Over the past year, most campuses have had to confront the impact of ChatGPT on the classroom, particularly on student learning and submission of assignments. Teachers are scrambling to modify their syllabi to lay out policies to ensure no plagiarism occurs. There is not
The strategies students use to engage with and learn material are crucial in any course. The course may be well organized and delivered brilliantly, but instructors can’t control how students interact with the material outside of class. For years, scientists (and a shout-out to
Peter Filene, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that “teaching is only as successful as the learning it produces.” Students bring a certain set of expectations, personalities ,and learning dynamics with them at the beginning of
Author’s note: I started this essay when my son graduated from high school. He is now a college senior. (Procrastination is a problem I need to deal with one of these days.) I publish it now so that readers may share it with the college
“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius.”
—Aristotle, Poetics
“Gen Ed is crap.”
—Student, senior exit survey
General
What if a student was having trouble understanding an assignment, and they asked a smart friend to help them? This person had not taken the class but was able to get the student started on the assignment or at least unpack the instructions a
There are more than 2,000 islands along the coast of Maine, 200 of which are in the Penobscot Bay. My island, one of the few that is publicly connected to the mainland, is a 20-minute ferry ride shore to shore. We also have a
Experiential learning is “the process whereby knowledge is created through transformation of experience” (Kolb, 1984, p. 38). The benefits of experiential learning include increasing student engagement, supporting various learning styles, and fostering the link between theory and practice.
Shifting from traditional educational approaches can be
My upper-level course on writing in the natural sciences was filled with technical writing or communication majors developing and honing their skills in writing, presentation, visual communication, and user experience strategies. Most had limited, if any, college-level natural sciences coursework. Students are taught to
The best final exam question I’ve ever given is this: “I want you to write about one thing that you figured out in this class that matters.”
This sounds simple, I know. Perhaps even a little flaky. After all, we’re the instructors. We’re the experts
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Over the past year, most campuses have had to confront the impact of ChatGPT on the classroom, particularly on student learning and submission of assignments. Teachers are scrambling to modify their syllabi to lay out policies to ensure no plagiarism occurs. There is not much clarity on how to respond to the threat of ChatGPT. The new technology raises fundamental questions about teaching and learning; however, the art and process of learning remain the same.
As interdisciplinary knowledge becomes more important than ever, the distinct barriers between humanities, science, and arts break down. Today’s students are exposed to multitudes of information and asked to make connections to several knowledge systems to find solutions to the complex challenges we face today—among them, climate change, increasing inequality, and racial discrimination. Having spent over two decades in the classroom, I feel learning is deeply connected to a constant process of being exposed to new information and, more importantly, chewing on that piece of information multiple times—much like what a cow does—to make complex connections. Thus, metaphorically, l associate modern learning with the ancient process of rumination that most ungulates do. Let me explain this a bit more.
A cow eats grass or fodder, which is nutrient rich but high in fiber and hard to digest. Likewise, the knowledge we intake is much like grass, nutrient rich but hard to digest. Cows indulge in swallowing, unswallowing, rechewing, and reswallowing. This process, rumination, enables cows to chew grass more completely, improving digestion. Much like cows, each one of us must, after ingesting complex information, engage in rumination—bring back the data; chew on it again; connect it to other viewpoints, others’ situations, and different perceptions; and grasp it so that we understand it in its every dimension.
An avid walker, I got these ideas during one of my longer weekend walks, which gave me time to ruminate on various issues. Walking allows me to be in my body and this world—in the present. It is an opportunity to dialogue with myself. Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; I reflect on how some of the concepts that I tried to understand as a middle or high school student or an undergrad or grad student did not make sense then but do now as I was able to connect them concept with experiences I had later in life. The key here is to inspire students to contemplate to facilitate deep learning. ChatGPT can provide organized information within microseconds; however, rumination is necessary for deep understanding.
Biologically the cow’s digestive processes are ingestion, propulsion, mechanical digestion, chemical digestion, absorption, and defecation. Furthermore, cows use four chambers or compartments of stomachs for their digestion. They ferment the food through rumination, regurgitating and rechewing it before the main digestive process begins. Likewise, we as teachers have to ask our students to sit down after ingesting information, to regurgitate and chew on the data, to ferment the knowledge to absorb all aspects of this information — and to create new information.
With cows, as food passes through the GI tract, it mixes with digestive juices, causing large food molecules to break down into smaller molecules. The body then absorbs these smaller molecules through the walls of the small intestine into the bloodstream, which delivers them to the rest of the body. Each of us must mix the information we are exposed to with our creative juices and relate it to our experiences and other experiences for the data to break down into smaller pieces to absorb and make sense of the information thoroughly. I also want to add here the influence of peer learning. Listening to our peers is akin to any information we ingest being returned to the brain to, as it were, rechew. We have to retrieve the information from our brains at a later time and mix it with the views of others, to masticate on it again and mix it with different perceptions to make new connections. Teachers must encourage students to bounce ideas off of others in the class and dwell on them for a while, and they provide them with time to do this.
So essentially, I argue that deep learning is a complex process requiring much reflection time:
The role of the teacher in this context is to inspire students to engage in rumination, challenge them to regurgitate the information they’re processing, and promote reflection through in-class experiential activities and take-home assignments. Learning takes time—students need to understand it as a well-thought-out process—things that students ignore in rush to get through the degree. Teaching and learning will then be meaningful for both the student and the teacher—ChatGPT notwithstanding.
Avinash Thombre, PhD, a professor of applied communication at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is a practitioner of yoga, loves sauntering, meditates regularly, and identifies as an ecocentric writer, transcendentalist, amateur astronomer, public intellectual, and philosopher. You can access his reflective writing at https://avithombre.medium.com.
