Field notes
I sit at my desk in my cubicle, eating the dinner that I have brought with me from home. I check the time -- 4:45pm. I need to be out the door at 5pm if I am to beat the really bad traffic to Claremont. One of my employees arrives and starts talking to me about some of the work he’s doing on one of our projects. I eat. I listen. I try to figure out whether he needs me to make a decision, and more importantly whether this is something that is, in fact, related to that project. A collegue asks me for help with something he’s working on. I leave for my car at 5:10pm. The traffic between Pasadena and Claremont is neither worse nor better than usual, and I park in front of the IS & T building at 6:35pm. I talk briefly on the phone with my partner, Jessica, who I have not seen since early morning, and we compare our days. I feel tired. I go to Hagelbargers, order a coffee, and sit working for a little while longer on a presentation I plan to give aat work on Thursday or Friday.
I walk into class a few minutes before class starts, still thinking about how I want to do my work presentation. I say hello to Michelle on the way in to the center of the room, where I like to sit. She looks tired. It looks like the graduate student council was using the room before us again, because the tables are set up in concentric rings around the dais. Most students are sitting in the outside rings, near the walls or the back of the room. Some out of habit (they’ve been sitting in the same places all semester); some out of need for electricity for their computers; some because they sit with their friends or groups; some for their own reasons. I sit in my usual spot. Justin is next to me, in his usual spot. Sam, Payam and Jung are sitting near me along the north wall; Sam and Payam look tired, too, especially Sam. Behind me are Kathryn and Seth, in their usual spots. Tom sits along the south wall of the room among the IS & T people, close to the speaker but out of most of the students' lines of sight.
Alan Wicker, a guest speaker, talks on his work in collecting worker’s narratives in Ghana over the last several years. He speaks for a while about the narrative form in qualitative research and how he came to do his current work. I cannot see Alan because a slide projector on a pedestal blocks my view of him. His voice is quiet. It competes with the intermittent sound of fingernails on keyboards throughout the class, and does not always win out. I look around the room, and some typists are focused intently on their laptop screens. Jung is distracted by Tomomi’s typing, and moves to another part of the room. I check my e-mail occasionally. After speaking for a while, Alan stops and asks for questions. Of the twenty-five people in class, few ask questions (I only remember two — those are our most outspoken students). Leo asks the first one. Tom asks a question of Allan (Tom and Alan have known each other for many years), perhaps to ensure that Alan gets enough questions to show that we are interested in what he had to say; perhaps in an attempt to draw the class back into the discussion.
The lights go off, and Alan shows us slides of the Ghanian workers he interviewed. He tells the job of each person pictured, and some of the people I see are those whose narratives I read, which I find very interesting. When the lights come back on, the class looks noticably more sleepy. Tom displays quotes from people’s responses to the Ghanian worker narratives we had read on the projector, and elicits comments. Few volunteer to speak, and Tom has to ask students to speak, including me. I hold back partially because I speak frequently and want to give other people the floor, but really because I am dog tired. Nawar comments about how typical quantitative research in Africa shows only a very constrained set of data (AIDS, economics, etc), and how nice it is that Prof. Wicker’s research shows a fuller picture of African life. I am glad for her comment, because she does not speak often and typically has interesting things to say. The lights go back off and we look at slides of Allan’s trip to Cuba. Afterward, the class thanks Alan, and he leaves.
We take a short break. Sam (possibly Payam?) and Jung talk about applying for a music competition or grant of some kind. I browse the web. Jason and Nicole talk about their group presentation. Kevin tells me that the lights out portion of Alan’s talk made him very drowsy, and Michelle echoes that.
Tom turns the class over to the project groups for progress presentations, and the lack of energy in the room is like the hundred foot giant that he struggles to keep from falling on us. None of the groups (except for group 6) has much progress to show from the previous week (especially my group, Group 2), and Tom ends up doing most of the talking and acts as presenter for groups 2, 3 and 4. Kathryn (Group 3) proposes a useful question, which Tom offers to Group 2 to use in the focus group. Tom proposes that we do a practice focus group with students before the real focus group, which we (Group 2) think is a good idea. Group 5/6 gives a presentation of software that animates still photographs to make them appear like they are talking, and everyone laughs.
We break into our groups. It is nearly 9:45pm. The rest of Group 2 joins me where I am sitting. Everyone but Jung looks exhausted. I present the three or four focus group questions I had brought with me, as well as Kathryn’s question. Everyone has interesting things to say, perhaps because of motivating factor of the public airing of our lack of progress. We expand the number of questions up to eight, partly by brainstorming, partly using Appendix B of Csikszentmihali’s Creativity, and try to think of probe questions for each one. I take notes, and say I will write them up on the class wiki over the weekend. The room is now loud with talking, and I can see that the other groups are quite animated, as well.
The class breaks up at 10:00pm, I go to my car and drive home.
Discussion: Class interaction in TDNY 401O
I presented a narrative covering the time period from 5pm to 10pm, bracketing the class (which runs from 7pm to 10pm), and told it from my perspective (the perpective of one student) because the bracketing places the class in context of a student’s day. I know that (in talking with other students over the previous weeks) many other students experience the class in a similar context: work, a long drive, then class until 10pm. I also tell it in the present tense to bring the reader vicariously into the context of the class and day. Three factors that influence participation and class culture are either directly evident in the field data, or can be inferred. They are (a) mental exhaustion inhibits participation (b) life context from outside class distracts students (c) the large classroom and class size inhibits people from speaking.
Mental exhaustion is palpable in the class, and has become a more prominent factor in lack of participation as the semester has progressed. Many people in the class on that day either looked tired, or expressed to me that they were tired. This mental fatigue directly impacts the class dynamic and culture. I suspect that a critical mass of tired people lowers the participation of the entire class. The fact that Tom never appears to be tired, and is always full of energy (even though he must surely have had a full day behind him), makes the listlessness of the class stand out even more.
Intrusions from the life context — the larger framework of the student’s life into which the class fits — compete directly with classroom activities. I walked into class thinking of my work, and was only able to release it with difficulty. At least some of the typing that goes on in the class is probably not class related, because the typing and the direction of attention of typists does not always correlate with what is currently being discussed.
The large classroom size (room size) and class size (number of people) are clearly detrimental to comfortable interaction for a large portion of the class. While the full class is in session, Tom does most of the talking and has to prompt students into participating by calling on them directly. When the class is broken into smaller groups — such as during the project group discussion or the breaks — most people tend to participate readily.
Conclusion
Maintaining a healthy and enthusiastic interaction in any large class (more than 12 students, say) in a lecture environment is not easy. I think that encouraging a culture of comfort, in which people feel comfort in expressing themselves, and a culture of investment, in which people are interested and feel responsiblity for the quality of class discussion is both important and difficult in this environment, with these students. Mental exhaustion and life context, which may be particular to the CGU graduate program due to the fact that (at least in comparison to my first graduate career) the students in our class are older and have more complex lives than younger students (who might not be employed or have families, for example), are unfortunate realities which must somehow be accomodated within class context and pedagogy. Further, although the field work I presented above does not reveal it explicitly, I believe that the fact that the students in this transdisciplinary course come from different schools presents an additional hurdle to overcome in supporting good interaction (perhaps due to predjudice toward other disciplines, or lack of common meaning structure or language between some disciplines). When I compare interaction in TDNY401O with that in CGU IS focused classes taught at Caltech for Caltech and JPL staff (students who share a common meaning structure, vocabulary and culture), I see that the interaction is very different: more effort is given to limiting discussion than promoting it.
These are not insurmountable problems, as other days within this same TDNY 401O class have gone much differently in terms of classroom interaction. But all these factors must be somehow accomodated and explicitly understood within the classrom context and pedagogy in order to mitigate them.
