Introductory Courses, Student Ethos, and Living the Life of the Mind

## Citation

Gregory, Marshall W. “Introductory Courses, Student Ethos, and Living the Life of the Mind.” *College Teaching*, vol. 45, no. 2, 1997, pp. 63-71.

## Summary

The problem with "introductory" in "introductory" courses - implies a less substantial course than more advanced ones, but actually students often find intro courses more challenging because of their status as novices to the discipline.

### What Do Introductory Courses Teach?

Introductory courses as first impressions, which are important... not just to the field, but to the university.

"Freshmen and sophomores learn not only about English, history, or economics, but about college as a whole. They learn to read the ethos of their academic community the same way they earlier learned to read the ethos of their own families, congregations, or neighborhoods. They sense the assumptions, even if they cannot articulate them, that their teachers and older peers hold about education in general." (63)

Does a focus on introductory courses' disciplinary content and cognitive skills start "too far down the road"? "It seems to me that introductory courses cannot teach either disciplinary content or cognitive skills as effectively as most teachers would like them to do without first improving their general itellectuality. By *intellectuality* I mean something more than and different from cognitive skills. *Intellectuality* here means more than just the ability to analyze or synthesize; **it refers to something more like an overall stance. It is what we call living the life of the mind.**" (63)

"The job of introductory courses [is[ to make sure that when students *leave* them, they not only recognize the stance of intellectuality but have developed some ambition for taking that stance on their own." (64)

Before disciplinary content and cognitive skills can be taught, students need to be introduced to "two sets of attitudes that are both antecedent to, and that condition, learning: first, a set of attitudes that many students hold about intellectuality itself, and, second, a set of general attitudes they also hold about learning." (64)

### Intellectual Presumptions

Recognizing the value of ignorance; before coming to introductory classes, students have been immersed in a society and education system that scorns ignorance - not just the bad kind.

#### *Value of Ignorance vs. Value of Knowledge*

Value of knowledge often thought of in relation to the cost of ignorance, which perpetuates a neoliberal economizing and commodification of education, seeing it only as a means towards a financial end. We need to stop denigrating education by placing it in service to getting a job.

Stigmatizing ignorance also leads to a deprecation of curiosity - "an essential foundation both for polonged deliberation, whether performed in our own heads or in company with others, and for the delayed gratification of answers that can only be earned by incremental degrees and long commitments." (64)

"The search for knowledge begins with a sense of deprivation rooted in ignorance." (64) - Compare with Foucault's assertion that critique begins by not wanting to be ruled in that way? What is the link between critique and curiosity - critique knows what end it wants to accomplish (see also "Commitment to *telos*"?)

Students come to us wanting to know an answer; if they have the answer, they feel good, if they do not have the answer, they feel bad and do whatever they can to get out of that feeling as soon as possible. How to encourage students to dwell in the curiosity and not-knowing, to puzzle their own way out of it? (How to restructure classroom discussion around an awkward silence, for example?)

#### *Questions vs. Answers*

Corollary to previous point, students in introductory courses need to learn to ask questions, rather than what answers to give. In the students' mind, both questions and answers are the domain of the teacher - the teacher asks questions and takes answers that are already known in advance. Few teachers reinforce the idea that **questions belong to students**. Look for models of discussion that are centered around student questions, not teacher questions. (Compare with this - also, possibly use this as a first-day or early-in-the-semester text/reading? Stand back and let the students work through it)

#### *Concepts vs. Experience*

Against the Locke notion of the *tabula rasa* that gets filled over time, but is the model of education that students most often come to us with in their heads. And against the Romantic and existentialist belief in concepts as the realm of genius intellects, and facts as a more ordinary and grasp-able thing.

"I advocate balancing students' naive confidence in the ontology of facts with a suitable recognition that the way facts become facts in the first place, and then they way they get organized into meaningful structures of knowledge, is not according to self-selection or to self-announcement, or to a transcendent pattern that only teachers can see." (66) Teaching students to value and that they have ability to learn about that which is not immediately available to be apprehended.

### Student Ethos: Humility vs. Self-Centerdness

Talking here about ethos of students *as* students, not as individuals or as persons in a broader sense.

* An ethos of self-centeredness - not arrogance, but an insidious yet mostly innocent assumption that everything in the classroom "not only does - but should - revolve around the students' feelings." (66) Reinforced by the end-of-semester student evaluation that implies a "customer is always right" model and rarely invites the student to think from the instructor's perspective of why they might have done things in a certain way. "Teachers and students alike would do better to agree that learning is, on the student's part, a willingness to participate in being called outside of the ego or the self in order to capture a glimpse of something that exists *out there*, and to relate it somehow to what he or she has, or is, *in here*. [...] All the knowledge in all of the disciplines [exists] outside the student. A fundamental question that follows from this truism is, then, what does it mean to learn about these things?" (67) Maybe another way to ask this question or a related one, how should or what does it look like for teachers to retain or assert their authority without resorting to the old model of master-apprentice?

#### *Are Students' Comfort Zones Important?*

"Too often both students and teachers alike fail to operate from a belief that the best version of a student's ethos *as* a student is taking that big risk of going outside of the self, accepting grades lower than A's while trying to earn them, being humble enough to concede that the standards for success exist outside of the comfort zone, and, finally, believing that this kind of humility is appropriate for getting an education." (68)

-Discomfort is not an automatic negative (it's different from direct harm, but is this a difference of degree or kind? And isn't it going to be different for each student - the stakes may be much higher or lower for some students than others)

#### *Four Stressful Forces*

Things that obscure the vision of work and the attitude of humility:

1. Living in a society that values instant gratification in all things - which Gregory links to consuming the most up-to-date products available for fear of being behind or missing out (How does this square with the previous claims about student comfort zones? Is wanting the newest thing, even if it is exotic or strange, still within the comfort zone? How, then, to value *this* form of curiosity?)
2. The infiltration into academe of the retail model of education - again, the "customer is always right" way of thinking, which lets students assume that faculty will be accommodating. "Although teachers' supportiveness is good when done for the right reasons, the pressure to please students so they will stay enrolled pushes up against the better motive of pleasing them in order to improve their learning." (69) (What can we say about this point, in relation to this article and this one about college instructors' emotional labor and support for students?) Gregory suggests that students are being positively reinforced simply for "for being in school, not necessarily for doing anything remarkable in school," which amplifies the innocent and unconscious self-centeredness he keeps circling around.
3. Emphasis, since the late 70s, on student-centered classrooms. Here, not advocating for a return to lecture-format or authoritarian teaching, but "it seems clear to me that unless teachers carefully modulate their message to students about student-centeredness, and that unless students are persuaded that we also need to center on, for example, content and learning - then they are left free to conflate student-centeredness with self-centeredness without ever seeing their own psychic sleight of hand." (69)
	1. Advocating for an ethos of student and faculty humility, recognizing the Other, which in turn fosters a better understanding of and willingness and ability to engage the Other, thinking and acting in relation rather than in isolation
4. The postmodern elevation of subjectivity as very nearly a final authority for everything - which argues against the totalizing hegemony of rationality; if identity is constructed and diffuse, how can there be recourse to claims of universal truth? The slide into mere (and vicious) relativism. But by giving everything over to subjectivity, again we give power to student self-centeredness.

### University Ethos: The Life of the Mind

Introductory courses need to help cultivate student ethos, but also an appropriate university ethos. What is an/the appropriate ethos of the university? How do instructors model that ethos to students? Is there a unified ethos being presented across the students' courses and years in college?

"I propose that the function of the university is to cultivate the life of the mind and to make the advantages of that cultivation available to both individuals and to society. [...] I believe that teachers should take as one important aim, perhaps the most important, not merely the traditional aim of teaching content and skills, but the teaching of general principles of intellectuality. [...] In addition, introductory courses should teach students how to talk about and how to analyze the processes, aims, and value of their own educations." (70)

Students "have to be taught how to learn. Having an intuitive sense of ignorance and a need to know is not enough. The very considerations discussed in this essay - intellectual presumptions, student ethos, and various rationales for learning - are topics that students need to know how to think about on their own and with others. Introductory courses are the only places in the curriculum where this kind of education can occur for most students." (70)

## Notes

This is such a strange essay! His focus on the introductory class is very important and the cultivation of intellectuality is perhaps the first step of a rhetorical education, with rhetorical education more specifically directed at civic participation. Gregory's language of self-centeredness is a point well-taken, but it smacks of "special snowflake" talk, and I fear that it could be misappropriated for those ends. Especially his critique of postmodernism - he even admits that this is a bit of a slippery slope argument, since no students and few teachers actually take it that far as to advocate vicious relativism. But that *is* a real (if not legitimate) complaint - especially from conservatives, railing against the "liberal agenda" of universities and university professors.

How can liberalism / the university / rhetoric insist upon foundations that are not essentialist? Is there a model of education or a mode of critique or a form of rhetoric that can be taught that is not available to be co-opted? These questions remain.