Dean Encourages Professors to Teach Naked?

While many see technology as potentially unlocking an entirely new learning environment, almost as many see it as a bane to education. In fact, it now seems that at least one college dean, regretfully, believes that technology is the root cause of a boring lecture hall.

Jeffrey Young, reporting for The Chronicle of Higher Education, notes Southern Methodist University Dean José A. Bowen has gone so far as to challenge professors to teach without any machinery. Young notes that Bowen uses a more provocative phrase to describe teaching without technology.

He wants his staff to “teach naked.”

Teaching Naked

Actually, while insisting he wants to pull the plug on all technology, it seems that Bowen is primarily trying to discourage professors from using PowerPoint. Apparently, far too many instructors are using the tool as nothing more than a slide display.

These professors appear to be using the “program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool” according to Young. More importantly, they are apparently boring their students to death.

Still, reading a little deeper, it does seem that Dean Bowen is requesting a tad more. He appears to be advocating for the removal of most technology from the classroom.

“Class time should be reserved for discussion,” the dean contends, “especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors.”

Is Technology the Issue?

While the idea of teaching naked initially appears focused on eliminating technology from the classroom, it is clear that the issue is not one related to machines. Instead, it is the lack of skill employed by the professor and the inability to use technology wisely.

Yet, according to Young, the “biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods.” Unfortunately, while the standard lecture model is generally less than riveting as an educational format, it is a model that “is pretty comfortable for both students and professors.”

In other words, a bored student is also not having any demands placed on him. That suits more than a few college attendees extremely well.

Poor Message

Ironically, while presenting his ideas at a conference that was attended by Young, Bowen offered “a philosophical argument about the best way to engage students.” In it he talked of “using podcasts and video games.”

And it also seems that when Bowen first began removing some technology from classrooms, that technology was quite old and in need of an upgrade to match today’s sophistication. Apparently, there was no funds to upgrade.

That leaves one troubled.

Dave Parry at Academhack tackles the silly assertion head on.

“…..any teaching practice requires technology. Are we to imagine that these luddite professors disallow paper and pen from class? ‘Students should not take notes in class, the technology gets in the way of discussion.’

“Are we to imagine that they do not allow books in class? ‘No books, they get in the way of discussion.’

“Books, paper, pen, desks, chalkboards, whiteboards, all of these are technologies.”

Parry goes on, leveling the fallacious notion presented by Bowen:

“Teaching without digital technology is an irresponsible pedagogy. Why? The future is digital, love it or hate it. We can argue later about whether or not this is a good or a bad thing.

“But to educate students, or to attempt to educate students without developing their digital literacy is to leave them ill prepared for their futures. You wouldn’t think of educating a student and not teaching them how to read, digital literacy is this crucial. In the future if you don’t know how to use this technology you will be ‘illiterate’.”

Furthermore,

“We can’t go back to ‘teaching the way it was,’ because this will produce a generation of students who don’t know how to critically engage with, leverage, use, resist, these very technologies. Eliminating technology produces not the affect of a more engaged literate student populous, rather it produces the reverse, an ill informed, uncritical, unengaged student populous who will become at the very best passive consumers of the technology being resisted, and at the worst its willing victims.”

We could not agree more. The idea of ‘Teaching Naked,’ either figuratively or literally, simply makes no sense.