Rote learning, handouts have no place in varsities

The crises facing university education is not just located in the continued cash crunch plaguing them, neither is it confined to the unplanned universities expansion, or the persistent tribalisation and politicisation of universities.

In actual fact, the trouble is even not reducible to overcrowded lecture rooms, or its overworked faculty, who have lately been forced by circumstances to displace teaching for research. The challenges facing university education are mammoth and complex.

The ramifications of these challenges on learning, quality teaching and research are enormous. Most of all, the lecture room is changing, and so is the interaction therein. The totality of the complexity of challenges affecting higher education in Kenya is directly expressed and felt right in the lecture rooms.

The lecture room, once the hallowed ground where ideas found fascination and curiosity met satisfaction, has now become emblematic of the depressing state of higher education in Kenya. The lecture room, both as a physical and an intellectual space, is itself in a troubling crisis.  

The mercantile logic driving higher education has reduced the lecture room to a transactional relationship, where one robotically gives and another passively receives. The lecture room has lost its lustre and is in urgent need of redemption. I am aware that several disciplines deploy different pedagogical methods of instruction in the university.

I am also aware that it is within best practices to have diversity and creativity of instruction, especially in the university. Among these methods, the interactive lecture method, especially common in the humanities and social sciences, is in grave danger of extinction. In some university campuses, the interactive lecture is all but dead.

Biggest tragedies

One of the biggest tragedies facing our universities is the decline of the lecture as a teaching method and in its place, the use of methods that were a preserve of primary and secondary schools.

There is a good reason why we have lecture rooms in universities and classrooms in high schools. The reason is located in the nature of knowledge that is shared in the university. Unlike lower levels, in the university the status of knowledge is largely constituted as unstable and contestable.

Thus, the role of the lecturer is less of teaching and more of provoking thought and promotion of a critical, independent opinion. This is especially the case in the humanities and social sciences. 

The power dimension with regard to transmitting knowledge is fairly shared between students and the lecturer. In high school and primary school, the hierarchies are sharp and the teacher is clearly the boss, and the sole purveyor of knowledge.

As such, the best method of teaching at secondary school level is mainly reading or writing notes on the board.

In the university, the curriculum is fluid and dynamic, and before being delivered, it is transformed into a course outline whose overall make up is mostly an expression of the intellectual philosophy of the individual lecturer.

In other words, the same course, if taught by two different lecturers might differ in orientation. Also, in the university, ‘the actual’ lecturing is only a very small part of a process that is largely supplemented by carefully selected readings. Again, these readings might vary.

Uniquely, the lecturer might occasionally be required to design a course drawn from his or her area of research expertise, deliver and examine it. In other words, the relationship between course delivered and the lecturer delivering it is intimate.

The lecture as a whole is the sum total of the research and intellectual vocation of the lecturer. An interactive lecture is not a transactional affair, but a transformational relationship. Lectures last a lifetime, way beyond an examination. 

Unfortunately, most university teaching today is routinely rendered through reading out notes to students who are by all standards too intelligent for this mode of instruction. This mindless exercise exposes its full banality in examinations. To pass examinations, the student is simply required to give back notes originally dictated to him or her by the lecturer.

There are cases where successive generations of students have been dictated to notes that are never revised or updated despite the fact that knowledge is dynamic.

This partly explains why some of our graduates are less analytical and incapable of handling abstract thinking. The tragedy of reading notes  is worsened when ‘busy’ lecturers hand out their notes to be photocopied because they are ‘moonlighting’ across other campuses.

This is the gravest of sins. ‘Hand out’ teaching is a crime. It robs students of a critical experience that can only be found in the university.

There are several reasons why the interactive lecture might struggle to reclaim its place in the academy. First, universities have gone full cycle in the reproduction of mediocrity. Those who were awfully taught through ‘handouts’ and ‘dictations’ and never got exposed to thought provoking lectures are now possibly teaching, or seeking jobs to do so.

Second, universities have rapidly declined as centres of research and seminars where ideas are shared and contested and most lecturers only show up in campus when they have a class to ‘dictate notes to’ or an examination to deliver.

Although research profiles have more financial and social returns than teaching profiles, the latter day academic is engaged in more teaching load for pay. Dictating notes becomes the only option to completing marathon teaching. 

Quality standards

Perhaps the most significant reason why interactive lectures are becoming less and less is that they demand plenty of reading and preparation on the part of the lecturer. They also demand a continuous engagement with emerging research.

More importantly, good researchers make good lecturers and if lecturers are not engaged in wide reading and research, then university students should expect a raw deal in the lecture room. Excellent lecturers are not necessarily the most eloquent or the more amusing.

Good teachers are not necessarily the best lecturers. This is the reason why arguments and scholarly articles from educationists advocating for the training of university lecturers on pedagogical skills are misplaced. Good lectureship is not measured on eloquence, dramatics or on its entertainment value.

Excellent lectureship is a measure of the extent to which it provokes thinking, inspires a thirst for knowledge and stimulates debate.

To remedy the continuous downturn in the lecture room, the government must first pay lecturers well so that consultancies and moonlighting are less attractive to academics.

Secondly, universities must adopt internationally acceptable quality standards in the designing and delivery of course content.

Instructional methods that do not expose students to wide readings, problem based learning, independent thinking and thought-provoking interactions, especially in the social sciences and humanities, should have no place in the university.

- The writer is head of department, Publishing and Media Studies at Moi University.