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Janovy, Jr., John. (2003). Teaching in Eden: Lessons from
Cedar Point. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
208 pp.
$85.00 ISBN 0415946662 (Cloth)
$22.95 ISBN 0415946670 (Paper)
Reviewed by Ruth Rees
Queen’s University (Canada)
June 10, 2004
Teaching in Eden is an extremely interesting book, and
one that can be read from many different perspectives. On the
one hand, the book is a memoir of a professor’s 28-year
teaching career, composed of successful and unsuccessful
experiences – in the standard formal classroom and later at
a biological field station (officially called Cedar Point in
Nebraska, but fondly referred to by Janovy as the Garden of
Eden). Can you guess from the author’s choice of words for
the title, as to which location he recommends?
On another hand, the author says that the book is an
assessment of American higher education teaching practices. I
would be more precise and say that this second perspective is
more a condemnation of traditional or conventional university
teacher practices – one that contains standard teaching
approaches, such as one-way lectures using glossy Powerpoint
presentations to a silent audience.
A third perspective is that of describing the kinds of
in-depth, integrated, and sustained learning that has gone on
from the perspectives of several students who have taken this
first year course. This viewpoint, I think, would appeal more to
the future parents and students of the University of Nebraska
(the author’s university) or any other “second
tier” post-secondary institution as a drawing card.
“Why should I/my child go to this particular
university?” one might ask. “Because this college
has an introductory course in Biology as a field course where
experiential learning takes place, where students must
take an active role in their own learning, where everyone’s
ideas are discussed, taken seriously, and built upon through the
course,” Janovy might briefly but passionately respond.
A fourth perspective is that of a teacher. Janovy obviously
takes teaching seriously; moreover, before he retires, he wanted
to pass on his notes as to what works and what doesn’t work
in certain teaching situations. He leaves a legacy, and a
revealingly honest one at that. He describes situations where he
believes that he has failed as a teacher; but he also provides
some delightful examples of students’ work that illustrate
the depth of their querying and exploration. He reminds us that
professors have an incredible responsibility; that responsibility
is not just to teach (the same course year after year); rather,
that responsibility is to nurture students so that
students take on the responsibility of their own learning. As a
professor in a Faculty of Education, I heartily support this
stance. Our philosophy in my Faculty is that we produce teachers
who are very concerned, nay obsessed, about ensuring that the
students learn; that’s the role, as Janovy sees as the
teacher’s/professor’s role.
I was taken by Janovy’s analogy of the field station as
being the Garden of Eden. In the beginning...of the
students’ post-secondary education…they are expected
to reach toward the Tree of Knowledge and take the first
bite… of their own education. After that first bite, the
rest, as they say, is history. Parallels to the Garden of Eden
and the challenges of self-directed learning are made throughout
the book. I haven’t begun to do it justice!
The book is a relatively quick read. It is divided into
twelve chapters. Unconventionally, it starts with a “sales
pitch,” where the author is being interviewed by
perspective parents and a student about why they should choose
this particular institution of higher education. Janovy tries to
encourage them by stating what he personally believes to be
true: that it’s the human resources at this college that
makes it a desirable place to be – all the people, not just
the professors and their graduate students, but also the other
undergraduate students. I was pleasantly surprised to read this.
Janovy, a renowned professor of biology, seems to have
internalized this quintessential aspect of organizational
theory: that it is the people within an organization that
carry the culture or ethos. Use the library, yes, he says, but
also use the people who are there. Learning, he says and I
paraphrase his words, consists of both content (knowledge) and
process (how it’s learned). He writes that the process of
learning through people is what motivates students to learn. I
must admit that I, as a professor of education, was delighted to
read this from Janovy, a professor of biology!
The second chapter describes the beginnings of and rationale
for the Cedar Point experiment: an opportunity to use nature and
the natural environment as a classroom. I believe that the
following quote is quite telling. “Scientists, however,
need nature. Young scientists just don’t know how much
they need nature,” (p. 28). This setting was ideally
suited to provide the “intellectual experience of
encountering [and exploring the resources in the]
wilderness,” (p. 28). Indeed, it was so ideal that Janovy
(and his students) nicknamed it “Eden.”
The third chapter describes the pedagogical approach that
Janovy used at the field station. Professors of experiential
education could have undoubtedly saved Janovy from some of his
start-up challenges, for he too learned how to run his course by
experimenting himself. Rather than using a “tried but
true” lesson, Janovy was continuously using resources
available in the environment and building a set of lessons around
what was available in nature. Each class was about a small
research problem that was revealed in the natural setting.
Students had to test some fundamental research problem.
“We would being [each lesson] with a discussion of ideas,
continue with the outdoor physical labor required of any field
researcher, then settle into the laboratory…for a length
session…and review our accomplishments” (p. 30). The
lessons always seemed to raise more questions then to provide
answers. The lab manual detailed the different aspects of the
five-week course, as a course in: 1. humility and patience; 2.
public health; 3. microecology; 4. biodiversity; 5. pathology
and diagnosis; 6. invertebrate zoology; 7. the use of the
microscope; 8. teaching; 9. learning to deal with complexity;
and 10. learning to generalize. The aim was for the students to
learn how to learn; again, the process, Janovy believes, is more
important at this stage of a student’s learning than the
actual content.
Chapter 4 continues with the description of the design of the
field-based course. Janovy wanted the students not to learn
parsasitology as much as he intended them to be a
parasitologist – to view the discipline from many different
perspectives. While this is relatively easy in a setting such as
Cedar Point or other laboratories, Janovy contends that all
teachers should try to reconstruct this approach in more
traditional classrooms. A high school history teacher in the
town where I live believes in this same approach; each year, he
assigns one of his classes an assignment for them to research.
By the end of the term, they had become historians. For example,
he had the senior students carry out historical research to learn
the first names of the World War I soldiers who were buried in
the town’s graveyard. Of the 42 graves, by the end of
term, only two remained unknown. The students’ research
took them to the National Archives in the capital, to libraries,
to military records, to discussions with professors of History at
the university, and even included interviewing some local
families. The amount of history the students learned was no
small measure. However, the learning that occurred was much more
than content; they learned how to act like historians.
Janovy contends that students, in order to learn properly:
must have the correct tools of the trade, work collaboratively
and present the results of their work in teams to the entire
class, not only answer questions but develop some questions
themselves about the subject, and each and every student must
make some verbal contribution to the daily discussion. Again, by
incorporating these strategies into both field-based and
traditional classrooms, Janovy believes that students will move
from passive to active learners who recognize the valuable input
of other human beings with whom they must work interdependently.
Another useful analogy that Janovy makes is that we should try to
get our students to do the same kind of tasks we demand of
ourselves as professionals or specialists in a particular
discipline: carry out research, question what we read, discuss
issues with others, and seek input from colleagues, to name only
a few strategies.
Chapter five is the only chapter in the book that I found
difficult to accept at first. Janovy admits that he is probably
committing “educational blasphemy” (p. 59) when he
describes how he evaluates a particular assignment: “I
never grade students on how well they do such an assignment; I
always grade them on whether they actually did what was
requested, which is usually to generate three full typewritten
pages on some subject,” (p. 59). He advocates giving
students a writing assignment where they have to take a subject
and relate it in some way, and not mention their own families,
money, politics, agriculture, medicine, the military, sex,
sports, or religion. Again, he wants the students to delve into
a topic and expand it in a way that is meaningful to them. This,
he contends, is a good way of finding out about the students,
being reminded that they are so very unique. When he comes across
a memorable assignment, he is reminded of why he entered the
teaching profession.
Chapter six underscores some of the challenges facing every
teacher: that we need certain materials or resources in order to
carry out our lessons; that often those materials must be
anticipated in advance. The joy of being involved in
experiential education is that the resources are all available in
nature. Janovy reiterates two points: one, the resources are
available only because we see/ascertain them within context; and
two, the most important resource is that of the human
resource.
Another pedagogical technique that Janovy uses is to have an
assignment where the students must generate questions about the
subject being studied, rather than merely responding to
questions/issues raised by the instructor. In chapter seven, he
provides the context for this assignment. This task is another
example of how he attempts to get his students to learn to think
on their own, and outside “the box.” I especially
like his final sentence of that chapter: “What a true
teacher needs is a supply of people, enough knowledge,
challenging and easily accessible material, and a long long list
of questions (p. 99).
Chapter eight provides more guidelines for Janovy’s
experiential learning process. He insists that every student
carry out a research project based upon a problem that the
students each identify and articulate. He believes that too few
students are ever given choice, judging from their reaction to
the assignment, year after year. While carrying out research is
obviously a very important part of learning to be a scientist,
Janovy believes that the source of the project, i.e., what to do
the research on, is even more important. The more general
question, though, is “[h]ow do we extend the empowering
properties of an individual science project into the typical
university classroom, or any classroom, for that matter?”
(p. 107) Janovy says that there must be three factors present.
One, the project belongs to the student, and thus allows a
student to contribute to her or his own portfolio. Two, the
project is a result of several iterations of doing, reflecting
and assessing, and revising or redoing. Three, the project is
not an end in itself; rather it serves to act as a springboard
for generating more questions by the student. Again, the
emphasis is on the process as being if not more important than
the product.
Undomesticated systems is the title of chapter nine. Janovy
takes great joy when his students encounter problems that they
cannot solve, or solve very readily. He describes how some
students spent hours doing one particular kind of data
collection, only to come to the conclusion that the data were
inappropriate, or that the particular focus of the research was
incorrect, or that they have erred in some basic assumption, as
examples. Learning through one’s own mistakes, Janovy
contends, is indeed a learning experience. Some students, albeit
a small number, were so engrossed by the
“undomesticated” nature of their work, that they
continued with their first-year field study project into their
final year dissertations. They were so challenged by their own
troubling research problems that they felt motivated enough to
purse answers, if not solutions.
Good teachers/professors are passionate about what they do.
They also connect what they are doing to everyday life. Janovy
at the field station talks about death with the students and
about their feelings when they do their dissections; he brings in
poems, and relates the death of the particular species that they
are working on to war and natural disasters. He describes how he
demonstrates a respect for nature and the resources that nature
offers, and hence breathes life into his subject. Accordingly, I
thought that the title of chapter ten, death and resurrection was
most appropriate.
Chapter eleven talks again about the main challenge
confronting every teacher: how to get the students to take on
learning and to get/be excited by it. Janovy discusses some of
the many ways, and is careful is stating that not all similar
ways work for all members of one class, or for two consecutive
classes. The point he makes here, I believe, is that we as
teachers/university professors cannot give up; we must keep
trying and in many different ways, mindful of a particular class
or a specific context. We too must go through the same processes
that we apply to our students: learn through failure.
Finally, chapter twelve, entitled “Building Eden,”
ends the book on a hopeful note. In the Old Testament, the
Garden of Eden represented the unspoiled environment in which
“the innocents” were placed. Eden was rich in all
types of resources, an ideal setting for any teacher. But,
Janovy contends, if we widen our vision, any learning place could
become a figurative Garden of Eden where creative thinking can
take place. Janovy suggests that we too, regardless of our
discipline, can help to create that intellectual paradise for our
students. All we must do is find answers to these and
other questions: “What is a fact? What is an
observation? What evidence do we need in order to make a
decision?” (p. 173) He makes the process look
straightforward; but we know from reading the book that it is not
simple and certainly not foolproof.
Teaching in Eden is not just a good read; it’s a
great read. It offers suggestions to any teacher, regardless of
the discipline or grade. Some of the suggestions can be used
directly; others must be recast before being applicable.
Interestingly, however, many of these strategies are not new;
they are either in pedagogical literature associated with
experiential education or in the literature for teaching in
inclusive classrooms. Two common aspects of these two literature
bases are: one, the teacher must share power with the students;
and two, teachers must take risks. The rewards, in seeing
students grow and develop as they search for answers to their own
articulated problems, are, according to Janovy, well worth
it.
About the Reviewer
Ruth Rees is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of
Education, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She
teaches pre-service teacher candidates (students with a minimum
of a Bachelor's degree) in a one-year teacher education program,
as well as coordinating a course for preparing aspirant teachers
who want to be considered for the principalship. Dr. Rees's
areas of expertise are issues of equity and inclusive classroom
practices, as well as educational leadership and management.
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