The lecture has been a tried-and-true tradition of the collegiate experience for as long as anyone can remember.
No, really. When the first universities were established in the Middle Ages, they arranged pupils in benches (or sometimes on the floor) before a master behind a podium who, well… lectured. Even as far back as ancient Sumer and the birth of writing, the bright-eyed Akkadian pupils sat, stylus and clay tablet in hand, to take dictation from a master as part of their education.
It is 2021, however, and as with everything else in the current year, some people are reevaluating whether or not lecturing is really cut-out for the modern world. I recently came across an article by two gentlemen from Coventry University in England that explained why “leaving lectures behind makes sense” for their university. Some of the pedagogy-jargon made a bit of sense, like:
At Coventry University, we have instead opted for a “community first” approach to teaching and learning. The learning experiences we are striving to create for our students require them to actively participate in the construction of their own understanding. We know that when we employ learners as active co-creators of their learning, it builds opportunities not just for the deeper absorption of knowledge but also its application in real or close-to-real scenarios, delivering against work-readiness needs for their futures.
Ironic that I would have to amend the lads at Coventry on this point, but in Queen’s English what they are saying is that lecturing to students doesn’t facilitate the kind of impactful, lasting learning that hands-on instruction does. They go on to give the example of a module-based class in marketing.
That’s all well and good, but I would argue that the problem with lectures is not that there is anything wrong with them in practice, but that we moderns are just particularly mediocre lecturers and lecture attendees. The problem with the lecture is not pedagogical, it’s cultural. As this 2016 article from The Atlantic points out, yes, lectures may take a back seat to active learning in terms of effectiveness—but, rather than blame the lecture itself, take a look at the lecturers. Along with the decline in good lecturing, Grosse-Loh notes, is a decline in public speaking and rhetoric skills:
It is probably not a coincidence that as teaching public speaking fell out of favor, so too did the quality of the average college lecture itself. Many college lectures today are deemed dull—and with good reason. In 2014, in a highly controversial move that infuriated faculty, researchers for Harvard’s Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) secretly photographed lectures to assess attendance and concluded that attendance declined over the course of the semester by nearly half.
In earlier times, an integral part of university education was learning rhetoric, one of the three pillars of the time-honored basic liberal arts curriculum called the trivium. Nowadays, fewer college professors actually have a dedicated education in oratory and public speaking, and sometimes it shows. (Not the UTM professors, of course, you’re all fantastic). A lot of that is because, frankly, public speaking is a difficult subject to teach. As the Atlantic story points out, it requires small class sizes, oftentimes means to videotape and review student performance, and a lot of work on an individual basis for already-busy professors.
But you can’t just pin all the blame on the poor professors; students themselves can’t get off scot-free. While a boring lecture is lamentable, you might think students would at least attempt to wring water from the stone, so to speak, given they are paying thousands of dollars to attend these classes. Furthermore, we have never had as many distractions as we do today, with more handheld computers of various shapes and sizes in circulation than at any other point in human history. Do you think everyone carrying around a computer in their pocket 24/7 has anything to do with a student body too distracted to profit from an hour and a half lecture? You betcha.
There are certainly subjects where lecturing all the time just doesn’t make sense: like engineering or anatomy. But then again, the lecture is a time-honored tool of instruction for a reason. I don’t believe people from the 14th to the 20th century were stupid enough to keep giving lectures if people weren’t learning anything. There is wisdom in following a beaten path, so to speak. We may just have to reconfigure ourselves and our expectations of what it takes to attain an education.
