Making Learning Matter — from emilypittsdonahoe.substack.com by Emily Pitts Donahoe
We’ve got to get better at talking to students
In a recent newsletter, John Warner articulated a problem I’ve been mulling over for quite some time now:
“The challenge is to convince students that there is a genuine benefit in the struggle of learning as something distinct from the steady forced march of schooling. How do I convey the genuine value of thinking when the cultural message of the moment is the opposite?”
If higher education is to have any meaningful future at all, we have to find real answers to this question.
So, for a long time, I’ve been lamenting that we don’t talk enough with students about the value of work in our disciplines. We should devote more time to exploring how this knowledge operates in the real world! We should explicitly communicate its benefits not only for students’ future professional lives but also for their personal lives, and for the world at large! We should give them a self-transcendent purpose for learning! We should show them that what they learn has real, tangible meaning beyond the classroom!