0.3 Findings

Mark, katrina survivor

Mark had taught and served as provost at a university in New Orleans for a total of 31 years. Of all the participants in this study, Mark was the most experienced teacher. He had also done the most experimentation with technology in teaching. Hurricane Katrina had destroyed his home two years before and forced him to move out of the city. The effects of the storm created both emotional and material losses for everyone there. The devastation to the city’s infrastructure had a negative impact on the quality of the university’s computing labs, on the students’ ability to afford personal computers, and on the Internet connectivity they previously had.

The post-katrina environment

Mark was realistic about what was possible to accomplish in the post-Katrina environment, choosing the traditional face-to-face lecture-based format for the theories course. He understood his students’ ambivalence about coming to the campus after the hurricane: “We’re like an oasis to most of the town, because it is a drive in through pretty much of a dead zone to get here. So they don’t really like coming in.”

The students claimed to want online courses, but they also wanted personal contact with their instructors. Immediately after Katrina, almost all the courses offered were online, because few of the students could get to the campus. The quality of those courses varied widely, depending on the individual instructor’s level of experience and understanding of the technology and pedagogical methods that worked in the online environment. Many students became completely turned off to online courses during that time. Mark felt it was not unusual that they should have a negative response to online courses after that, even when things had returned to some semblance of normality.

Philosophy of teaching

Mark was outspoken regarding how he felt students should be taught. His words could have sounded a bit bombastic, but his empathy for the students and the difficult conditions in which they were living clearly informed his opinions. He found fault with constructivist teaching that led students to believe that there were no right or wrong answers, and made it a point to correct students who exhibited that belief.

I try to like give them everything I know. I’m very demanding and I also expect them to know the right answer. I always ask questions that have a right and a wrong answer so they don’t get the sense that there’s really no right answers. Otherwise they’ll flunk the licensing exam. The counseling kids have this notion that there’s never a right answer, so it’s okay, just whatever you think is a good answer is a good answer, probably from taking qualitative courses. The exams I give are very content-based; I guess I’m very traditional in that sense. The classes are lecture and discussion, and I try to get them to develop their theoretical posture a bit, get a sense of which theories they like and why. I’m there to teach them theories and make sure they’re going to max the theory part in the licensing exam because they’re going to know it better than anybody else.