Why Do They Have to Take Our Courses?

When I started my full-time university position, it came with the usual responsibility of advising. With that great responsibility often comes great skepticism. Students, confronted with the sheer number of courses they are required to take, will express doubt about the necessity of one requirement or another. I developed at the time what I thought was a clever response. “Why not?” I would ask. “Why not take courses in these subjects supposedly unrelated to your major? Will it hurt you to have more knowledge?” I had not intended to be flippant – although perhaps I did intend to be sarcastic (leopard and spots, after all) – but I realized later that is exactly what my answer sounded like, not all that different in the long run from the “learn math to balance your checkbook” argument many of us heard as children. I am comforted that my response frequently led to more productive conversations about the nature of general education, but there are certainly more thoughtful and useful, not to mention respectful, ways to get there.

One of those ways requires us to ask of ourselves: why DO students need to take our courses? Even more broadly, we need to ask ourselves why students need to take every required course in our curriculum. The first question is difficult enough – as easy as it may seem on the surface. The second question can be more complicated depending on the design of our general education curriculums and whether or not we as individual instructors either understand or buy into requirements.

Our first task is to understand thoroughly why students should take our own courses. As with any other aspect of teaching, it begins with being able to fully articulate what we are trying to convey. With content, this understanding is usually almost second nature, or, in the case of material with which we are less familiar, we are capable of connecting it to previous knowledge or of educating ourselves on the topics. When it comes to the reflective, even meta-, exercise of thinking about the significance of what we teach, it is perhaps less readily apparent.

Instead of allowing student questions concerning the need for our courses to undermine our own motivation, I suggest that they are an opportunity. After making the realization above during advising, I reconsidered my courses, coming to the (albeit painful) conclusion that I was not being transparent about what I wanted my students ultimately to “get” by being in my classrooms. I made assumptions about students’ self-motivation and their ability, without experience or background, to connect the dots, within the context of the course and to outside material. I began asking myself, “Why do they have to take this course?” In doing so, I could take a fresh look at my approach to course design and take into consideration my students’ need for investment.

In this reassessment process, however, I did not want to make the mistake of simply providing a step-by-step guide that leads in one direction – my direction. As I said before, what I consider motivation for investment may not be what students consider motivation. More importantly, it rather defeats the purpose of respecting their questioning if I immediately shut it down with a rigid answer that may or may not make sense to them (thinking personally here of my own past development). My goals, which are reflected in my learning outcomes, are to encourage more critical questioning and to provide multiple tools that will help students design their own answers with the benefit of insight and information and embrace their own investment in their learning.

Maryellen Weimer in an article for Faculty Focus aptly titled “Those Magical and Mysterious Learning Moments” (2014) quotes William Reinsmith as remarking, “not even the most outstanding teacher can summon a learning moment. The most we can do is fashion a context for them.” One of my interpretations of “fashioning a context” is to provide opportunities that are consciously and deliberately designed to help students invest in general education learning. It is in the design and redesign of courses that we can think about how to incorporate issues of student investment into our learning activities and assessments, making it an overarching, ubiquitous goal in course and curriculum frameworks.

I suggest sharing whatever form your articulation about the purposes and significance of your courses takes with colleagues, other instructors, and advisors. Sometimes we can work at cross purposes across our campuses if we are each unable to discuss – not shallowly and theoretically, but with in-depth understanding – with our students the value of other courses and requirements. Reinforcing stereotypes of English majors avoiding math, biology majors who don’t need to read fiction, or business majors who don’t need to know how to write – even if this reinforcement is passive and unintentional – only hinders the principles of general, liberal education. By sharing with others our expertise and our understanding of our fields and courses, other instructors and advisors will be informed advocates and be able to discuss the significance of required courses beyond generic platitudes and having to fall back on the old “it’s required” argument. What would it be like if we could all help each other reinforce the significance of not only our individual corner of education but education as a whole? It really can only start with communication.

In the first part, I commented that we as instructors can see the grand plan because we are cogs in it, but our students often don’t.  Faith Kurtyka (2013) quotes from a student writing sample from a first-semester composition course: “Why should students have to pay for overcrowded classes that have nothing to do with their major? General education courses should be treated like samples at a coffee shop: if somebody doesn’t want to indulge in a sample, then they should not be forced to.” It’s a curious metaphor, of course, but to keep the student’s image going: what if the barista knew that the coffee they were selling contained a cure for a major disease? Yet, they persisted in marketing the coffee as “great tasting with an interesting flavor,” “one you should try,” “because it’s good for you,” without highlighting its significant health benefits? We would find this strategy ludicrous, and, yet, in the above student’s defense, it is not all that different from how we explain general education courses to our students. They are courses they “should” try because they are “good” for them. If all else fails, we fall back on “because it’s required.”

Instead of resorting to such vague explanations, which I would argue would not convince even instructors to do something about which they were unclear of the value (perhaps a good example of this is the frequent discussions concerning what makes an effective learning outcome and why they matter anyway), one solution is to let students in on the secret: that there are real, clear, proven reasons for studying a variety of subjects, for developing the skills that are emphasized in the liberal arts education. For instance, the University of Idaho (​​Henscheid, et al., 2009), in making changes to their general education program, found that “to convince students that the humanities are important, they must, first, rethink the traditional content of humanities instruction and, second, ask instructors to do more to make student aware of the particular contributions the humanities make to intellectual growth” (p. 279, emphases added). There is one word missing here that I believe is the crux of how to accomplish this goal: to make students explicitly aware of the contributions the [insert discipline here] make to intellectual growth.

How Can We Explicitly Teach Students the Value of Our Courses and Curriculum?

Explicit. Related: transparent. You will frequently hear about “embedding” skills into our curriculum, about what our students “get” out of our courses above and beyond the stated learning outcomes. While it is undeniably true that there are skills and material that students gain from courses that are not our main focus or are even unintended, it seems counter-productive to keep these skills labeled as “important” a mystery, almost asking students to go on a scavenger hunt to find them, following clues (some more effective than others) that we leave scattered here and there. Why not simply let our students know what we are teaching and what we expect them to learn?

The same is true of “the bigger picture.” Why not simply provide students with opportunities to assemble the jigsaw puzzle that is university curriculum? Each piece is designed to make a whole, to create an image of a “well-rounded” student, of a “life-long learner.” Yet, if you can’t see the image, then it’s nigh impossible for most people to put the puzzle together. It’s just a jumble of odd-shaped pieces. If all students are confronted with is the jumble with no indication of the end goal, then putting the pieces together is less appealing and certainly less fulfilling.

Let’s imagine that each student, on the first day or week of every course, spent time thinking about why they are taking the course (beyond the content), how it fits into their college career (the whole, not just the major), how it leads to a richer life (job-wise, citizen-wise, person-wise) after graduation. They are provided with readings, activities, discussion – time – that emphasize explicitly what is at stake, the “contributions to their intellectual growth.” If every course did this, what would be the outcome? I imagine the following: students who are able to articulate for themselves and others why they are taking each course and how courses work together. This is perhaps my personal educational utopia, and it would not be simple to implement on a large scale. Still, it is thought-provoking to contemplate what the ramifications of such wide-spread transparency would be.

How can we begin to create this transparency for our students?

Share with them. Share not the vague, elusive “it’s good for you” statements – which, by the way, they heard repeatedly as children (remember that “balance your checkbook” argument for math?) and it didn’t work for them then either. Share the deeper thoughts, the viewpoints of scholars and more popular thinkers. Let them know your own thoughts about why they are in your class and why you teach what you do. Bring in evidence, and let them analyze it, question it, discuss it, and even doubt it.  Each student will find different evidence compelling, but, in order for that to happen, they need to have access to that evidence and the time to consider it. Even a half hour in class spent in this endeavor will give them context they didn’t have before.

One of the reasons students resist general education courses is that they perceive them as discrete topics that have little to do with each other or with their majors. In other words, they aren’t privy to the bigger picture and purpose. According to Anne Beaufort (2012), “the three principles for facilitating transfer of learning that consistently show up in the research on transfer” are:

1. Teach learners to frame specific tasks and learnings into more abstract principles (i.e. concepts of discourse community, genre, rhetorical situation, etc.) that can be applied to new situations (Cormier and Hagman; Foertsch; Gick and Holyak; Hatano and Oura; Sternberg and Frensch);
2. Give learners numerous opportunities to apply key concepts to different problems and situations (Foertsch; Hatano and Oura; Perkins and Salomon; Salomon and Globerson; Brooks and Dansereau; Wardle, “Understanding ‘Transfer’”);
3. Teach the practice of mindfulness, or meta-cognition, to facilitate awareness of learning and transferable knowledge and skills (Brooks and Dansereau; Wardle “Understanding ‘Transfer’”).

I want to reframe the first point as, rather than emphasizing abstract concepts, instead focusing on explicit teaching of these “abstract principles.” Before we teach learners to frame tasks into “abstract principles,” we need to be explicit about what those principles are. As Elizabeth Wardle (2009, p. 770) notes concerning teaching writing, it is up to us as instructors in all different kinds of classes to teach students explicitly the connections between different types of writing. She specifically points out “one reason for lack of transfer is instruction that does not encourage it.” I like this because it puts it on us to design opportunities for transfer rather than expecting it as a natural by-product or as something that students already know how to do.

The second point concerning giving multiple opportunities to apply learning in a variety of contexts is relevant both to individual courses as well as curriculums in general. In terms of curriculums (general education or majors), this requires instructors to talk to each other and be on the same page – “to align,” in the language of pedagogy. Communication allows instructors to use similar language to describe related concepts, highlighting to students that what they are learning is connected.

As college instructors and students, our worlds revolve around the semester (or the quarter). At the beginning of a semester, there seems like so much time. At the middle, we begin to panic as the clock ticks down. And, at the end, we realize there was no time at all. In those fourteen weeks (or less if in a different system), we have to accomplish what feels like everything. This drive to keep adding more and doing more despite the logic of pedagogical research is what Andrew Miller (2017) calls “The Tyranny of Being on Task.”

It’s useful to step back and remember that, as a colleague once told me, “we aren’t here to finish students – we’re here to begin them.” Our class is not the only class they will take, and they will learn for the rest of their lives. While it can be tempting to fall into the trap of believing that, if students don’t get “x” in your class, they will never get it, that is likely not the case. And I say this as the lone medievalist in my department and almost my campus, which I find inspiring – there is content in my class that they will likely never have encountered anywhere else. Still, having said that, I do like to remember that college is a combination of experiences: a deliberate curriculum. Taking some time for my students to consider the bigger picture or to reflect on what they have learned is far too important to pass over in favor of another quick content lesson (which they honestly probably won’t remember if it’s that rushed). It’s a matter of choosing what is the priority. Cultivating investment in general education learning is worth the time and the investment.

Being honest with students will yield more dividends than almost any other strategy. They respect it, and they feel respected. They don’t want to feel like the university is playing some (very unpleasant) game with them, making them guess what they need to achieve to make some nebulous set of individuals happy. And, in case it isn’t clear, that kind of attitude is about as far from learning as it is possible to get. It might be just fine for getting grades or a diploma, but it has little to do with deep learning. Also, be honest about the limitations or the negatives of academia – let them in our secrets.

Being honest with yourself is probably even more difficult in some ways. It’s important to be honest with yourself about the significance of your course and why students should be there. If we can’t explain it to ourselves, then it is next to impossible to communicate it to our students.

One of the most under-utilized resources in understanding how to communicate the significance of general education learning is probably the most obvious: the students. Students themselves are rarely asked about what they want or need. Yes, certainly, we are the experts in the room, but, to be honest, that expertise is generally about content, not teaching strategies. There is no “loss of power” in asking a group of adults what they believe about a certain strategy, what they need from the curriculum as a whole in order to understand it, what they think of the progress of their learning, and what they think can be improved. There are a variety of methods to do this. There is, of course, just asking! I have developed more teaching strategies and honed more classroom activities after informal discussions with students and in-class feedback sessions than in any other way. There are then more formal methods, such as feedback surveys. I would encourage students to read about and participate in national discussions about their learning in order to influence those who are developing the practices about them. In fact, sometimes that participation can be built into courses.

If this chapter does nothing else, I want it to emphasize that students are people. They have concerns, responsibilities, tragedies, and triumphs. They have other interests and other parts of their lives beyond our courses. Sometimes those lives can adversely affect what happens in the classroom or the trajectory of their college careers, just as our lives can affect the quality of our teaching. In addition, students respond to different motivators just as we do. Expecting each of them to respond the same or to respond as we do is a futile endeavor. And, ultimately, that kind of thinking only serves to limit our teaching strategies. Accepting the diversity in our classrooms forces us to consider different ways to reach our students and engage their learning. Embrace student differences. And embrace their humanness.

And when students ask, “Why do I have to take this course?” Answer them.

Example Strategy: Why Do We Have to Study Early World Literature?

The following strategy is one I use in my early world literature courses, which seem to feature even more initial skepticism from students as to their value than other courses. In this instance, I incorporate a two-week unit at the beginning of the semester devoted to researching the question of why they are taking this course.

In this case, I select several book chapters, news articles, and videos that speak to the idea of cultural heritage as well as invite relevant presenters, such as the executive directors of the Integrated Heritage Project and the local historical society. These materials provide details of intentional destruction of one group’s cultural artifacts by another group: for instance, Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in England, the Nazi plunder of Jewish artifacts, the burning of libraries, and the destruction of cultural heritage by ISIS in the Middle East. It is essential for this unit to incorporate both historical, current, and inclusive examples in order to broaden the relevance of the discussion. It is also essential that it include examples of the efforts of people to preserve cultural heritage. The guiding questions: if these peoples find it so important to destroy the artifacts of others, then should we not seek to preserve them through the act of study? If other people were willing to risk their lives or their livelihood to save these artifacts, what significance should we give them? This unit ends with the students writing their own “resolutions” concerning their future attitudes and behavior towards cultural heritage, especially early literature. They are asked to revisit these resolutions at the end of the semester, refining them based upon our course.

In asking students to assess this approach, one commented, “Unit I helped me to understand why the preservation of world literature is so important. This in turn helped me to appreciate the material that we read in class. I took this course as a requirement and honestly wasn’t expecting to learn so much about cultural values. Starting with that unit allows students to reflect on their cultural values.” Another wrote, “Unit 1 definitely helped me understand why I took this course. A lot of courses I’ve taken have been simply because I had to and I always ask how is this going to relate to the real world. Unit 1 answered that question right from the start. I honestly do not think I would have enjoyed early world literature as much if I had not gained the understanding and appreciation of cultural heritage.”