Volume 6, Number 6 June/July 1992
Teaching Concepts or Governing Content
by Salim M. Diab and John Bowers,
The College of St. Francis, Joliet (IL)
Teaching introductory courses has become something of a contest. The professor is confronted with a large text and races against time trying to cover as much material as possible. The student spends the entire lecture period rapidly writing definitions, equations, formulas, and proposed mechanisms without necessarily understanding what is being presented. A seemingly insolvable dilemma involving two crucial questions confronts those of us who teach:
What material should be stressed in the introductory courses?
By what method of instruction should the material be presented?
Addressing the first question, we believe that an introductory course in any discipline (ours are organic chemistry and introduction to literature) should not attempt to be comprehensive in nature. Having taught introductory courses in chemistry and literature for the past 15 years, and having tried to be comprehensive, we have both come to the same conclusion: the optimal teaching experience comes when we attempt to engage our students in only a limited but crucial set of critical concepts.
When we discuss critical concepts thoroughly in class, the students have more time to appreciate the mechanisms of many key concepts that serve as a prototype to other new concepts. The approach also allows for more interactive and dialectic learning and teaching in the classroom. Our students understand clearly a core of elementary but important principles and issues in that discipline. Since some of them may become professionals in our disciplines later, they will study in detail the topics which we discuss very briefly, if at all, in the introductory courses.
Addressing the second question, we see two distinct methods of presenting the material in any introductory course. One method is the classical, or traditional, approach — meaning a descriptive method. In this method, the material is detailed with little or no attempt to connect ideas to each other. This approach depends heavily on rote, and it seems to be quite disjointed. A second method is the conceptual approach. In this method, the material is detailed with special emphasis on conceptualization of principles or issues. This method depends heavily on reasoning through a conceptual framework as well as through the use of analogy. The main difference between the two methods is that the former addresses only the "How?" questions, while the latter addresses the "Why?" questions.
Based upon our own experience teaching introductory courses in two widely different fields, we believe that the conceptual method is, in fact, a more powerful teaching approach than the descriptive method. The conceptual approach invites students to grapple with certain major concepts that lie behind the particular discipline they are encountering for the first time. Thus, they become engaged in the material of the course in an active way that the descriptive approach often precludes.
Descriptive vs. Conceptual
With the descriptive approach in literature, students are taught how to read a given literary text. They are introduced to certain critical terms and then are asked to analyze given texts in light of these critical terms. They may learn about plot structure and then be asked to pick out the plot structure of a given story. Or, they may be taught various poetic devices and then be asked to analyze a poem which employs these devices. The story or poem may then be judged by how well it executes the particular device being studied.
The conceptual method takes a different approach to the literary text and to the study of literature in general. Students are not taught just to interpret a work of literature in one specific way or to note how a specific literary device is employed. Instead, they are introduced, from the very beginning of the course, to specific modern theories or concepts about the way we read texts and the way we choose texts to be read in a literature class. They are asked to analyze the concepts that lie behind any given reading of a text. The process introduces a number of competing critical concepts which make problematic the activity of reading a given text. We discuss not only how to read a given poem but also whether a given poem should be taught in an introductory literature class at all, and if so why.
The conceptual approach works not only in introductory humanities courses, but in introductory science courses as well. Statistical evidence compiled for a dissertation in an organic chemistry course showed a significant difference between the descriptive method and the conceptual method of teaching eight carefully selected concepts. Moreover, a survey of students in the classroom experiment confirmed that students favored the highly interactive collaborative nature of the conceptual approach. Students reported that the approach motivated them to learn and encouraged them to truly enjoy organic chemistry—a victory in itself.
In conclusion, we have found that the conceptual approach to learning works better than the traditional approach in classes from quite diverse disciplines, and we recommend it for all introductory courses. We have both found that this approach tends to engage students in ways that the traditional method does not. Students feel empowered. They find that they are not merely being initiated into the sacred rites of a mysterious academic field by memorizing literary terms or chemical formulas. Rather, they are actually engaged in a meaningful encounter with some of the central concepts that shape and define that field.