Create & Teach
Conversational Interpretation: A Smarthistory Primer and How-To Guide
Modeling Conversation to Model Learning
In Smarthistory, we have replaced the lecture with unscripted conversation. In our experience, the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling than monologue. Conversations grow naturally and in ways that surprise even us, and they can ultimately be even more informative than a scripted and edited essay. Lecture and essay can, of course, be enormously valuable strategies for conveying complex information, but too often, the result is student passivity and disengagement. In contrast, a conversation is spontaneous. The speakers may well have ideas they intend to express, but may have to abandon them if the discussion goes in an unanticipated direction. It is precisely because conversation has twists and turns and false starts and blind alleys that the listener remains engaged with both the content and the pas de deux enacted by the speakers.
Perhaps most importantly, the process of conversation can model learning because it is learning. Students can watch new ideas take shape rather than receive them fully formed. Ideas are introduced chaotically, as one concept collides with another and then another in dialectical progression. It is in the rapid alternating voices of an engaged conversation that ideas evolve. When students hear these shifts of meaning as each speaker seeks to understand the other—to learn from the other, it models for them exactly the experience we want them to have—a willingness to bravely encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that make it meaningful to them.
Of course none of this is new. Socrates’ dialectical method begins (or continues) a tradition where questions are asked in order to dispel weak beliefs. The arts and humanities have always used social interaction to investigate ideas. Museums and galleries are social spaces. In our recent workshop at the Portland Art Museum, we paired and mixed curators, educators, and docents and asked them to stand before objects in their collection and have authentic multilayered discussions. The results are compelling. For museum visitors, conversation models how they can approach the unfamiliar in a meaningful way.
David Weinberger’s essay "Knowledge in Transition” posits that,
Educators…face a different set of challenges….Their authority is in question since we've learned that we can learn more from talking with others than by listening to any single expert. But, more important, if knowledge emerges from conversations, then just about all our educational focus ought to be on learning how to be good conversationalists: how to listen, how to kindle a conversation, how to evaluate claims, how to speak in a voice worth hearing... and, most of all, how to share a world in which knowledge is plural, for that's what conversation – and knowledge – is about. As educators we know that we can do this to some extent by fostering a safe environment for discussion.So perhaps what we need to do, as Weinberger suggests, is to teach students how to “be good conversationalists."
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.jpg "Assyrian Human Headed Winged Lion and Bull (Lamassu)")
.jpg "Sutton Hoo Ship Burial")
.jpg "Crivelli")
.jpg "van der Weyden, Deposition, c. 1435 (Prado, Madrid)")
.jpg "Saint Peter's Basilica")
.jpg "Robert Mills and Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lincoln Casey, Washington Monument, completed 1884")
.jpg "Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51")
.jpg "Klee's Twittering Machine")
