Ethnography in a 21st century classroom

Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classroom

Ethnography in a 21st Century Classroom What teaching settings look like today

By Prof. Jonathan AcuĂąa-Solano, M. Ed. School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Sunday, March 27, 2016 Post 244

What does it feel like going into a higher education institution classroom nowadays? How much has it changed over the last 150 years? Has the number of learners per classroom increased or decreased? There are indeed many more questions to ask and try to find an answer, but the fact is that today’s classrooms structured have not changed much and that the conformation of the students per class is radically diverse.

Prof. Michael Wesch (2010) has made a great point in what is happening with the structure of classrooms today and what is going on with the conformation of groups in higher education. Wesch was indeed working on an ethnography of what higher education looked like in college across the USA back in 2010. With the many advancements in technology, one wonders what the real future of education is; when one enters a university classroom, though there are some technological gatgets used by

the professor, how much has the transfer of knowledge really changed from the 19 th Century to what happens now in this second decade of the 21 st Century? As Hardesty (2013) pointed out, the real learning takes place “during periods of study, lab work and homework,” not in lectures within the classroom.

Prof. Wesch’s (2010) students participating in the creation of his video on college student ethnography have made important points regarding their lives in the classroom.

Not all readings provided to higher education students are relevant to their lives (Wesch, 2010). As someone who has been an active learner for many years, I sympathize with this comment since we were assigned readings that were not relevant to our development of skills and competencies to better perform our jobs. Besides, student reading habits are now very much different if compared to people who studied at a university some 30 years ago. Based on Prof. Wesch’s (2010) Introduction to Cultural Anthropology students (at Kansas State University), they will be reading from some 2300 webpages and about 1281 FaceBook profiles in a year. And as pointed out

by Turkle (2012) when discussing how psycholigically powerful technology is today, learners will be much more engaged in their social networking than the class content that is not relevant to their lives. As teaching professionals we will continue to see how these technological gagets “can negatively affect concentration, communication and sleep, or increase fear of missing out, procrastination and stress” (Busch, 2016).

If we can extrapolate what is being depicted by Wesch’s students to our local teaching contexts, our education systems need to start a revolution. If we continue with our current educational practices, more and more students will not benefit from courses or majors that are meant to prepare them for their futures. No doubt, our learners in class are doing much more engaging tasks while attending class. What can be done to revert this and help them develop the skills and competencies they need to become successful professionals? This is a question all of us need to answer depending on what is happening in our countries and cultures.

References Busch, B. (2016, March 8). Fomo, stress and sleeplessness: are smartphones bad for students? The Guardian .

Hardesty, L. (2013, March 6). Higher-ed leaders meet to discuss future of online education. Retrieved from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/edx-summit-0306.html Turkle, S. (2012, February). Connected, but alone? (TED.Com) Retrieved from TED.Com: http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together#t-152139 [Video] Wesch, M. (2010, December 17). A Vision of Students Today. Retrieved from Wimp.Com: http://www.wimp.com/studentstoday/ [Video]