Non-Narrative Non-Fiction and Learning to Learn

This post is working a bit in reverse. I am writing about the source I chose for the class of the 19th (last week), just as I am caught up about thinking about learning I have done about learning in another classroom.

The source text that I chose was a series of educational mixed-media videos called Crash Course (specifically its "World History" series). I like the way that these videos present history often as a series of debates between people(s) with differing ideas of and uses for history. I also enjoy its seamless integration of animations and textual quotations into what is otherwise predominantly a lecture format. What I did not realize before learning a little bit about the ways we learn in Learning Process in the Educational Setting, is that the ways this source teaches history have very clearly been guided by the psychology of memory. Its use of illustrating quotations, photographs, maps and cartoons each serve to punctually wrestle hold of learners' attention while also emphatically binding material to be learned (the dry stuff of the history textbook's paragraphs) to a variety of forms of information, visual, auditory, and textual, so that learners can better remember information. So too does the "lecture's" content serve to deepen memory-retention, which often ends in challenging (often "unanswerable") prompting questions, just as it is often punctuated by them. This source is an ideal one for adding to my toolkit as a History (and English) teacher in training, because it often models the way that I should aspire to teach.

Thinking about this series, and ways that I could further tailor it to my teaching, I also happened to come across a tool called "Zaption," which allows for editing of any posted online video by teachers (or students!) so that the video can be paused by prompting questions, graphics, or comments. This tool can be used in the above-mentioned educational video, or could be added to TED talks, documentaries, movies, or even news clips, to prompt students in the class to answer questions (either vocally, silently in writing, or on their phones to be displayed real-time in front of the class. Integrating such a tool (in concert with others like PollEverywhere) is useful, and really exciting for me for two reasons. On the one hand, it chunks up, or scaffolds, the learning that students do throughout the video. It forces them to stop and rehearse, then consider, then somehow engage with and create linkages to the material they have just absorbed in their short-term memory. On the other hand, it grants students the opportunity to transform what was once a one-way, monologuous information-drop into a two-way, producer-consumer conversation about a topic. Such a conversation is critical not only for improving student engagement and providing a sense of agency to the student-learner, but also because it serves to reinforce their memory of the information being learned, both deepening and broadening the neural linkages they would otherwise be making in a flat and sponge-like way.

Learning is about more than listening, it is about listening that gives birth to questioning, considering, and debating. I think that many of the audio-video tools of the internet era that are available to teachers only manage to act as mono-dimensional educational tools in many cases. Students are not sheep or sponges, and do not learn by mere absorption, regardless of how arresting or relevant the source may be. By linking audio-video sources to Zaption, I think that I can work to add an important layer to the way students interact with their learning materials.