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Re: Student resistance to changes in professional education practice



At 02:30 PM 10/1/2004, Richard Hake, you wrote:

In his POD post of 29 Sep 2004 titled "Student resistance to changes
in professional education practice," physicist Mano Singham (2004)
wrote:
"I have been approached by faculty and administrators in the Law and
Dental schools at my university who say that while they are trying to
improve the way they teach by including more active and participatory
methods, they meet resistance from students who ask them to "just
tell them what they need to know" and to forget about all this
"higher-order thinking stuff."...

Possibly some subscribers []
may know about causes of student resistance to change,...

David Garvin (2003), in his fascinating article "Making the Case," wrote:

Christopher Columbus Langdell, the pioneer of the case method,
attended Harvard Law School from 1851 to 1854 - twice the usual term
of study. ...
In his course on contracts, he insisted that students read only
original sources-cases-and draw their own conclusions. To assist
them, he assembled a set of cases and published them, with only a
brief two-page introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .

Inducing general principles from a small selection of cases was a
challenging task, and students were unlikely to succeed without help.

///

Langdell's innovations initially met with enormous resistance. MANY
STUDENTS WERE OUTRAGED (my CAPS).


Richard describes student discomfort as "resistance to change."
But I have been gathering the distinct impression both
from Richard's posts here and others in the same vein,
that it is a process somewhat comparable to learning to swim
by being chucked in the water: no matter how skilled the
accompanying life-guard - it is hard to get comfortable with
the panicked impression of impending death.
One doubtless has crystal-clear recollections of learning to swim
in this manner long afterwards: the student standardized gain
is high, the recall is good years later, in fact.

Now, having shared this impression, I am reminded of the surgeons'
then later the obstetricians' view that pain was a normal part of
operations and child-birth and that it was not to be gain-said
- a view which has ebbed over the years since the dome in
Mass General Hospital contained the stoic soldiers who sat in
the operating {kitchen} chair, at first implacable, later wilting
to unconsciousness as shock took effect
while the bone saw was at work to amputate their damaged &
infected limbs.

I suppose these metaphors are begging me to enquire if some
educational anaesthetic cannot be found to ease students' pain
with research/enquiry methods.


Brian Whatcott Altus OK Eureka!