Through the looking-glass

One way for educators to help their students would be to put themselves in their shoes

The Indian industry’s concern about the quality of engineering graduates is well-known. One of the root causes of this, in academic circles, is the attitude of today’s students. A common lament among faculty is that while the millennials have better access to information and more comforts, they lack the values, work ethic and focus to pursue academic excellence. This perspective typically translates into interventions such as offering the right advice, increasing attendance and workload, curtailing the use of mobile devices/social media, more surveillance and stringent punishments. Irrespective of how these interventions are implemented, the student disengagement only appears to be increasing. Few attempts are being made to understand why today’s students are doing what they do.

Empathetic experiment

One of the bold attempts ‘to see how it really is as a student’ is Professor Cathy Small’s ethnographic study entitled

My Freshman Years published in 2004. Her study revealed that college experience is impacted by several fundamental misperceptions on the part of faculty and students. Some of the dimensions where misperceptions are prevalent include importance of learning in the classroom versus in the campus; trade-off between knowledge of subject areas versus knowledge about themselves, their abilities and relationships; academic success versus success in managing the demands of the college on their lives.

While the study is extremely insightful, it may not be possible for most faculty to appreciate the insights without some self-exploration. If so, how could one encourage interested faculty to develop a better appreciation of student realities?

One possibility is to rethink the faculty development programmes. This thought emerged while I was doing a session on design thinking for a faculty development programme. Before the session I was told that about 60 faculty participants from various colleges were undergoing the programme and that the three-week programme was supposed to end in a couple of days. When I entered the class, I noticed that about one-third were absent. After a few exercises on context appreciation, I introduced a popular exercise on generative storytelling using the ‘Yes & And’ rule. I noticed that the participants felt uncomfortable to spontaneously say a random statement and build on it. After some cajoling, one of them said, “Today, Dr. Pi taught us how to use the Arduino kit”. Then, the next person uttered, “We started to unbundle the kit”, and the third said, “We found that a component was missing”.

Different approach

It appeared that all of them were trying to say something factual or logically consistent. This was in stark contrast to doing similar session with undergraduate students. I wondered if this was due to the peer pressure or the academic training of remembering and reproducing rules and facts in a specific domain. However, something surprising happened when it came to the fifth person. He refused to play the game, and when persuaded, got angry and said that the whole training programme was stifling. It appeared that he couldn’t handle being a student and receiving lecture after lecture.

It was at this point that it struck me that the greatest takeaway of such faculty development programmes may not be learning how to teach, but experiencing what a student goes through in a classroom. Faculty development programmes could be reoriented to open this reflection among faculty members instead of being rituals that are organised and attended to satisfy institutional requirements.

A few other strategies that can be tried by faculty to improve their understanding of present-day students include: becoming a member of a student team during hackathons, helping students write reflective narratives and having one-to-one conversations on them, extending the narrative into a collective reflection on why we are doing what we are doing, and even encouraging students to become teachers for a day. This process will take some time and effort, but if persisted can surely help evolve more innovative approaches to improve the quality of engineering education.

The author is Dean (Design, Innovation and Incubation), IIITDM Kancheepuram