I'm sure all of you have your Syllabi done and copied for classes already,
but just in case you don't.  Here is an interesting piece published recently
in a journal I get.  Reprinted here with permission:

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 Using the Syllabus to Lay Down the Law

 

³You will submit three projects.² ³I expect regular participation.² ³You
must attend class.² ³Students bear sole responsibility for ensuring that
papersŠsubmitted electronically to the professor are received in a timely
manner.² The ³arrogant tone² and ³imperial commands² (p. 51) are an
all-too-familiar part of syllabi for college courses, writes Mano Singham in
the article cited below. Edits like these even appear in the course outlines
of gentle, kindly faculty members.

 

He also notes the lack of objection raised by students to these harshly
stated demands. ³Students don¹t seem to be offended by being ordered around
in course syllabi.² (p. 52) Could this be because they don¹t read course
syllabi?

 

Troubled by the rude tone and detailed legalism apparent in so many syllabi,
Singham searches for the cause and concludes that ³it is likely that the
authoritarian syllabus is just the visible symptom of a deeper underlying
problem, the breakdown of trust in the student-teacher relationship.² (p.
52)

 

Among the likely causes of the breakdown, he credits the creeping intrusion
of local and national legislation into the classroom‹things like the Family
Educational Rights and Privacy Act as well as many institutional policies
and rules. He recognizes the need for both but believes that common sense
and judgment should be the driving force behind making classrooms civil
places conducive to learning. ³My concern is that trust, respect, and
judgment are being squeezed out by an increasingly adversarial relationship
between teachers and students.² (p. 53)

 

His analysis leads him to another likely culprit: the amount of power a
faculty member typically wields. No one questions their right to set the
rules for every aspect of classroom decorum and everyone expects students to
live by those rules. The power is nearly absolute and, as has been wisely
observed, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Unfortunately, many faculty
use their power not for the benefit of students, but to protect themselves
against any and all potential challenges to that authority. Singham now gets
personal in his analysis. He looks at the syllabus for his large 200-student
physics course and recounts how the list of rules grew year by year, driven
by their own internal logic. A student violated an unstated rule (by not
proofreading written work, for example) and the next year a rule demanding
careful editing was added to the syllabus.

 

Singham describes where this process took him: ³I began to think that I
could create a rule to achieve whatever I wanted.² (p. 54) But his analysis
led him to quite a different conclusion. ³I discovered that there were
important things that I just could not do with my syllabus. I could not make
students care about the work, be creative and original, be considerate of
others, or write or speak well. All I could do was force them to do very
specific things.² (p. 54) And from this discovery, he made his way to the
most important insight: ³I realized what I should have known all along, that
learning is an inherently voluntary act that you can no more force than you
can force someone to love you. Authoritarianism and fostering a love of
learning just don¹t go together. If they did, the best learning should occur
in prison education programs, where the Œstudents¹ can be coerced to do
almost anything.² (p. 55)

 

So when the opportunity to teach a small seminar course for sophomores
presented itself, Singham decided to try teaching it without a syllabus. He
recounts how he and the class jointly created a kind of de-facto syllabus
several weeks after the course began, and how well it worked. He
acknowledges when colleagues query him about how he would handle students
who consistently turned in late papers (no one in the class did) that he has
to face those problems individually, resolving them on an ad hoc,
case-by-case basis. The approach he took with this class does not produce a
fail-safe system.

 

But Singham believes it creates a better climate for learning‹one that
prevents faculty and students from becoming adversaries. This is the
relationship he proposes instead: ³Šgood neighbors in a small community. The
classroom works best when students and teachers perceive it as a place where
there is a continuing conversation among interested peopleŠA sense of
community is not created by rules and laws but by a sense of mutual respect
and tolerance. Good neighborliness cannot be legislated‹it can only be
learned by example and experience, and it flourishes in an atmosphere of
trust and acceptance of difference.² (p. 57)

 

What makes this article so good is Singham¹s honest appraisal of the all the
issues. Are his students ready for this much freedom and responsibility?
Will they take advantage of the situation and avoid doing serious work? ³The
possibility that my students may not be ready for democracy worries me a
little, but the thought that they should be ready for and accepting of
authoritarianism troubles me a great deal more.² (p. 57)

 

Reference: Singham, M. (2005). Moving away from the authoritarian classroom.
Change, May/June, pp. 51­57.


Mr. James B. Greenberg
Director Teaching, Learning and Technology Center
Milne Library 
SUNY College at Oneonta
Oneonta, New York 13820

email: [log in to unmask]
phone: 607-436-2701
fax:   607-436-3081
IM:  oneontatltc

"Ignorance is curable, stupidity lasts forever"