It happened last night. The Mutiny. And it made me happy.
There is a point in each semester that I give a task to students in a class I am teaching and they ignore it and do something else. If the students already know me, it happens early on. But if they come to class not yet knowing me, it takes quite a bit of work to get them there. It helps to have an accomplice – even just one – who organizes the group to rebellion.
I tell students, from the outset, that the discussion prompts I give them are suggestions – or starting points. I tell them not to stick rigidly to the order of the prompts on my handout. I encourage them to start with the prompts/questions that are of most interest to them and to follow fruitful tangents. And I tell them my philosophy with discussion guides is that it is my job to give them something they can ignore when they decide to do something better. But they laugh as though that were a joke – and they inevitably stick to the questions I pose in the discussion guide, proceeding dutifully from top to bottom. I know this because, when I drop in to join the discussion in one of the small groups, one of the members usually tells me where they are in the list of prompts as a progress update.
These are graduate students. They have nearly two decades of experience in classrooms that socialized them to comply. So it is not surprising they are good at it.
I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I like to think that the prompts I put on the guides are informed by experience and will elicit discussion about key ideas, common points of confusion, or important differences of opinion. So I think it is probably fine if they stick to the prompts I offer. But experience also tells me that when they get brave enough to say ‘thanks but we found a different path we are going to follow instead’, that is when the best stuff happens.
So I look forward to the mutiny. Because it is a signal that students are taking ownership. And now I am along for their ride.