Getting Out of The Way: An Improvised Classroom Symphony, Self-Conducted

I’ve always wished my students would get so energized by something that they’d hijack my class.

It very nearly happened this week. I sat on the side and watched the magic happen.
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I’ve always wished my students would get so energized by something that they’d hijack my class.

It very nearly happened this week. I sat on the side and watched the magic happen.

We were doing something I’ve done in previous years in the earlier versions of my Fundamentals of Linguistic Anthropology class: trying to define “language” after we’d done some deep work on understanding what it does, and after getting rid of some simplistic received ideas.

This year the class has been going beautifully. It’s in a spacious room with ground-floor large windows (that I reveal by opening the shades….No PowerPoint, so we don’t need a darkened space to illuminate a screen….If students get distracted by the pedestrians and trucks….well then we aren’t engaged enough, are we?). I have a lot of excited, insight-filled students. We don’t raise hands; students open every class period with two different sets of roles: one (sometimes two) student gives us a very brief snippet of Language IRL, something that connects what we are reading about in class with something they encounter out in the world, and a set of three students looks quickly over Daily Cards that everyone writes to make sure they are actively engaged with the reading and selects three questions for discussion. The discussion over roams merrily over a lot of topics. I am always nervous, because I’m not in control. Sometimes students have misconceptions, and I do correct those, but mostly we talk.

In the attempt to define “language,” I asked students to jot down some thoughts. Then I had three students go to the whiteboard and record the phrases that the students threw out. This went on until the class was satisfied. Then I asked if we could eliminate any, or if there were redundancies. At first there was tentativeness; nobody wanted to hurt a classmate’s feelings by not retaining their offering. But after a while, things got going. People jumped in with suggestions. They asked questions about what certain terms meant (“Is learned the same thing as taught?” “Is as members of social groups the same thing as social?” Do they want to say something about reality or abstractness or materiality?). They discussed how to ensure that signed languages would be included, and what some of the purposes of language are; they included art.

The students at the board acknowledged their classmates sitting at their tables, and everyone was completely absorbed in the process, watching as words got erased, until they all felt that no further reductions could be made. This went on and on, until the end of the hour.

We all felt energized, and connected in a shared task, and committed to trying to figure out what we believed.

I didn’t care if they had every nuance right; defining concepts is imperfect, and endless. (In the 1950s two anthropologists wrote a whole book about definitions of the central concept, culture.) I didn’t care that they did not yet know everything about the arguments regarding linguistic “functions.” We had not yet addressed the question of nonhuman primate communication, or language acquisition and socialization.

I wanted to prime them to think about what the central object of our analysis was; I wanted them to feel engaged in generating something of their own; I wanted them to be in charge of their own learning; I wanted them to understand that they too could participate in an intellectual conversation. I wanted them to care.

It was a sunny day outside, which we could feel through the tall glass panels, and it was a glorious day inside.

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Image Sources:

Houston Symphony

Sun clip art




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