Irwin L. Morris

Teaching and Learning: My Personal Perspective

Though I did not realize it at the time, I must have developed a predisposition towards the academic life at a relatively early age. Born during the last years of my father’s graduate work in chemistry, a good portion of my childhood was spent playing with beakers and test tubes, rummaging through library shelves, and writing on chalkboards. Several relatives were or are teachers (my mother, father, and grandmother). Ironically, I married a teacher whose mother was a teacher. If it is possible to be destined for the classroom, I was. Maybe because I was immersed in an academic environment from an early age (and maybe not), I have difficulty with the conventional educational wisdom manifested in the college classrooms I sat in as both an undergraduate and a graduate student.

To begin, I find the distinction between teacher and student artificial and misleading. While we may take the role of either “student” or “teacher” in any particular classroom setting, the best instructional environments are those in which students and teachers are able to teach each other and learn from each other. Regardless of class size (large lecture section or small graduate seminar) or student background (first-term freshmen, senior majors, or graduate students), I encourage interactive learning. Even in large lecture sections, I regularly solicit student input and discussion, and I emphasize the significance of attending and participating in discussion sections. In senior-level and graduate courses, I often require students to “take the podium” to present material or discuss class readings. And group projects are required in many of my courses.

Effective skill development and knowledge acquisition, at least in political science, are not distinct activities. An overemphasis on either can prove to be quite problematic. While I attempt to cultivate the use and improvement of critical thinking and communication skills in my classes, I try not to forget how difficult it is to develop these skills in an intellectual vacuum. It is one thing to teach critical thinking and communication skills in isolation. It is something else, entirely, to facilitate students’ efforts to solve real problems and answer interesting questions by thinking critically about the situation at hand and communicating their thoughts and insights to others who are addressing similar problems or questions. Likewise, without the thinking and communication skills necessary for using and applying the knowledge we have or will acquire, knowledge itself is not particularly useful. The most enriching learning environments are those in which skill development and knowledge acquisition are integrated in an effective and meaningful way. From my experience, this occurs when important theoretical questions and/or significant societal problems are focal points throughout the course and when students are regularly expected to actively address these questions and problems on a regular basis.

Next, I think the distinction between work and fun is overdone in many classrooms. I love what I do. While hard work is certainly part of the job (e.g. grading exams), I enjoy much of what I do on a regular basis. In certain circumstances (that are, admittedly, all too rare), I find my work—as teacher and researcher—especially rewarding. Over time I have come to realize that these special times all share two common traits: they involved both hard work and having fun. I have had the opportunity to do research with a very small number of very bright, very capable undergraduates and graduate students. During these research projects (two of which are still ongoing), the workload is often obscene—late nights, early mornings, and uncountably many cups of coffee, but it is also just plain fun. This “fun” is not an irrelevant by-product of our working together; it is an integral part of the learning process. I find that fun and creativity often go hand in hand, and I am at my most productive when I am able to think creatively. I expect this is true for my colleagues and students.

Finally, I consider humor a fundamental component of a productive learning environment. During my college and graduate school days, humor played a relatively small role in the classroom. My professors rarely made a conscious effort to use humor as a pedagogical tool, but when they did it was almost always memorable and effective. My experience in the classroom suggests that students respond to humor, and I think they do so for at least two reasons. First, humor can be used to establish a less threatening classroom environment. If students can laugh together (and they notice that they are laughing together), it makes it much easier for them to work together and to learn together. Second, humor often forces us to consider issues or ideas from a different perspective. Often, we laugh because we see the common or the conventional in a new and different way—from my perspective, the very essence of learning.