Barn Raising: Collaborative Group Process in Seminars

Abstract

In the classrooms of higher education, the seminar is a puzzling phenomenon. Most teachers understand what to do with a lecture and, usually, what causes its success or failure. But the seminar is another matter. Most instructors aren’t sure what a good one ought to look like, and, even if we did know, how to accomplish that. The problem is both technical and attitudinal. It seems intuitively clear that a seminar ought not to be a question-and-answer session, though often it is. Conversely, the implication is that it should be conversation among the students in which the participation is widespread and the teacher is just another participant, or else in some way a facilitator of the discussion. But what sort of conversation? Experience teaches that when it is not a question-and-answer session, it is either aimless drifting (“just a bull-session” in the students words) or an argument. “Well,” the reader might ask, “what’s wrong with a good argument? It keeps people on their toes, forces them to haveprepared and punishes those who haven’t thoughf through their ideas. A boxing match is fast and aggressive or it is dull. Isn’t that true of an intellectual conversation, as well?” This paper will take the position that the boxing match is not the best possible model for a seminar. “But,” our reader might reasonably object, “for two hundred years the European and American tradition of education has been that students must be challenged to sharpen their thinking. They must continually test the validity of their ideas by exposing them in combat. The classroom is a dueling school in which one’s most basic weapons are sharpened for the battle of life.”