As many faculty are focusing more intently on our syllabi for the fall--after mulling them over all summer--many people are trying to figure out what to have students DO. Should they write term papers? Five-paragraph essays? Compare and contrast pieces? [The answer is NO.]

There are lots of exciting ways students can engage actively with their learning, both to further their understanding and to convey that understanding. (Writing is for thinking, ideally, not just for following a safe recipe.)

The key is to figure out what the ultimate goals are--really going back to fundamentals--and then start from there.

If students are supposed to draw connections between the course material and the rest of the world, then allowing them freedom to explore is appropriate.

If students should master a particular, real genre, not necessarily a "school genre," then having them understand the conventions of that genre is helpful.

If students are supposed to become expert in a spinoff topic, then giving them free rein is appropriate.

If students are to become lifelong writers who have options about how to best convey their message to particular audiences, then having them figure out what's appropriate in diverse moments prepares them to think it through.

If students are supposed to achieve perfection in academic-style writing, following every arbitrary (it seems that way to students, believe me; I've asked) instruction, then it is asking for corner-cutting, imitation, going through the motions, and dread.

There are lots of colleagues all over the place engaging in, well, engaging assignments. Some fall under the general container of "unessay" (here and here). 

Here is a list of what my own students have produced, just in the last year:

• Podcasts
• Drawings
• Cartoons
• Paintings
• Mosaics
• Movies
• Poems
• Short stories
• “This I Believe” essays
• Ethnographies
• Interviews (with strangers, friends, classmates, family members)
• Position papers
• Mapping of campus/landscapes
• Conversation analyses
• Proposals
• Blogs
• Websites
• Book reviews
• Op-eds
• Journal articles
• Senior/honors theses
• Dissertations--okay, not undergraduates
• Research articles
• Food logs
• Landscape mapping
• Interviews
• Observations
• Linguistic autobiographies

Nobody could argue that the authors and creators weren't learning, or that they were not putting in effort.

Some of the work was brilliant, inspired, amazing! Some was a first, brave, risky effort at trying a new format, genre. A football player wrote his first poem since middle school. A doula created a series of paintings depicting different food prohibitions during pregnancy, having interviewed people of different ages and from different countries. A student made a mosaic; another made a cartoon of the ways personhood remains the same and changes over the lifespan. Someone created a food-waste brochure. One student wrote a letter to his younger self. I welcomed this experimentation. I learned a lot, and ENJOYED, what my students were doing. They did too.

Learning, writing, doing don't have to be painful drudgery to be worthwhile.

Comment below with your own ideas, if you like!

The Proceedings of a conference, Learning In and Out of School: Education Across the Globe, held at the University of Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies on May 22-23, 2012, are now available!

This is envisioned as a contribution to broadening the scholarly but also the public conversation about the nature of learning and its relationship to the formal institutions we know as schools. In that sense, posting proceedings is a necessary offering.

We—anthropologists, psychologists, human development and education scholars from as far as Korea and Alaska—met for two full days during a gorgeous spring week just following graduation, with flowers and warmth and the peace of an academic year just completed. We ate wonderful food throughout the day and night, and had many informal conversations along with the formal proceedings. As convener, I aimed to implement my best understanding of how people learn and how they interact by structuring the conference with no papers delivered. This is somewhat like “flipping the classroom”: the independent preliminary work that could be done in advance was done in advance—writing and reading papers and preparing comments on others’ work—and the precious face-to-face time was used for what could only be done that way: discussing, asking, brainstorming, and laughing together.

I found out by accident. One of my students had a job staffing a reception desk. They talk about my class--but don't even bother to let me know. When the students are buzzing with interest in the subject, when they don’t even tell the teacher about their out-of-class conversations—this is worth every moment.

Read it on Huffington Post, or here

MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses—are not the same thing as the enormously popular interactive games titled Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). Nor are they the same thing as going to college. And this matters.

[Or see it on Huffington Post]

I teach anthropology at Notre Dame. I have written a book about truth and deception. I have written a different book about college. As an anthropologist I am interested in not only what humans do but what we think about what we do. Humans are fascinating. I am glad to have a front-row seat to our species.

So I need to weigh in on the story of football player Manti Te’o and his fake dead girlfriend, as revealed last week by Deadspin.

But I can’t figure out what kind of story this is.

[Also on Huffington Post]

Over Thanksgiving weekend, my college-student daughter started singing. She knew, and claimed that her friends knew, hundreds of songs. My father, a pediatrician, asked what he thought was a rhetorical question, “Why do kids know the words to every song but they can’t memorize something for a test that will get them a higher grade?”

This is, actually, a real question.

Also on Huffington Post

President Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected in a landslide.

 We progressives who donated time and money to ensure that this happened have a right to be pleased.

But now it is time for loyal critics to speak up. And one area that must be attended to is education—at all levels. That unmentionable education radical Bill Ayers—someone Obama once knew but had to repudiate—wrote a letter to Arne Duncan explaining clearly what is wrong with the current system, but it does not quite go far enough.