Advocate Online

Speaking Out

Humanizing Classroom Technology

Students today, besieged by bullet points and blinded by data-smog, suffer not from a deficit of information but from meaning-lag. They are increasingly calling for professors who can engage them directly. Yet too often we distance ourselves, retreating further into message-centeredness via our latest high-tech instructional media.

We fortify behind veils of presentational paraphernalia, hiding our burned and fearful hearts amidst our charts and graphs. We march our students lock-step through points we think are powerfully important, yet too often have little felt meaning for them. This is far less than authentic “education,” a “drawing out” of the student into curiosity, passionate learning, and a world of meaning and significance.

Research into the communication styles of effective college teachers shows that “teacher immediacy” is central to student learning and satisfaction. Students want teachers who see them as people, who connect with them in personal ways, who understand them, who confirm their humanity.

The great teacher finds ways to link student with student, teacher with student, and student with subject. The masterful teacher who has already made this sense of felt “immediacy” and connectivity a priority can judiciously use instructional technology to good end. Teachers who barricade themselves behind yet another layer of separation, however, commit fundamental pedagogical blunder, and students and society both lose.

Professors driven by the compulsion to “cover the field,” to present a seemingly endless array of names, dates, flow charts, bar graphs, and so on, miss the opportunity to teach the living students in front of them.

Reliance upon screen-centered transmissions can obstruct the creation of a more dynamic and humane classroom environment. Technology is certainly not fated to be fatal to student engagement in our classes, yet its use can further entrench an already message-centered teacher in counter-productive pedagogical focus.

The kind of communication for which a great teacher strives comes not from dwelling in the domain of sites and slides, but from vital classroom connection of people with people, and people with ideas, in an atmosphere of warm and empathic interpersonal contact and care. The great teacher’s true power-points are, after all, mind, body, heart, and the human spirit.

Ron Gordon is professor of communication at the Hilo campus of the University of Hawai'i, where he teaches interpersonal communication, human dialogue, listening, leadership, and modern American cinema.