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A Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show Pedagogy: Tablet PC Use in Humanities and Communication

Student-Centered Classrooms

Andreas Karatsolis and Kevin M. Hickey Albany College of Pharmacy

Albany, NY USA

Abstract The use of Tablet PCs in the classroom is typically seen as supporting student annotation and note taking to foster the consumption and recall of facts and concepts. However, interactive software applications such as DyKnow have the potential to support active learning practices as they transform not only student-teacher interactions, but overall classroom dynamics by allowing students to generate knowledge and participate in dialogical communities of practice. This paper shows and discusses how, in a science-oriented curriculum, DyKnow facilitates student engagement with texts, themes, and arguments in three different activities within humanities and communication courses.

Introduction

The arrival of computer-mediated pedagogies has produced a plethora of new ideas and approaches to teaching. For a variety of institutional sponsorship reasons, PowerPoint has been adopted by both teachers and students because it facilitates the inclusion of images and animations in a television-like presentation that caters to student expectations for a concise visual representation of information. The cognitive style of PowerPoint, however, is not always conducive to student learning because of its linear nature and its “forced progression” presentation model (Tufte, 2003) which makes the incorporation of student-centered pedagogies more difficult. More interactive software such as DyKnow, however, has the potential to allow PowerPoint-like inclusions of visuals while increasing the student-centered nature of classrooms. DyKnow is an educational application designed to utilize the capabilities of Tablet PCs and promote active learning classroom strategies (Dyknow.com, 2006). Although classroom research utilizing this tool is in its early stages, this research has largely focused on science-based courses such as in the fields of computer science for collaboration and note taking (Berque, 2006), physics for simulation experiments (Mitra-Kirtley et al., 2006), and language instruction for its pen-based character writing capabilities (Itoh, 2006). This paper, however, focuses on a humanities and communication curriculum and discusses how the use of DyKnow within a tablet-PC-based classroom promotes student-centered pedagogies in the creation and facilitation of learning communities.1

Knowledge is never “purely” acquired but is always culturally and socially embedded (Lave, 1993; O’Connor, 2001; Wenger, 1998). Within scientific communities, Latour

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(1987) shows that cognitive activity is distributed among people in social networks. In addition, approaches to the health sciences (the focus at our school, Albany College of Pharmacy, hereafter ACP) are moving toward more community-based approaches to integrative health that incorporate both expertise in what can be called “multi-cultural competencies” and awareness of the increasingly international scope of health care issues. For these reasons, professional curricula in the health sciences emphasize the development of practitioners who can understand their roles in culturally diverse societies through a liberal arts curriculum (in the area of pharmacy practice, for instance, see the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education [ACPE] guidelines).

As humanities faculty in a science and health-oriented institution, we are interested in encouraging strong communities of practice and increasing the opportunities for students not only to engage in active learning within the classroom but also to engage with texts (understood in the broad Derridean sense of the word) in ways that help students to develop interactive, self-critical approaches to communication that are vital to effective participation in culturally diverse communities. To facilitate the development of these skills, our school made a commitment to the Tablet PC technology which all our students use in wireless networked classrooms since 2003. Although we are just beginning to conduct more systematic classroom research on the effects the introduction of such tools has had on our curriculum and classroom practices, our experiences suggest that these technologies support active learning. In our humanities-based courses, students not only retain more information and take more elaborate notes, they are also empowered to become active participants in learning communities of real practice — a condition analogous to changing a standard movie or play into one with active audience participation, a sort of “Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show Pedagogy.”

To enable new software and technologies which facilitate learning communities, we organize our classroom approaches around fluid and quasi-linear “progressions” of interactions that can be summarized as “text,” “themes,” and “arguments” (or a similar “progression” used extensively in our school is that of “text,” “context,” and “subtext”). These recursive, interactive, and overlapping “steps” toward understanding the intertextual nature of the world are “inherently dialogic” and help students to understand how “[e]very text exists in relation to previous and forthcoming texts” (Lenski, 1998, p. 75). Not only understanding but also participating in the open, fluid, and always-becoming nature (i.e., creation) of knowledge is particularly important for students planning to work in any of the increasingly interactive and culturally-diverse fields of heath care. This initiation into “the experience of learning how to name the world” (emphasis in original) is what Paulo Freire describes as a “true learning experience, and therefore dialogical” (1993, p. 159). And it is this dialogical participation in the creation of knowledge — a participation that occurs not only among various groups (and classrooms) during a semester but that also occurs semester after semester — that is a vital learning experience for our students.

We will attempt to provide a sense of how our interactive “IT-pedagogy” works by using examples of student-produced DyKnow notebook panels presented to illustrate this text-themes-arguments progression (but not all from the same course). The first section

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focuses on “texts” in our freshman writing course, Principles of Communication; the second section focuses on “themes” from sessions in our Caribbean Literature and Music course; the third section focuses on “arguments” and comes from a course entitled Academic Reading and Writing. Within each section we present examples of DyKnow panels created by students (or an instructor) to provide an archive of our classroom activities.

Text: Interactive Text Analysis and Revision

Humanities courses require students to engage with texts, both in analyzing and in revising them for organizational and rhetorical effectiveness. In ACP’s introductory course entitled Principles of Communication, students engage with many of the genres that they will encounter in their academic and professional careers. However, instead of being presented with static generic models in a lecture format, students in our classes use communication technologies both to engage in collaborative discourse analyses of texts and to practice models for consequent revisions.

In one such activity, we first introduce students to a generic model of four rhetorical moves for conference abstracts as proposed by John Swales: outline the research field; justify a particular piece of research/study; introduce the paper; summarize the paper and highlight its outcome/results (Swales, 1990). Then in DyKnow panels, students analyze and annotate examples of abstracts to determine the prevalence and distribution of these rhetorical moves (see Figure 1). This first activity allows the whole class to begin thinking in terms of author intentionality and rhetorical strategies associated with what we can think of as the genre called “abstracts.”

Figure 1: Example of Abstract with Annotation of Rhetorical Moves

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Students then are presented with a problem: they have to examine an abstract from research in the field of biomechanics, an area they are unfamiliar with. Their first task is to carefully read the abstract to choose — from a list of three titles — the most effective title for the abstract; the potential titles range from a very broad description of the topic to a narrow focus on the methods employed in the work. Using the polling feature of DyKnow, students are able to make anonymous choices, and see the aggregate of all responses on a graph (see Figure 2).

As the graph shows, most students originally thought that the first title would be more appropriate for this abstract, following the “high-school model” where the topic is announced in the beginning. However, students who had selected the second title argued in the class’s subsequent open discussion that the authors pointed directly to the “objective of the study” in the third full paragraph, which made it a better choice for a title. Very quickly the class came to a consensus that “B” was more appropriate, as the textual evidence and the generic model previously presented did not support the choice of “A.” In short, students were able to formulate a communal response to this problem based on a deeper understanding of the generic structure of abstracts.

Figure 2: DyKnow Screen on Abstract Title Analysis

Following this analysis, students are then asked to revise an abstract which has clear organizational problems and also provide a title for it. Based on the shared knowledge on the generic structure of abstracts that the students have just collaboratively developed,

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they are able not only to revise successfully, but also to have good reasons for their changes. Figure 3 shows the first step in this revision process, an annotation of the abstract for suggestions for large-scale revisions. As all students can easily submit their panels to the instructor who then appends them to all the students’ notebooks, within a few minutes every student has not only access to everyone else’s annotations for suggested revisions but also data that allow students to perceive patterns in their collective comments. In this respect, students are able both to apply learned skills in a new situation and understand the theory upon which their developing skills are based.

Figure 3: Example of Student Annotations on Abstract Revision

In short, without a direct exposition or lecture on the structure of abstracts and within one eighty-minute session, students used DyKnow and their Tablet PCs to reach a consensus, develop a model and revise work based on this model with limited direct intervention by the instructor.

Themes: Group Response and Synthesis

In addition to analyzing individual texts and abstracts, students at ACP analyze clusters of texts to understand how themes “thread” through and thereby interconnect texts both diachronically and synchronically. This helps students to gain a sense of how texts

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engage in multiple ongoing “conversations.” The two following DyKnow panels come from an exercise that asked five groups of students (in a class of 26 students) to use Jamaican dub poet Mutabaruka’s poem “Dis Poem” and his song “I am De Man” to determine how themes in these texts connect with themes in other texts read as part of the Caribbean Literature and Music course the students were taking. Although each group had the two Mutabaruka texts as “core texts,” the additional texts assigned to each group varied with each group.

Figure 4 shows the work of one group, with each student using a different color (blue, black, red) to highlight different themes and connections. Figure 4 shows the multiple approaches used by students to understand Mutabaruka’s texts. Students used paraphrase and summation. They picked out key words. The comments written by each student (distinguished by their colors) shows how each student took different yet complementary approaches to understanding Mutabaruka. The intertextual nature of texts’ meanings is indicated by putting Mutabaruka’s texts into both diachronic and synchronic “conversations” with the Bible, European G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History, West African Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, the poetry of Caribbean author Derek Walcott, the calypso music of David Rudder, the historical novel of Trinidadian Michael Anthony, an essay of Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle, and the dialogic “history song” of Bob Marley, “Buffalo Soldier.” Not only are the diversity of texts and approaches used to produce the meanings of Mutabaruka’s two texts indicative of the actively intertextual approach used by students in this group, but Figure 4 also uniquely interprets both Mutabaruka’s texts and the dozen additional texts referred to in this panel.

Figure 4: Exploration of Themes from One Student Group

The importance of this group’s interpretation is at least threefold: first it provides students with a concrete sense of their power as interpreters, as creators of knowledge and not just

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consumers who (à la Freire’s “banking concept of education”) regurgitate what they are fed. Second, this interpretation provides students with a visual analysis and record of how the meanings of all the texts that they have brought together are always changing, always in flux, always significantly dependent upon their “contexts.” Third, as we see by looking ahead to Figure 5, when the entire class comes together students see — despite the uniqueness of their various group interpretations — how their texts all engage in multiple overlapping conversations, and these interconnecting conversations help students to understand how texts cannot be reduced to discrete and unchanging meanings.

Figure 5 shows that in a poem and a song that none of the students had previously encountered, each of the five groups found similar themes (as indicated by the four groupings) although each group used different words to describe those themes. One important reason for this difference is that many of the words that students chose to use came from texts other than “Dis Poem” and “I am De Man.” To take the bottom left cluster, for instance, “no money” comes from Jamaican James Berry’s poem “Fantasy of an African Boy,” “education” is a key word that comes from Trinidadian Michael Anthony’s historical novel In the Heat of the Day, and “poverty” refers both to Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison’s “Gleanings” and to Bob Marley’s song “Them Belly Full (but we hungry).” This strategy helps provide students with a sense of the multiple and interconnected meanings of a single text, an idea known as “intertextuality.”

Figure 5: Synthesis of Themes Determined by Five Groups’ Analyses of Mutabaruka’s “Dis Poem” and “I am De Man”

What is especially important is that students come to this intertextual understanding not through a teacher’s “orchestration” of, say, Hegel, and Walcott and Mutabaruka but instead through “students’ orchestrations” enacted within “social, cultural, and material

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contexts” (O’Connor, 2001, p. 287) of the classroom, the school, the nation, and the world in which these texts exist (e.g., the largely impoverished 20th century Caribbean and imperialistic, 19th century Europe). This focus on student engagement helps prepare students for the complexity of the world in which they must make not only “life decisions” but also analyze and interpret the cultural (and other) components of health to make appropriate health care decisions.

Other than the assigning of suggested texts to each group, this was a student-run exercise in thematic analysis, and students determined how those themes occur in different manifestations in different texts. In addition to the enthusiasm students brought to this exercise, what is particularly important is that at the final stage (the “synthesis stage”) students see the work of other groups and learn from those groups. This empowers students as they experience their own abilities to read, understand, and interpret texts as participants in multiple, ongoing conversations.

Through this process, the divisions between teacher and student bleed into each other. Fellow students are increasingly seen as partners, as teachers, and as creators of knowledge, knowledge whose validity is confirmed both by other texts and by the similar conclusions independently arrived at by other readers and other groups. Through this process, students also achieve a better sense of what constitutes truth and meaning; they understand (or at least work toward the understanding), for instance, that truth it is not some eternal and unchanging entity that rests outside the cave of our benighted experiences awaiting the retrieval of people better and stronger than us, but that truth and meaning are socially constructed, not independent of the material world, but in conversation with that world, a conversation that occurs through the stories and texts that we both inherit and continually transform.

What also makes this pedagogical approach valuable is that DyKnow provides students with multiple panels that show how texts were analyzed and then interpreted, providing students with what we can characterize as a “living document” of their own engagements with people like Hegel and Walcott. Students may still feel “out of their league” when joining into a conversation with Hegel and Walcott, but they have nevertheless conversed, and this remains far better than mutely taking in what is essentially a philosophical monologue which students attempt merely to record and then “play back” to their teachers at appropriate times.

Arguments: Visual Representations of the Literature

The final example comes from our course entitled Academic Reading and Writing, in a module where students learn to synthesize ideas from multiple sources in the creation of systematic literature reviews. In this activity, students are first introduced to the concept of a systematic literature review which combines the inclusion of multiple sources with a focus on a narrow problem area from which a thesis statement (or statements) can be developed. As you can see in Figure 6, the instructor presents a visual representation of possible clusters in a systematic literature review and then uses the annotation stylus

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feature to explain different possibilities of disciplinary foci or connections among sources. Ideas such as a source presenting positions on multiple topics, or an author assuming positions on related issues in different works can be explained and discussed.

Figure 6: Systematic Review Instructor Slide

The students are then presented with six brief articles on the topic of access to wilderness, and, in a manner similar to the previous activity, read them individually, and then separate into groups to work collaboratively on a panel. This time, however, the groups all have a specific issue (e.g., “Human Freedom”) which serves as the organizational theme for the development of what will be a systematic review cluster for showing how all six authors respond to the issue of human freedom in relation to the topic of access to wilderness areas (see Figure 7).

In the upper half of this panel, the group tries to summarize each article by focusing on each author’s position on the issue of human freedom. In several cases students pick and then paste into the panel a significant statement which captures an author’s position as expressed in an article. The collaborative process of choosing (or even developing) this “significant statement” forces a negotiation of close readings of these texts. In the bottom half of the panel, students have created a concept map of how the authors’ different positions are in conversation with each other. Again through dynamic group interactions, students are able to recognize the points of convergence between authors, the divisions between the different positions and eventually find ways to develop their own positions on this issue. Without being experts on environmental issues or argumentation, students are able to understand the arguments put forward by a community of experts, develop

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their own responses to them, and present this work to their own community of practice —their class. These are the first and most central steps in developing the rhetorical skills required for the development of strategies to write literature reviews or include such sections in one’s research work. What’s perhaps even more valuable is that all these notes and concept maps became part of the classroom notes for that particular session. Using the capabilities of DyKnow, all students can save everyone else’s notes and even play them back when they are writing their own literature reviews. In this way, the whole community of thinkers has contributed to the conceptualization of each individual project.

Figure 7: Notes on a Systematic Literature Review from One Group

Conclusions and Recommendations

The previous examples of in-class activities on “texts,” “themes,” and “arguments” showcase ways in which tablet PCs and DyKnow can transform classroom dynamics and promote more student-centered pedagogies. Educational technologies for the classroom do not have to be instructor driven, follow a linear model of presentation, or exclude student interaction. As humanities and communication professors, we are always interacting with texts, themes, and arguments, but not until recently have educational technologies allowed us to actively engage students in responsive learning experiences. If we follow Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism (1981), we are creating inherently responsive experiences by allowing students to act at a particular point in time and space, working to

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construct knowledge in ways that allow those students to become full participants in a community of intellectual practice. Embracing such technologies and re-imagining our roles as educators through the new interactions these technologies afford is a valuable pedagogical exercise for helping students prepare for a world that is not only increasingly complex but also a world that too often works to turn people into passive consumers instead of critically engaged producers of knowledge.

Notes 1. Although beyond the scope of this paper, the use of interactive software programs in conjunction with tablet PCs not only promotes student-centered pedagogies but also manifests the trans- and interdisciplinary natures of the university. Interactive, student-centered, and technologically mediated pedagogies help break down barriers between teacher and students, among students, and among departments by promoting less rigid (less compartmentalized) and more active ways of thinking.

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