Rethinking The Academy:

The Benefit of Everyone Involved

At first, it would seem that allowing a student to teach the teacher is such an inversion of the traditional roles that all learning would grind to a halt. It would seem that the students would lose all respect for the teacher, refuse to do their assignments, and otherwise act out.

In fact, in my experience, turning to a student and asking him or her to explain a fine point of unix gives the teacher more credibility, not less, since the students can appreciate that a teacher need not know everything. In fact, the teacher can become a specialized resource person who is the reader for the class essays and serves institutionally as the grader.

By giving up the role of computer specialist, she is more able to retain the role of reader/writer, a role for which she is in fact primarily responsible and for which she is often professionally trained. In the case of computer skills, many of us teaching in the computer classroom are self-taught, though more of us are beginning to pick up outside computer skills through formal educational experiences; such training requires us to ask whether this is indeed an efficient use of time, when our lives are so busy.

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Last Modified: August 2, 1996

Copyright © 1996 by Keith Dorwick