The Student as the 'Expert'

By Cindy Reitzi

March 2005

Apparently, in my early life, I was averse to schedules. As my mother frequently tells me, I never took a nap after age 1 and further exasperated my parents by scrabbling head-first over the crib gate in determined refusal.

Inexplicably, I remember why. Carted off to bed, draped across the shoulder of a parent, and moving away from voices whose stories receded unfinished, like some sort of bedtime Doppler Effect, I distinctly remember my last conscious thought: “I’m missing something. I know I’m missing something.”

And so, the seed anticipated the plant. As an adult, the nagging feeling that I’m “missing something” persists from two early crib-side impulses: a learner’s curiosity and an overactive imagination.

In college, these impulses propelled me to collect degrees in the social sciences and humanities, some of the broadest possible palettes for curiosity. After all, everything has a history and any possibility can be conceived in fiction. But curiosity and imagination also strangely attracted me to The Research Paper.

While I was drawn to classes that made you write papers, other students I knew were feverishly avoiding The Research Paper.

Most students don’t associate learning excitement and insatiable curiosity with The Research Paper. They think instead (“boring”) notecards, (“yawn”) footnotes, (“I’m asleep now”) bibliographies, and if they’re really frustrated, (“I’ve had it”) plagiarism.

The Research Paper has gotten a bad rap. Yes, it entails all of these harping details, and yes, details are important to exhibiting academic credibility, but it’s important not to dwell on them, because the real excitement of teaching The Research Paper is a learner’s excitement.

The stereotyped juxtaposition of teacher to student is that of expert to acolyte. The teacher knows; the student absorbs. This positioning can lead to what one educator-who-wrote-a-book (whose name escapes me) dubbed “authentic” vs. “inauthentic” learning. Oddly, these situations have a lot to do with how much our students view us as “experts” with answers.

How we ask questions and how we act as an audience for our students breaks down some of these distinctions. For example, “authentic” questions are “real” questions we don’t know the answers to.

“Inauthentic” questions, on the other hand, are questions we already know the answers to. Teachers are famous for these types of questions which are necessary to review information and the like. Still, a question like, “So, what is Romeo feeling as he drinks the poison?” illustrates the absurd extreme of such questions since you wouldn’t have to actually read Romeo and Juliet to get at the answer (i.e. suicidal?). Yet, there’s always some students who can’t answer a question like that.

Likewise, students also sense that teachers are “inauthentic” audiences for their writing because they know we already know “the right answer.” This creates a kind of Catch-22: Educators do need to have expertise in their subject areas and in the art of teaching yet, unfortunately, students’ perceptions of teacher expertise don’t always foster what other educators-who-have-written-books like to call “high-level learning.” As a result, you frequently hear students say, “I don’t have to explain Romeo’s motives. Ms. Smith knows what I mean; she read the book.”

A friend of mine, truly a master teacher, used to subvert this problem by teaching books that neither she nor the students had ever read, therefore allowing the teacher and students to discover them together. Not every teacher would be that willing to do the educational equivalent of a trapeze without a curricular safety net. Plus, you’d better be ready for significant student discomfort if you do.

I once inadvertently put TAG students in that position by assigning a book that had no Cliff Notes. No explanatory text to provide answers; no safety net. Some of the students were beside themselves because they actually had to read the book carefully. It floored me.

Research papers are another opportunity to change the “authenticity” factor. When you teach The Research Paper, you are the technical expert – after all, you are teaching students how to write a research paper with all those harping details – but, ironically, you are also more of an “authentic” audience if you have no expertise in the topics they research.

Put in that position, students are pressed to become “experts” on their topic and then really explain it to you. They can’t say, “Ms. Smith knows what I mean” anymore; they have to perceive a “real” audience, not one that already knows the answers. And sometimes, the best expertise you can offer your students is a learner’s curiosity: “authentic” questions, not definitive answers.

Posted March 1, 2005