Lecturers need to adopt new strategies
Kefa Atibuni
A couple of weeks ago the media was awash with reports of interdiction of a lecturer who was recorded on phone slapping a female student at Makerere University.
The lecturer was reportedly angered by students who were using their phones and talking during the lecture.
The incident sparked a lot of debate, with a section of people saying perhaps the lecturer was right because he was duty bound to demand attention from students when lecturing, but others think the lecturer had passed the acceptable limits of the teachers’ professional code of conduct.
Whatever side you may choose, one thing that is subtly mentioned in that story is the frequency and magnitude of the same or similar challenges lecturers face nowadays. It could be students repeatedly coming in late and disrupting lectures, attendance dropping off during a series of lectures, students challenging your mark for an assignment, and like the Makerere incident, mobile phones going off during lectures, and so on.
As a masters student I remember one of my course assignments was to lead a team of course mates in organising a training workshop for undergraduate students. I was very nervous, and you will only understand if you know the directness and bluntness of Dutch students. For example, it is not uncommon for a student in that country to say “excuse me, I don’t get the explanation,” without trying to sugarcoat anything.
Ten minutes into it, the room was full but we couldn’t get started as our trainees all seemed unbothered and instead were getting chatty among themselves.
Efforts by the first presenter to introduce the training all seemed flatly ignored. In what felt like a reflex action, I got up and said in a rather husky voice, “please, we are not at a picnic right now, can you all please listen to the presenter”. By the look on their faces, my colleagues seemed unhappy with my approach, ostensibly because it was “un-European”. There was silence in the room and at the end of the day we had a successful training.
In another story, a lecturer at one of the universities in Uganda told me he once asked his class a question about something he was teaching and one of the students shot back, “who is the teacher now?” He momentarily snapped but quickly recomposed himself and joked about it, saying “I’m training all of you to become teachers”.
The truth is we can’t turn the clock back, students of today can talk to their lecturers without fear of reprisal, can have laptops and smart phones with them in the lectures, and they will have them turned on, even when requested not to do so. As emeritus Professor Phil Race puts it: “Many students live life with one eye on a laptop or IPhone screen, and one ear with an ear-phone piece in it, and the other eye/ear on the rest of the world”.
The truth is we’re not going to succeed in getting our students of dot com era to switch their electronics off during lectures, the reason lecturers need to adopt new strategies to make learning happen.
For example, don’t threaten students that you will ask them to leave if they don’t obey your ground rules. It will just take one student to refuse to leave to give you a much more serious problem.
If it is about phones going off in class, say something like, “please leave your phones on if you really need to be contacted, for example if you have got a seriously ill patient, or a crisis in the family, and so on. I want you to be all relaxed enough to give attention to the lecture, so remain possible to be contacted if needed. If your phone does go off, please slip out quietly and deal with the emergency. Alternately, please set your phone to silent mode and do not answer it in class”.
One result of this is that when someone’s phone does go off, everyone wants to know what the emergency is, and students whose phones ring for no important reason are now quite embarrassed.
You can also think outside the box and give the students something to do with a phone such as finding something on the web. This can get the “using of the gadgets” more productive and captivating.
Kefa Atibuni is a senior communication officer at Muni University.
