practice, covering things that I thought were common knowledge by now. From the title of the unit as well as the general theme of the readings in previous subjects up until this point, I thought we would be looking at different research or theories from media scholars and sociologists. Yet here we were talking about qualitative and quantitative data. If I remember correctly, the recommended reading of the first week was related to conducting proper research, avoiding bias and statistics. I had to take a step back, having previously attempted and failed a Bachelors degree in Science, I can at least say that I am somewhat familiar with the basic principles for conducting sound or proper research. Perhaps then the main audience for this topic wasn’t me, but those third year almost-graduates who hadn’t been exposed to such concepts.

Looking back on it, the unit was meant to equip Arts students (media majors especially) with the tools to present clear arguments and present evidence to support them. This particular subject may have been preparation for postgraduate study, but even for those not considering hardcore research it taught Arts students to consider numbers and data. The important thing for me, was introducing students to different types of knowledge and broadening their own ways of thinking, making students better thinkers. This was not the first time that students had been presented with different styles of thinking and encouraged to evolve their ways of thinking. When discussing internet and cloud technologies students often encounter two clear opinions; technological advancement is all bad or technological advancement is all good. Students engaging in further reading encounter opinions that try to mix both utopian and dystopian arguments; as well as some that say the whole dichotomy is too simplistic to actually get anywhere. The issue of white privilege in technological advancement and different research had even been brought up in class although, unfortunately, not too as much detail as it deserves.

Many universities in Australia have realised the importance of providing their students with wider, more comprehensive skill sets. This is evidenced by compulsory ‘breadth’ units at certain universities; where students must select a minimum of subjects form outside their current faculty as part of their degree. This is great, although the compulsory units can be problematic for course mapping. Furthermore there may even be a tendency to treat the two types of learning as separate entities; only recalling on analytic knowledge for compulsory statistics units. It had me reminiscing of a unit from my previous science studies, the lecturers were trying to get science students to think more about things like reflective writing, copyrights, patenting and economics. In the defence of the course, any science student exhibiting such skills would be a pretty well-rounded, highly employable scientist. However, I always felt myself a little at-odds or overwhelmed by the different things they were trying to teach me. As a student who hadn’t thought to consider these concepts, I felt that there was a little bit too much assumed knowledge on behalf of the students. Perhaps that was the main difference between my first experience and the later, described in the first paragraph. Our media lecturer taught us the fundamentals from the bottom up, which we then used to embellish our report writing. My first experience with such a unit, assumed us to have a basic knowledge of a wide variety of subjects and then expected us to engage with quite advanced problems.

There’s no doubt that it’s important to equip students with a wide range of skills and teach them to appreciate different ways of thinking. However, as I have tried to convey, there are right and wrong ways to approach the situation. Teachers and lecturers should work to make sure that their students understand the basics of the specific knowledge being taught, before delving into the implementations.