Drawing on my experience as professor of Anthropology in Greece, this paper focuses on student practices like rote learning and plagiarism academics commonly consider inimical to meaningful learning, intellectual empowerment and the...
moreDrawing on my experience as professor of Anthropology in Greece, this paper focuses on student practices like rote learning and plagiarism academics commonly consider inimical to meaningful learning, intellectual empowerment and the cultivation of critical independent thinking. In this paper I refrain from viewing such practices from the standard academic perspective according to which they must be eradicated, and try to appreciate them from the perspective of the students who engage in them. I suggest that they serve as means through which students navigate in and cope with the university environment, but they also provide a point of view from which the university appears as a setting within which the "bad habits" academics so despise are sensible and helpful. To my beloved teacher, Robert Knox Dentan. There is something I don't know that I am supposed to know. I don't know what it is I don't know, and yet am supposed to know, and I feel I look stupid if I seem both not to know it and not to know what it is I don't know. Therefore I pretend to know it. This is nerve-wracking since I don't know what I must pretend to know. I pretend to know everything. (R. D. Laing, Knots, 1970.) Asymmetries and misunderstandings The egalitarian cliché about learning as a flip side of teaching notwithstanding, the lessons one may draw from and about one's teaching are not always clear and sometimes they do not emerge at all because the circumstances from which they might arise are too embarrassing or painful to acknowledge. This paper focuses on student attitudes and practices that academics generally condemn, sometimes try to explain, but perhaps for the reasons mentioned above, rarely consider worthy of taking seriously. The practices that concern me include rote learning, that is memorizing course material and reproducing it as faithfully as possible even when its content and uses are not clear; equating studying with cramming before exams and successful exam performance with providing answers that conform with professors' expectations; substituting sacred, self-evident truths and common sense notions for disciplinary knowledge; and last but not least, composing essays that include plagiarized materials. The common element these practices share is an assumption that challenges conventional notions of understanding. This is that being able to prove you have learned what you were supposed to does not require understanding it; in other words, trying to make sense of what one learns is not self-evidently sensible The paper draws on my experience in the Department of History and Archaeology of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where, from 2000 and until my recent retirement, I taught a mandatory introductory course on social anthropology and folklore and several more advanced anthropology electives. Judging from conversations with colleagues from other departments and universities, the practices it records are quite widespread among
