I am a college teacher, part time. I teach various courses in Communications at the local university. By day I am a general contractor. By free time, I teach various college classes and I run a vlog called the Genuine Optimist. Search for me everywhere and you will find me under that description.
Here's the challenge, every year I become more and more inclined to create more freedom for students. The blowback or negative is that students get lost, at least for a short while.
I have found that students are not trained to use freedom. It's too foreign to them. They are too focused on regurgitating what the professor wants. Even worse, it is far too tempting for educators to drone on in lecture and never connect with students. The best connection is never a student idolizing the teacher, it's the teacher shutting up his or her mouth long enough the hear student.
Now, if the student has nothing to say, then the teacher, in the purest respect to Socrates and others who have followed, gets to ask questions. In the sciences its different, or at least there is a foundation of axioms to know first. In the humanities, everyone thinks they have the most solid foundation and so we tend to force feed ideology to students. We then become political lecturers focused on linear thinking. I choose to be a political questioner focused on relational understanding.
So that is my bias, I want more freedom for students. I want them to relate and not regurgitate. I want them to question and not assimilate. I want self-starting, self-nourishing minds, minds that can function powerfully on their own, free and clear from political ghetto thinking.
Some day I might get in a lot of trouble, if I am not careful. The weird price we pay for practicing deliberate freedom...
I think that letting students speak their voice opinion and thoughts are vital. We are in parts of our lives where we need to be heard. We need to be able to have our own opinions. So many times I have had professors try and feed me their voice and opinion and try to shut out my own. Reading all of the comments on this post I think we are all on the same page that we need to let the students have a voice.
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When I read this post about giving students freedom it made me think of it as giving students a voice. Sometimes our voices can be suppressed by the amount of material that we have to go over in class. I like how you said that you want your students to be able to think for themselves, because I think that a lot of us may have great ideas and things to share. When we allow students freedom to express themselves, we can see things in different perspectives and it allows us to learn more. When you mentioned in class that we would have a choice of what types of projects we do in the course, that made me excited because we will be doing something that we want to do rather than something we "have" to do. Just like in a future job, I think it is important to take advice and ideas from your employees, or in this case students. So thank you for giving us a voice.
-Deanna
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Another thing that obstructs the flow of ideas in the classroom setting is that no one wants to be "that guy" or "that girl" who talks too much. The classroom setting forces us to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to have their voice heard, but I would argue that this limits the freedoms and growth of the individual student. I would personally prefer one-on-one tutoring with a scholar in some field or another. Does anyone disagree with me?
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I believe that giving the students freedom is a foreign thing for them. All teachers teach their way, give assignments, give grades, and move on. We are expected to follow a syllabus that tells us when to do something and how to do it with no freedom. Giving a student the freedom to express themselves in a creative way will broaden the horizon for them mentally. It helps a student come up with unique ideas that will help their learning and help them better in life, aposed to being thought the same say in every class.
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It is an unfortunate conundrum that students are subject to power differentials between themselves and their professors. Free thinking and growth are what most students are trying to develop; they want their own voice. That voice is subject to the consequence of a grading system. I am not an advocate of "everyone gets a trophy for participating", however, without the freedom to venture beyond the parameters set forth by those in power, students become conditioned to stick to the parameters outlined by their professors. Freedom to explore different schools of thought is a liberating idea!
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As a student in your Ethics in Communication class I appreciate the way you teach. I like that we do not feel pressured to think a certain way or prepare assignments based on what we think you would appreciate. The one thing that is hard is that there is less structure. I am the type of student who like set assignment schedule, and specific instructions and you leave that open. This is not a bad thing by any means I have just had to adjust my learning style in this class. It can be refreshing and stressful at times. You are right though. It is nice to have a teacher that cares about their students and not their own personal agenda.
-Ashlee
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Being a student in your class and observing the way you teach, alone shows that you care about our freedom. Allowing us to think for ourselves instead of degrading our voices by having us use "credible sources" gives me the upmost respect for you as a professor & human being. It shows that you see us as students with a perspective that needs to be seen and understood rather than students that are supposed to meet made up standards in a time frame in order to be seen as good enough to pass the class. You respect our individuality by allowing our voices to be heard and allowing us to free our minds. Listening to individuals perspectives i think helps contribute to the big picture because it allows us to understand one another rather than us living with guards up because we are "misunderstood". I think it will also make us more responsible and treat each other with integrity rather than a person thats in support of one side of a coin. And as the saying goes "its your mouth that gets you in trouble" that will eventually get those with a voice in trouble if we stop allowing ourselves,students or people in general anywhere in life to express their voice and freedom.
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