26 Students in a Fellow’s Class
A Note on TLH Pedagogical Methods
The Transformative Learning in the Humanities (TLH) program fosters the democratization of the humanities classroom through what is known as active or participatory learning. Such a transformative model prepares humanities students for a world that requires collaboration, written and spoken communication, project management, critical thinking, analytical reading, cross-cultural thinking, and ideation. Numerous studies, such as those conducted by Google’s Project Oxygen (2014) and Project Aristotle (2017), have demonstrated these skills are key contributors to success in the workplace and in communities and, we hasten to add, to success in the rest of a student’s education as well. Through participatory learning—a method where both faculty fellows and their students learn through a carefully structured pedagogy designed for contribution—every student not only gains essential skills but can see the ways those skills can have an impact on those around them.
TLH participatory methods draw on long traditions of active learning with genealogies in progressive education back to Maria Montessori and John Dewey, radical pedagogy (Paulo Freire and bell hooks), and a variety of contemporary, engaged pedagogies (such as those espoused by guest speakers in our Transformative Speaker Series), including those inflected by social science (such as the work of Carol Dweck on fixed versus growth mindset).
What Makes TLH Methods Innovative, and Why This Matters
In the traditional teaching model leveraged in college humanities classes, a teacher lectures to supplement reading students have done independently; the teacher then opens the class to discussion, usually by asking a question and prompting the students to respond. Typically, one or two students will raise their hand and offer an answer; the majority of the class tends to remain silent. This becomes a trope through the semester, with the course unfolding as a discussion between the teacher, viewed by the class as the authority figure in the room, and those few students who regularly speak up and proffer their opinions. The bulk of the discussion portion of the class is blanketed by an uncomfortable silence, with some students seemingly disengaging from the topic of discussion altogether.
When faculty do not use participatory methods and rely solely on traditional models, most students never contribute or say a word throughout the course, and the teacher has to chiefly rely on term papers and other independent writing assignments to divine what the students have learned from the course. In short, the traditional humanities teaching model typically eschews total participation of the students and the teacher and thus presents itself as an undemocratic pedagogical model, the problems of which are multifold and long-lasting, especially for first-generation college students and first-generation Americans.
This undemocratic model, first and foremost,