Learning to see a question in context

 
This autumn is my first full term of teaching at the University of Oslo since my employment there a year ago. During that past year, I have been involved in supervision of BA students and one seminar, but to oversee and participate in planning a course through an entire term is new to me, at least at this university. However, notwithstanding my previous experiences at other universities in other countries, each new start brings with it new experiences, and every time I settle in at a new institution it does feel a lot like learning how to teach from scratch. Partly this has to do with the different ways that higher education is conducted in different countries. Even at different universities within the same country there are practices and solutions that are particular to one specific institution. And moreover, returning to Norway after eight years abroad also means that several aspects in university education have changed since I myself was a part of that system.        

One of the fascinating and enjoyable things about teaching at a university is that you get constant reminders of how utterly complex and varied we are as individuals, and people come with such different frames of references and experiences that what we, the lecturers, communicate or what they encounter during a course can be received so very differently from person to person. While this variety is well known to anyone who has been at university, and while it is by no means unique to the university, I do forget from time to time just how tricky it can be to convey a message in such a precise way as to give no room for misunderstanding. Teaching is a constant reminder that the audience of your communications can read the key words of a message in very different ways, and so you must do your best to avoid any kind of misunderstanding. And even then there are glitches and cracks.   

These glitches and cracks, however, are part of the educational process, both for myself and for my students, as they provide ample opportunity for teachable moments. Recently, I was reminded of this when I came to realise that the historian’s dictum of learning to ask the right questions also has a counterpoint: learning to see the question in context. This realisation came about when I was organising the obligatory oral assignment for one of my courses, a half-term course that was to be concluded with that assignment. The course consisted of two groups of students, and for each group there were between twenty and twenty-six registered participants. In order to make each student participate in the seminar I formulated individual questions that the students were given one week to prepare for, and then they would answer that question in class. The questions were relatively simple in the sense that they did not demand long answers, but they did require that the students had paid attention during the seminars and read the syllabus. Those who could not attend the final seminar were allowed to submit their answers in writing. All in all, most of the students did a very fine job of it and showed great potential in their further studies. Indeed, some who had been quiet and withdrawn during the entire course were among the ones who showed most understanding of the topic. While it is neither surprising nor uncommon, it is always a bittersweet sensation when students show their competence at the end of a course, demonstrating that they could have contributed so well and so productively in the seminar discussions.            

The questions all pertained to the course and its syllabus, and I had thought it obvious that when answering these questions the students should consider this framework. It turned out that yet again I had failed to learn the age-old lesson that nothing should be considered obvious when communicating with students, especially when they are first-year-students. One question that reminded me of this lesson ran as follows: “What does the term ‘universal history’ mean?”

The half-term course is on the cult of saints and identity-construction in twelfth-century Norway. Within the context of the course, universal history is the history of the known world beginning with Creation, ending with Judgement Day, and maintained, guided and planned by the omnipotent God. This is the Christian sense of universal history that underpinned the history-writing that began in twelfth-century Norway, and in this course we had read several primary sources that served to exemplify this approach to universal history. I had repeated time and again that the identity-construction of twelfth-century Norway was bound up with the concern of showing Norway’s place within this universal history. The question was, in other words easy – or so I thought.  

It turned out that the two students who got this question struggled to understand it on the terms that I had expected, and I realised that I should have added a few more details to anchor the question more firmly in the course itself. But when I gave feedback to one of those students, who submitted their answer in writing, I also came to realise that it was not solely a matter of how firmly it was anchored in the course, it also had to do with how these students had not learned to see a question in its context. When I gave my feedback, I remarked to the student that while the answer was in and of itself not wrong, the answer had also nothing to do with the course. I accepted the answer as a pass and not a fail – it was, after all, a very low-key assignment – and explained to them that in the future they needed to read the question in light of the context in which it was asked. The topic of the course should have given clear indications, and so should the syllabus and the many references to the key term of the question in the seminars. The student responded by thanking me for the feedback, and said outright that they had not thought about this issue because to them, a question was just a question.                    

The student’s response was intriguing to me, because it was the perfect diagnose for one of the main problems with communication in general, namely that to see a question in its proper context needs to be learned. In answering the question in a way that was unconnected to the course, the student was not stupid. They had just not been taught that very simple aspect of the nature of questions, namely that questions all depend on context. For a historian – as well as any other participant in society – learning to see a context in question is crucial, because the quality of our answers depend on it, and because our follow-up questions can only be relevant when understanding the context of the original question.

There really needs to be a course in its own right where we dig into the basics of abstract reading that is part and parcel of human daily life. Because learning such basic elements as seeing a question in context is important, but also too easy to not learn.