Two weeks ago, in honor of Labor Day, I wrote about honoring the labor of teaching and how we can manage the ‘scope creep’ of increased expectations. We looked at the ‘scope of practice,’ a tool to make sense of where we can draw healthy boundaries and articulate our responsibilities for supporting students and their success. We considered the role of a ‘good enough’ orientation towards teaching: teaching so that students feel supported but learn to navigate the inevitable challenges of learning (or, as Sarah Rose Cavanagh calls it, compassionate challenge).
This week, we shift our focus to honoring the labor of learning. Just as teaching is work, learning is, too. Just as instructors navigate increasing demands on their time and attention, our students find themselves managing economic realities and academic challenges: it’s not uncommon for a full-time student to be working 10 – 20 hours a week (or more) while managing a full course load as well. While many of us have heard the maxim that, while in college, ‘school is your job,’ #adulting often complicates this. So, does this mean that we should lower our expectations? Not necessarily. Honoring the labor of learning does involve an acknowledgement of competing priorities, but it also involves being willing to challenge students (again, compassionately).
“We all need to be talking more about time.”
Honoring the labor of learning involves talking about time. In the words of Dr. Betsy Barre, the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University (and, just as related to this column, developer of the Course Workload Estimator): “We all need to be talking more about time.” What does she mean by this? In part, we need to have conversations with our students about the time and effort expected of them in our courses. (Note: You may already do this. If so, great!).
- At the course level, if students are expected to do x hours of work outside of class for every y hours in class, how exactly do you want students to use that time? As a piano teacher, I recognize that the request to practice hours a day needs to be accompanied by clear instructions on how to structure that time.
- At the assignment level, being clear on the time you expect work to take can be helpful: if students are taking multiple hours and work you assumed would take 15 – 20 minutes (or vice versa), there’s a misunderstanding there somewhere. This cycles back to the previous point, how is the expected time to be utilized?
Rethinking expectations, redefining rigor
‘Talking about time’ is a great place to start, but it’s also worth taking a moment to interrogate where these ideas about how much time students should spend originate. As noted above, it’s clear that these ideas come from a time when students weren’t working so much outside of the classroom. Beyond that, while there’s certainly a correlation between time, effort, and outcome, this (again) doesn’t answer the question of how that time is best spent. The ‘10,000 hours rule’ (mercifully debunked here and here) is often used as a shorthand to say that ‘you get out what you put in.’ Expecting learners to ‘put in their 10,000 hours’ without much in the way of guidance or structure (let alone meaning or enjoyment) risks turning off students before they really explore their potential. (And to anyone who’d say that the ‘really committed’ students/artists would wade through the muck, I’d say that you’re entitled to your opinion but clearly neglecting the role of joy in persistence). Rather than a joyless slog, the research that was simplified into the 10,000 hour rule focused on ‘deliberate practice,’ or structured, guided, and often supervised development.
One challenge in rethinking these expectations is the extent to which our expectations about student time and effort are bound with notions of rigor. Rigor is often defined as having high expectations or standards. As Kevin Gannon points out in a feature for the Chronicle of Higher Ed (Link: Redefinition of Rigor), we can make a simple distinction between logistical rigor and intellectual rigor. Logistical rigor focuses on quantity: the amount of hours we expect a student to practice, the number of pages of reading we assign, etc. Intellectual rigor focuses on quality: are students challenged in their thinking, trying new approaches, or questioning their assumptions? These are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they one and the same. Honoring the labor of learning means getting clear on how much quantity is necessary to achieve the quality of learning we hope to achieve.
Engaging Purpose, Authenticity, and Meaning
So, if honoring the labor of learning means focusing on quality (intellectual rigor) just as much as quantity (logistical rigor), how do we do that? A place to start is in being transparent about purpose. When we don’t connect with the purpose of work we ask students to do, we risk them inferring that there is NO purpose. Lost in much of the discourse (re: moral panic) over AI and academic integrity (re: cheating) is that students’ reasoning often points to one culprit: a sense of some work being less important (re: busywork). Engaging with purpose (as we did in a discussion of transparency, featuring Unicorse, the world’s most annoying unicorn) is a first step towards making assignments more authentic, meaningful, and, well, purposeful.
What makes assignments authentic? Authentic assignments often have an authentic audience. Whereas much schoolwork has an audience of one (the teacher), authentic assignments ask us to address a public audience, out there in the ‘real world.’ This can have the effect of raising the stakes, but it can also increase meaning. Rather than another exercise or assignment, students practice putting their knowledge and skills out into the world. Meaning can also come from real autonomy (re: choice). The Meaningful Writing Project, a study turned book, found that students’ most meaningful assignments involved choices of topic, flexibility in format, while also being guided by a faculty mentor. Freedom and structure aren’t mutually exclusive (just as challenge and compassion aren’t).
Conclusion
Honoring the respective labors of teaching and learning is not a contest. The labor of teaching is just as real as the labor of learning, and we can learn to value both as we seek out meaningful, authentic learning experiences while honoring the needs of faculty to prioritize their well-being. Just as compassionate challenge is possible, just as rigor can seek challenge without logistical overload, honoring the labors of teaching and learning involves acknowledging the challenges of both while still asking students to do challenging (and meaningful) work. This is how we honor the labor of learning.