John Boyer, a senior instructor of geography and several wine classes at Virgina Tech, asked attendees to take a lesson from humanity’s ancestor Homo habilus, to take a step back and think during Sunday’s TEDx talk.
Boyer, notably wearing a plaid sport coat and bright red Lacoste glasses, is perhaps best known for his graphic novel/textbook hybrid that features a mild-mannered college professor who leads a double life under the pseudonym “The Plaid Avenger,” and somehow manages to educate students about world issues while still dressing ostentatiously in the face of global ignorance. Boyer’s idiosyncratic approach to teaching, which includes the use of social media in the classroom, is part of his broader attitude about the state of higher education.
Boyer’s lecture, titled “Homo Habilus U: Reinventing the University Experience for a Changing World,” focused on the inadequacies of current attitudes about the purpose of higher education.
Boyer compared the modern college student to his or her prehistoric ancestor, Homo habilus, who outsmarted his contemporaries by being a “jack of all trades” and not specializing in any one particular area, thus making them more adaptable. Boyer bemoaned the current system, noting that most people attend college for the sole purpose of specializing in a certain field.
“Before you even get to college, you take specialized classes in high school to prepare you for college, and then you are told to take more specialized classes and declare a ‘field of study,’ and then you should declare your major,” Boyer complained.
Boyer argued that most students feel like they need college to get a job, and that the university system is ill-equipped to prepare students for work. Rather, according to Boyer, college should be about expanding the student’s mind and learning to be a “jack of all trades,” like Homo habilus.
“We are at the brink of radical and rapid change in our society,” Boyer said. “We aren’t trying to crank out workers, we’re trying to crank out thinkers. Hopefully we’re cranking out people who have learned how to learn, learned how to be adaptable!”
Q&A
Pipe Dream: First can you tell me a little bit about the work that you do and your field of research?
John Boyer: Sure. I actually don’t have a field of research, I’m a senior instructor at Virginia Tech, so my full-time job is supposed to be just teaching, which I’ve been doing for about 13 or 14 years now. I teach really big courses of world regional geography in the Geography Department. I also teach courses online and a couple other regional courses, say on Europe or Africa. The big class I teach actually has 2,700 people in one class.
PD: How do you manage that?
JB: That’s why I came here early, to talk to some of the faculty at Binghamton, we employ a variety of in-class technologies, including social networking tools to develop assignments but also create interaction between me the professor and thousands of students to make it seem like a truly lively, interactive class, instead of just me lecturing in front of a whole bunch of people. So we’re kind of on the cutting edge of education technology stuff, big classroom stuff, kind of hybridizing, taking some of it online while still maintaining a sense of interaction, and that’s what I do.
PD: So how does that relate to the Plaid Avenger?
JB: Laughing How did you hear about that?
PD: We do our research! So how does that project tie into the work that you do in your classroom?
JB: Well, just like using social networking tools to communicate as much as possible with younger generations, I also look at different mediums to teach people with that aren’t being employed very much, and kind of came up with graphic novels a while back. I’m not really a big graphic novel person, but I see it’s a powerful medium that could be employed to do so much with education, and really no one’s using it at all. People say, “Oh a comic book is a comic book”, but it’s graphic! And we are in a very graphic world, we’re graphic 24/7 now. We’ll probably have glasses with TV screens in the soon. So we are a very graphic-oriented creature, quite frankly, and so I had the idea years ago, “Hey what if I wrote a whole textbook like it was a graphic novel?”, and it was really delightful to look at but also educational at the same time. So I said “Hey just for fun, let’s develop a comic-type character that will be a vehicle for the action, but then tell real stories and teach real lessons about the real world using this fictional character.” That’s how I came up with The Plaid Avenger, just for fun, as a kooky, quirky, college professor who is supposed to be an undercover superhero, but he’s never really undercover because he’s the most obnoxiously dressed person in the whole room. So it’s kind of a farce on James Bond, kind of a spoofy, farcey kind of concept to have fun with, so the reader knows that this character is fake, but everything else is and all the adventure takes place in the real world. We can teach you a lesson while still having fun. One thing lead to another and I got asked to write a textbook, so I thought I would make this character be the host of the textbook as well. So that’s how the whole thing keeps evolving and growing. Now it’s kind of a brand and it’s taking on it’s own life in other educational aspects as well.
PD: So have you found that between these graphic novels and the implementation of social media in your teaching, have you noticed a difference in the way that you relate to your students or the way that you’re reaching them in the past 13 or 14 years you’ve been teaching?
JB: Yes and no. I have not done any hardcore research to give you definitive results that “Yes I am contacting them more and better!”, you know I don’t have any solid numbers. My sense is yes, more and more people want to pack into the class, the class demand keeps growing every year, I continue to get tons and tons of emails from former students, and even former students parents, who say “Wow my kid would never read a textbook until they read yours” or “Wow he was never interested in current events until he took your class”, I hear from former students that they are in the CIA, or live in Berlin, or are a Chinese businessman now, and they got interested in that stuff in my class. So to me, it’s more qualitative data than quantitative, but I get so much of that stuff that I feel like I must be reaching people. Using the social networking tools before, during and after class definitely is working because it’s expanding the amount of actual face time I get with people. Believe it or not, the more you’re in the digital world, the more actual interaction you have with students, because they’re already there. So instead of just saying, “I’m going to lecture for two hours a week, that’s all the face time you get kids, sorry,” I’m online and I’ll do online office hours. I’ll chat with people online during those times, and suddenly, you’re talking to people a lot more than two hours a week. Some professors don’t want to do that, because they’re pretty busy with research and everything like that. I put myself out there because I want the interaction, I think it’s a vital part of education that might be getting lost in today’s world.
PD: Do you see this model that you’re currently using to be the future of education? Is this where the industry as a whole is going?
JB: Yeah, and I hate to sound so egotistical, but yeah I think I’m on the right track. I wouldn’t be doing it, and I wouldn’t be so passionate about it if I believed otherwise. I do believe that we are going to a more flipped classroom approach in America, where you have pre-production of your lesson materials or your lecture, and then the student reads that like homework, or they go and watch a three hour lecture on Russia. Then when we have class time, be it live or online, when we have face time, we can discuss the stuff you already read about. That’s kind of the flipped classroom approach, but also it’s now incorporating the online digital approach. We can interact more because we can do it any time we want. I can interact with you while I’m in my office and you’re in your dorm room, or on the bus, or when you went home for Thanksgiving break. We can still talk or chat because that’s what these lines of communication that are being opened up all over the place are about. That’s what’s so powerful about it, bringing more people together more of the time, and we need to be using it more for educational purposes, not just entertainment purposes.
PD: Do you find that other faculty and teachers are receptive to this approach? Are they embracing the use of technology or resistant to it? What’s the general attitude right now?
JB: The general attitude I think is 50/50. Half the people are tenured, they’re 55-plus; there’s not much impetus for change, and I understand that, unless they are really passionate, dedicated teachers who are really into connecting with the students. So attitude-wise, I would say 50-50. Half the people think it’s just bells and whistles, and half think there’s something to this and we should be investigating more. Now implementation? Probably more like 80-20 where probably only 20 percent of the faculty out there are actually doing it. I’ve done talks on ed-tech pretty much all over the world, and that does seem to be the sense, that they want me to come talk to kind of introduce it to people.
PD: What are you mostly going to focus on in your talk today?
JB: None of that stuff! When I get invited to do TED Talks, their tagline is “ideas worth sharing”, so I just always come up with a new idea. I’m a watcher of things, an observer, and I’m seeing what’s going on in higher ed, and it does incorporate elements of some of the things we’ve already talked about. You see the changes that are coming, and you see these cultural changes happening in America, and what I’m referring to is people changing their attitudes about why you go to college, and it’s mostly why? Why do you think people go to college?
PD: To get a job.
JB: There you go. And that’s not really what the university system is about, not Binghamton, not Virginia Tech, but universities. That’s not what they were created for, they are an area of interaction, challenging each other and expansion of the mind, growing, in other words. So I think we’re starting to get away from that a little bit, and through observation and just doing lots of reading on different topics, I got into a paleontology and anthropology binge a few months back, and started reading about ancient man, that is, ancestors of man from the evolutionary tree of humanity. I looked at some of the unique aspects of different species, how they stayed alive when others failed. I found this one Homo Habilus that’s sort of fascinating. Homo Habilus survived mostly because he was adaptable, he wasn’t specialized and he wasn’t trying to get a job. That’s what I’m going to talk about today, maybe we should look back in time to get back on track. In a world that’s changing fast, you need to be much more adaptable than a specialist. You need to focus less on going to college to get your specific degree and your specific knowledge to get you a job. You might want to focus on getting as many tools in your toolbelt as possible. That’s what Homo Habilus did, and that’s why he “won” the evolutionary game in the long-run.
PD: So this shift that you’ve observed, in the business of higher education, do you view it as a negative shift? Should we try to take it back to a Homo Habilus environment?
JB: Yes, absolutely. I’m not so old that I can say that it was “the good old days” of university, because it was that way when I went to school too, 20 years ago. It just seems like it’s been taken to another level now, where every single person in America is supposed to go get a college degree. Everybody is; you’re looked down upon if you don’t. It’s preposterous. How are we setting this up so that if you don’t achieve this one particular thing, you’re a failure in life? That’s not only not true, but a negative reinforcement of everybody who are not driven to go to college who do just want to go start a business, or work at Walmart, or be a plumber and make way more money than I ever will. We kindo f are turning the whole reason to go to college on it’s head, and now it’s becoming a mandatory thing, and that is a negative. This is a place for free thinking and free ideas exchange. There’s training to a certain extent, but it’s about way more. It’s about liberating the mind and challenging yourself, and that’s the opposite of why people are coming here now, just to get a job.
PD: Has that attitude at all impacted your specific teaching style?
JB: Oh absolutely. One of the reasons why my classes are so big, especially the one called “world regions”, is because it’s a basic introduction to the whole planet. It’s a class that everyone used to be forced to take, and people suffered through it. They said, “I don’t care about the rest of the world, I’m just here to get a job.” So I fought really hard for a decade and a half, saying that this stuff is really important. It’s not that I want you to be “well rounded”, I want you to be successful! To be successful, you have to be in the game; you have to understand more than your little niche of information that you think you’re here for. So in a globalized world, you actually have think global. You’re not going to be successful unless you think global. All businesses and jobs in industry already think global, and so our students have to, too.