Video transcript.

In this video for Intellectual Production 4, we are going to look at two forms of pedagogical communication often found in higher education: the lecture and the seminar. First, we will consider each of these discretely, then in relation to each other and with other forms of pedagogic communication together at the end. The information we pull from here comes from two articles that explore the affordances and use of lectures and seminars.

Let’s start with lectures:

The set of important ideas Frank describes is that of consumption and desire in relation to audiences and lecturers as subjects-presumed-to-know. Frank presents lecturers as having two selves, the textual self that reads a text aloud, and the animator whose life is hidden in the performance ritual of the lecture. Frank claims that what students want from the lecture is what comes from this second self and that the idea of the animator that students hold is created in their own imaginations. Further, the lecturer as animator exists initially to be devoured by students – the lecturer’s responsibility is to allow the students the freedom to realize that the animator is an illusion they have constructed, whose identity as subject-presumed to know is finite and limited.

The representative quote I’ve chosen from this text, though there were several that caught my attention, is:

Lecturers must find ways to ask students what they want from us, so that they ask this as a serious moral question about themselves. A lecture series must get students to a point of realizing that they do want something from us, and then giving them sufficient resources to ask, on their own, what this is and why (pg. 33).

I focused here because I think that this quote demonstrates that there is something in a lecture that keeps it alive as a form of pedagogic communication. What this quote demonstrates to me is an acknowledgement of the important role the audience, or students, play in how lectures unfold and are effective. The process involves everyone in the room and also involves empowering students, which I think is the overall point of the article.

Watt, in his article on seminars, describes several important ideas, the first of which is that one of the main affordances of a seminar is the ability for student to choose a path of academic inquiry of interest to them. The downside to this choose your own adventure format, is that makes it difficult for any but experienced students with significant prior knowledge to attend, as well as cultivating a culture of exclusivity around who gets to teach such a class. In addition to this inequality, the effort of the seminar in levelling the playing field between students and teachers is often full of barriers such as the way the curriculum is constructed, the number of students enrolled in the class, and the authority of the teacher in relation to their students.

A representative quote here might be:

This is a general difficulty with seminar teaching. It can more easily produce the egalitarian form than its substance, and the authority of the teacher can be more crippling to the student in the seminar than in the lecture, where there is no obligation to respond (pg. 377).

I chose this quote as the gist of the article is situating the seminar in relation to the lecture and tutorial forms of pedagogic communication, and in terms of systemic elements like exams. It also describes in detail how the seminar structure has been configured both successfully and less so.

With this information in hand, we can compare how the educational technologies described here might configure how teachers and students communicate. Lectures, while appearing to be purely instructor-led exercises in reading aloud, might actually be much more about the relationship between audiences, lecturers, and time. In time, there might be a point at which, if the lecturer can let go enough to allow it to happen, that students are then able to reflect on themselves as fully embodied people. The seminar, which is intended to be much more egalitarian, might actually only appear so on the surface. The freedom prescribed to students comes at a cost of its exclusivity and privilege and therefore might not be as co-constructed as we might think. This form of communication also forces a kind of dialogue that is predicated on student skill and preparedness.

The question I have then, about any form of pedagogical communication, is how, when we really examine the relational nature of communication between teachers and students, is the burden of that communication distributed between participants, and how can we know when we have reached the underlying epistemic objectives of each form? I ask this because in the reading of the various forms of pedagogic communication, it seems that their epistemic goals are very difficult to achieve and that we might not know when they have been reached.