5 Myths About Learning in College: Myth 5

I spent much of my teaching career in classrooms that looked very much like this one.

And finally, here is the last of the myths that I tell my students about on Day 1. For some this will resonate particularly deeply.

Myth 5: If you have trouble learning in college it means there is something wrong with you.

For much of my teaching career, I taught in classrooms that look like this one. Everyone knows what to do in this room: come in, take a seat, face the teacher, and take out a notebook or laptop. As the teacher, I too knew what this room expected of me: That I would stand at the front and speak, maybe supplementing what I said by showing slides or writing on a whiteboard. Even when there was discussion, it would go through me, since the students faced me rather than each other (and after all, I was supposedly the only authority in the room). As I began to explore the practice of thinking with things, and the associated notion that thinking is embodied (which I discuss in the post on Myth 1), I came to see this typical classroom as a sensory deprivation chamber. These beautifully evolved human beings, who learn not only with the contents of their skulls but also with their hands, their bodies, and their immediate environments, were being asked to perform an unnatural act.

Some students do fine in this environment, able to survive and even prevail in this artificial, sub-optimal setting. Others manage to scrape along, often with poor grades but finally stumbling unhappily over the finish line. Still others cannot survive the mismatch between how they learn and what the sensory deprivation chamber requires of them. My friends in the disability community have told me that one way to think of disability is a lack of fit between person and environment, and in this way our traditional classroom is creating disability in students. This is tragic, both for the students who are harmed, and also because being a functioning, contributing adult requires skills that are not learned in this artificial way. The conventional classroom, and the conventional approach to pedagogy, weeds out students who could in fact be brilliant contributors to our social and economic lives. Even when these students find success outside of academia, their inability to “hack it” in college can leave a lifelong sense of inadequacy and failure.

To counter this myth, I offer the following proposition:

By recognizing and supporting the embodied learner, we can abandon the sensory deprivation classroom and create learning environments that are enabling rather than disabling.