Teaching the Students We Have, Not the Students We Wish We Had

Natalya Balnova for The Chronicle

Today’s college students are radically different from the students occupying college classrooms even a decade ago. The expansion of education that propelled widespread positive change through American communities in the 20th century has reached beyond high school, and more people than ever before understand the importance of postsecondary education in all its forms.

For broader participation to lead to positive outcomes — for example, the completion of degrees without huge debt burdens — students must have good experiences in the classroom. This is especially important yet incredibly difficult as the new economics of college are compromising the time, energy, and money that students and many of their professors have to spend on quality learning.

These are the core challenges of college today — and yet they are too often ignored. Instead, symptoms of those problems dominate air time, as the stereotype persists of “academically adrift” “snowflakes” “coddled” by their universities. Consider the recent essay by Nancy Bunge, “Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers. It Hurts Students,” which takes on student evaluations. Bunge contends the “unearned arrogance encouraged by the heavy reliance on student evaluations helps produce passive, even contemptuous students who undermine the spirit of the class and lower its quality for everyone.”

Her enemy appears to be sites like the often-lamented Rate My Professors, but her piece also attacks the students themselves, and reinforces a set of assertions largely drawn from one influential yet extremely narrow study, Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. The limited learning lamented by the authors is said to be linked to insufficiently challenging instructors, and according to Bunge those instructors are not demanding more of their students because they want to get good grades. She cites a Chronicle survey in which faculty members claim that students are “harder to teach” these days. The overall narrative suggests we should feel sorry for the faculty. If only they could have more-engaged students to teach.

There is an alternative explanation. Today’s college students are the most overburdened and undersupported in American history. More than one in four have a child, almost three in four are employed, and more than half receive Pell Grants but are left far short of the funds required to pay for college. Rather than receiving help from their parents to pay for college, even the youngest college students often have to use their loans to pay their parents’ bills.

Whereas previous generations could turn to food stamps for help, today’s students have to first work long hours to qualify for the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Similarly, students years ago could quickly talk to an adviser for help, but now they may be sharing that adviser with more than 500 other students. “Kids these days” aren’t kids at all. But this fact is neglected by many researchers and by too many faculty members who think of their own experiences in college rather than their students’ when crafting teaching plans.

We agree that Rate My Professors and similar efforts to assess students’ experiences with the faculty are flawed. There are extreme inequities reflected in the results, and sexism, racism, ableism, and homophobia have a direct impact on review, promotion, and tenure processes for instructors at colleges. But that does not mean that students, nor student evaluations, are to blame.

We need more, not fewer, ways to listen for the voices of students reflecting on education. We need more, not fewer, ways to include students in conversations about the future of teaching and learning in college. These conversations cannot begin by sending a signal to students that their voices don’t matter.

As Michelle Falkoff, an associate professor at Northwestern University, wrote this year, we should “take steps to assess teaching more holistically,” which means more conversations about the unique work of higher-education pedagogy at institutions of all shapes and sizes. That discussion needs to include a critical examination of our tools, what they afford, who they exclude, how they’re monetized, and what pedagogies they already include. But it also requires that we begin with a consideration of what we value, the kinds of relationships we want to develop with students, why we gather together in places like universities, and how humans learn.

In other words, the work of higher education — as with all of education — has to begin with a deep respect for students. They are not mere data points, not just rows in an online grade book. Students are human first. And so are their teachers. The exploitation of adjuncts, erosions to tenure, and the overall dismal working conditions throughout much of higher education contributes to faculty frustration and anger — which is now spilling over to affect students.

College has become the place America loves to hate, and college professors and students are the unwitting victims. It doesn’t require much cynicism to recognize this as part of a political plan to destabilize or even reverse the democratization of higher education.

But we can do better. As educators, we need to lead the way and design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging, and compassionate. And it requires that institutions find more creative ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching. This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is founder of the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice and professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University. She is the author of Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Jesse Stommel is executive director of the division of teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington, and a co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy (Hybrid Pedagogy, 2018). Next summer they will teach a course at Digital Pedagogy Lab aimed at helping educators rethink their pedagogical approaches in light of the challenges facing today’s students.

Correction (12/14/2018, 1:14 p.m.): This essay originally misspelled a scholar’s first name. She is Josipa Roksa, not Jospia. The essay has been updated to reflect this correction.