The Good Student Changes the Good Course
I call my courses meta-courses. I use the term to help me remember what I want to accomplish as a teacher.
When I think of the word “class,” I think of classification. I don’t want to define and sort rote knowledge and methods. Rather, I want to open minds to possibility. I prefer the term “course” because a course is a path, a journey, an exercise track designed to build strength and flexibility over time. I think of my courses as obstacle courses.
The prefix “meta-” means self-referential. A metafilm is a film about filmmaking. A metaplay is “the play within the play.” Metacognition is thinking about thinking—and so a metacourse, to me, is a lesson about lessons.
At the undergraduate college level, but in some high school courses as well, students should begin to understand the education process itself. Instead of just accepting the ideas of teachers and textbooks, students should recognize the curriculum, question it, and in some cases, take it over.
Students taking a metacourse should achieve another level of awareness about their own growth.
Questioning the text has always been an English class lesson. In Great Books courses, teachers encourage scrutiny of both the unreliable narrators and authors of fiction. In high school history and science classes, we learn about sources, and citations, and which knowledge to trust during research. In university seminars, class debate drives us to hear many perspectives and interrogate the authorities of multiple texts and voices.
None of this has to translate into thoughtful students, though. Until the Web, these were academic—meaning mostly theoretical—exercises. Rarely did questioning authority in a classroom look at the lesson itself or the world outside. Rarely did these exercises present an urgent challenge to students.
If they had, we wouldn’t find ourselves so unprepared for the present moment. Now sources are something citizens scrutinize on news aggregates like Google News everyday. Deciding which morning headline you trust is as common as coffee.
The Internet’s interactivity has made the public more aware and skeptical of narratives in their everyday lives. This is a triumph for Great Books courses and college seminars, but it doesn’t feel much like growth in practice because this greater consciousness has polarized institutions and media and students.
If the culture and its leaders can’t provide new narratives about identity or morality in challenging times, then groups and individuals will feel the burden falls to them to preserve their traditional foundations.
We react to the Web more than we take action with it. Our greater skepticism has produced more conspiracy than science. This is why education needs to grow beyond the “question authority” model.
The only way to successfully question authority is to question your own authority first. I teach to understand how courses can gradually give authority over to students, so responsibility comes with it. That’s what a good meta-course will do—turn students into conscientious authors. It will put our challenges into their hands.
I wrote about the students who expect my courses to be checklists of facts to memorize and actions to mirror. I wrote about my use of experimental assignments and multiple drafts to encourage students to build their own objectives and best practices.
Modern advances from CRISPR gene editing to artificial intelligence to the Internet itself call for a more intelligent and imaginative student body and citizenry that can develop their own inquiry, their own objectives, and their own courses of study.
My courses are challenging, improvisational, user-unfriendly experiences because that’s what builds the necessary muscles.