Deborah Tannen basically tells us that males are generally more spontaneous and aggressive than females in terms of classroom participation, oppressing the females as a result. She suggested organizing small group discussions so as to allow those less outspoken to learn voicing out their opinions in front of people.
Tannen did a great job in explaining how gender differences lead to education difficulties. But I personally am not satisfied with the solutions she provided. So the following discussion would be focused on solution feasibility analysis.
Tannen suggested breaking the class up into small groups for discussion. Nothing new. What is new is that she arranged the group based on the student’s gender and other characteristics. And yes, she did identify certain group arrangement which elicited more discussions from the students. But I felt it to be pointless.
Education is supposed to prepare students for the real world out there. Very often, we have to work with people who don’t match our style. The point is to learn how to work with almost anyone. And this can only be done the hard way. Of course, we do not just leave the less outspoken ones to survive on their own in the group. One way is to encourage them to speak out and suppress the dominant group speaker/s. Nevertheless, her findings in group arrangement might be a breakthrough in knowledge on group social dynamics for leaders who want to put together effective teams of people.
Throughout Tannen’s article, it is so focused on how to encourage classroom participation that it was not mentioned that keeping quiet is also important. Because keeping quiet is the very first step to listening. In fact, by listening, a student is inter-comparing and analyzing the information he acquire. The bottom-line is that he is thinking with the information given to him before he can make an intelligent comment. However, this may run the risk of the students always trying to look for something better to say. To prevent this, if I am a teacher, I would ask specific quieter students for their opinions.
What you said makes sense. The problem is, according to Tannen, teachers (who are overwhelmingly male in universities) value spontaneous verbal interaction and tend to assume that quite students either don't understand or are not smart. They may not even be aware of these attitudes. Tannen is pointing out that women tend to be the largest part of the "silent majority" and will suffer because of it in typical classroom situations.
ReplyDelete