Taken
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classroom
Ethnography in a 21st Century Classroom
What
teaching settings look like today
By
Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
School
of English
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Sunday,
March 27, 2016
Post
244
What does it feel like going into a
higher education institution classroom nowadays? How much has it changed over
the last 150 years? Has the number of learners per classroom increased or
decreased? There are indeed many more questions to ask and try to find an
answer, but the fact is that today’s classrooms structured have not changed much
and that the conformation of the students per class is radically diverse.
Prof. Michael Wesch (2010) has made a great point
in what is happening with the structure of classrooms today and what is going
on with the conformation of groups in higher education. Wesch was indeed
working on an ethnography of what higher education looked like in college
across the USA back in 2010. With the many advancements in technology, one
wonders what the real future of education is; when one enters a university
classroom, though there are some technological gatgets used by the professor,
how much has the transfer of knowledge really changed from the 19th
Century to what happens now in this second decade of the 21st
Century? As Hardesty (2013) pointed out,
the real learning takes place “during periods of
study, lab work and homework,” not in lectures within the classroom.
Prof. Wesch’s (2010) students participating in the creation
of his video on college student ethnography have made important points
regarding their lives in the classroom. Not all readings provided to higher
education students are relevant to their lives
(Wesch, 2010). As someone who has been an active learner for many years,
I sympathize with this comment since we were assigned readings that were not
relevant to our development of skills and competencies to better perform our
jobs. Besides, student reading habits are now very much different if compared
to people who studied at a university some 30 years ago. Based on Prof. Wesch’s
(2010) Introduction to Cultural Anthropology students (at Kansas State
University), they will be reading from some 2300 webpages and about 1281
FaceBook profiles in a year. And as pointed out by Turkle (2012) when
discussing how psycholigically powerful technology is today, learners will be
much more engaged in their social networking than the class content that is not
relevant to their lives. As teaching professionals we will continue to see how
these technological gagets “can negatively affect concentration, communication
and sleep, or increase fear of missing out, procrastination and stress” (Busch,
2016).
If we can extrapolate what is being
depicted by Wesch’s students to our local teaching contexts, our education
systems need to start a revolution. If we continue with our current educational
practices, more and more students will not benefit from courses or majors that
are meant to prepare them for their futures. No doubt, our learners in class
are doing much more engaging tasks while attending class. What can be done to
revert this and help them develop the skills and competencies they need to
become successful professionals? This is a question all of us need to answer
depending on what is happening in our countries and cultures.
References
Busch, B. (2016, March 8). Fomo, stress and sleeplessness: are smartphones bad for students? The Guardian .
Hardesty, L. (2013, March 6). Higher-ed leaders meet to discuss future of online education. Retrieved from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/edx-summit-0306.html
Turkle, S. (2012, February). Connected, but alone? (TED.Com) Retrieved from TED.Com: http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together#t-152139 [Video]
Wesch, M. (2010, December 17). A Vision of Students Today. Retrieved from Wimp.Com: http://www.wimp.com/studentstoday/ [Video]
Sunday, March 27, 2016
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