Exploring the Lived Experiences of Our Students

Abstract

How well do we know our students? We might justifiably pride ourselves in being student-oriented, and we may be skilled at building rapport with our students, but this isn’t necessarily tantamount to really knowing them. What is it like to truly grapple with the work we ask them to do? It all might seem quite reasonable to us, but the students’ experiences could be quite different. These questions and considerations have been brought front and center for us as we read the papers that constitute this issue of Teaching & Learning Inquiry. Many of these papers, each in its own way, attempts to better understand the lived experiences of our students. Nathan Webb and Laura Obrycki Barrett take a detailed look at just how we get to know students who are learning English as a sec ond language. The key processes they identify—in clud ing such behaviors as being uncommonly attentive, establishing common grounding, and forming connections—can be applied to all teaching. Mary Goldschmidt explores students’ lived experiences as disciplinary learners of both content and process, which includes learning to write the genres and conventions of their chosen fields. She foregrounds the rich descriptions of a few seniors who’ve developed “their own ‘place within the disciplinary enterprise’” (p. 27). Jonathan Cisco has created a more effective way of teaching students how to write literature reviews based on his direct observations of the struggles they were going through with such assignments. Interviews indicated that students were at a loss regarding the best approach to writing a literature review—much less, what a good review accomplished. Yet such reviews are among the most common assignments we require. Shane Dawson and Harry Hubball use computer-based analytics to chart the actual paths students take as they navigate their way through academic programs. This analy sis yields very useful insights regarding students’ perceptions of relationships among courses, as well as challenges students face simply piecing together that which we require of them. Michael Drinkwater, Deanne Gannaway, Karen Sheppard, Matthew Davis, Margaret Wegener, Warwick Bowen, and Joel Corney take us inside the physics classroom to better understand that lived experience. We are moving well beyond the student-as-passivevessel model in large classes, challenging students to engage with problems and issues in these settings. This team from the University of Queensland has shown that the value of the time spent in such active classrooms is affected considerably by the degree of preparation students bring into them. They present a strategy that is manageable and yet ensures that students arrive prepared. Moreover, the approach gives the instructor impor-