Demonstrating care is what keeps students engaged. In the modern era of digital pedagogy, engagement falls further and further into a fairytale that teachers write into their lesson plans. The banking model of education leaves students feeling disengaged and uncared for at a time in which care is the only way to prevent the utilization of modern tools to “cheat the system”.
The system was designed to be cheated. It makes no effort to engage the individual and encourage growth. Students are assigned grades in response to the work they produce, and then their work is unceremoniously stripped of value. Perhaps if teachers intended to demonstrate interest in student work, they could provide an incentive for revision or improvement, but a majority of the time, once the student has received a grade for the assignment, the assignment becomes garbage.
Because what use does a student have for an academic paper about “Shakespeare” or a difficult set of (hopefully effectively) solved mathematical equations? Unless they’re particularly “nerdy”, or already value their education, the answer is none because modern students don’t perceive their education as valuable or as an exploration of themselves.
That’s what education should be. A box of glasses. The students can try them on and discover lenses that work for them and some that don’t. Penalizing students for subjects they struggle with seems pretty counter-productive. If the lenses don’t work, try another pair; one of them will change your life.
The same digital tools that can be used to help students “cheat” the system can also give educators the upper hand in fostering a sense of care and engagement. Jesse Stommel suggests tactics such as providing low-stakes writing assignments on a public platform like WordPress in order to demonstrate that their work is a representation of them (and that their grade isn’t).
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