Labs for humanities courses?

[marshwiggle]

I've thought about this for a while, and would like to hear what more people think.

One of the big differences in pedagogy between STEM and the humanities is labs. Typically, labs are focused on developing skills that will be used subsequently in other courses. In many disciplines, the timing between teaching the theoretical background required for a specific lab and the lab itself is quite flexible. (A lab about weaving reed baskets may happen a few weeks after reed baskets have been discussed in lecture, or even before in some cases.) The timing of labs is more dependent on the sequence of the lab skills themselves. Even in computer science, where labs may be focused on the current assignment in the course, the lab itself will probably emphasize skills like good coding practices and documentation. In any case, the skills developed in the labs are often not specifically evaluated outside the labs, such as during exams (unless there is a lab exam).
Typically there will be about as many lab hours as lecture hours.

Tutorials, while they exist in many STEM courses, can vary a lot more in emphasis. They tend to be focused on the current course topic and/or assignment, and may not actually require any hands-on participation by students. They are often purely attendance-optional. The material covered in tutorials is usually a repetition of what was covered in lecture; sometimes it involves going over more examples than were covered in class.
Typically there will be fewer tutorial hours than lecture hours.

Humanities courses often have tutorials, which from my understanding can also vary in purpose and scope, but they don't have labs. Would there be value in having labs in the humanities which could work on specific skills that students are supposed to pick up, such as creating citations, library research, etc.?  Among other things, things would make a more explicit record of the skills students are supposed to learn in each course.
(Again, the point of labs is that students are supervised while they are doing tasks, and get real-time feedback, rather than merely getting comments when the work submitted is returned with a grade attached.)

[dr_codex]

Lots of humanities courses have these. Document handling and archival work are the obvious examples, but there are many others.

What humanities courses do not usually have are separate, credit bearing courses labeled "lab." Instead, the practical is usually embedded inside the course, often as the seminar portion of a lecture/seminar course.

[marshwiggle]

Lots of humanities courses have these. Document handling and archival work are the obvious examples, but there are many others.

What humanities courses do not usually have are separate, credit bearing courses labeled "lab." Instead, the practical is usually embedded inside the course, often as the seminar portion of a lecture/seminar course.

Even in STEM, specific "lab courses" are rare. Most of the time labs are one component of regular courses, where the lab grade is worth something like 20 or 30 percent of the final grade.

[Parasaurolophus]

Doesn't comp often have labs?

Also... how do labs figure into the STEM workload? Am I right in thinking that STEM courseloads are usually pretty light, and that the labs round them out a bit? If that's the case, then you'd be committing to a not-insignificant reduction in humanities teaching loads.

I'm not opposed, and I'm sure students would benefit, at least at the 100 and 200 levels. But I worry that, in practice, this would require either a significant investment in a university's humanities departments (which is hard enough to secure as it is), or would require a significant unpaid increase in faculty workloads.

[Ruralguy]

In my  STEM courses I almost always have a weekly problem set or numerical project. If there is a corresponding lab, that too is weekly and requires students to write up their results while they are there
(we find that prevents many "I did it, but I lost the write up" sort of excuses).

We also count labs as separate courses in both the student and faculty load, but we feel that gives us the right to do 3 hours of work in the lab session, or require outside work if we cut the lab period short.

We do like to link our labs and lectures, which means keeping same students you have for lecture in a section(s) of lab together.  It also allows us to do the opposite of what "Marshy" suggested above: we actually do bring up the theory about as close to the time we use it in lab as is possible, but then intro Physics and even more so Intro Astronomy, don't really have that many difficult step by step skills that you might need a lot of  time to develop as in Chemistry or some types of bio. Perhaps electronics is more like chemistry in that way. It might not be super hard, but you have to be methodical and turn theoretical abstractions into what you need to do with your hands on a circuit board. That takes time.
Even so, you'd introduce these ideas around the time you start talking about current, not at day one when you are discussing static charge.  I suppose some Physics E&M labs start right away with circuits so they can give students more time to learn them?

[marshwiggle]

Doesn't comp often have labs?

Typically in lower level courses; 1st or 2nd year generally.

Also... how do labs figure into the STEM workload? Am I right in thinking that STEM courseloads are usually pretty light, and that the labs round them out a bit? If that's the case, then you'd be committing to a not-insignificant reduction in humanities teaching loads.

Teaching workloads? Generally for large courses there will be lab instructors so profs don't have anything to do with the labs. The exception tends to be in small senior courses where there is a single lab section. Even then there will usually be TAs who do the grading. And there are often lab technicians to do setup and cleanup.

I'm not opposed, and I'm sure students would benefit, at least at the 100 and 200 levels. But I worry that, in practice, this would require either a significant investment in a university's humanities departments (which is hard enough to secure as it is), or would require a significant unpaid increase in faculty workloads.

Yes, the 100 and 200 levels are where I think the most benefit would be, as with STEM. It might even be possible to have labs cross disciplines; if things like teaching how to do citations would be the same then there could be an economy of scale. It would also emphasize that this task is not just for this course or this prof.

[Ruralguy]

Though true that at most larger universities the TAs will teach the lab sections, this is not generally so for SLACs and perhaps some other types of colleges (community colleges, and some universities with smallish sections).  At some SLACs a lab will count as half a course in load, but generally then the expectations for lab would be lower and would probably meet for less time. Ay my SLAC, labs (and also performance theater and other such non-traditional "hands on" courses) count as a full course, but the expectations are relatively high for what is produced in a lab meeting.

[Aster]

One thing to also check up on is the overall credit requirement for the degree plan. In my experience, it's the rare university today that adds credits into degree plans.

Many/most STEM undergraduate degrees, because of all of the additional labs, have higher minimum credit requirements, and/or restrict the numbers of core and/or general elective courses, compared to many non-STEM degrees.

Even a single additional credit hour inserted into a degree plan can be a real headache to get authorized in today's Higher Ed climate where universities are being coerced into cutting degree plans as short as technically possible. Every year, Big Urban College is told to do this to "boost retention", and every year, we cut more and more credits, coursework hours, and courses themselves out of our degrees.

[apl68]

Lots of humanities courses have these. Document handling and archival work are the obvious examples, but there are many others.

Often taught in conjunction with university libraries. 

Language courses often have labs as well.

[Wahoo Redux]

For a time I ran a writing center.  We frequently interacted with composition and engineering classes to facilitate specific writing-intensive activities or peer-reviews.  This is a small trend in writing center work which not enough schools engage in.  I don't know if this would qualify as a "lab" per se, but it is a communal, cross-disciplinary, and effective way to teach writing.

[marshwiggle]

For a time I ran a writing center.  We frequently interacted with composition and engineering classes to facilitate specific writing-intensive activities or peer-reviews.  This is a small trend in writing center work which not enough schools engage in.  I don't know if this would qualify as a "lab" per se, but it is a communal, cross-disciplinary, and effective way to teach writing.

The real value comes from it being

• compulsory
• graded, for course credit

so that everyone does it, and after that, the skills developed in it are assumed.

[Hegemony]

I think citations and library research are much less important to the vast majority of humanities courses than the content of the science labs is to science courses. I'd guess that fewer than 1% of our humanities courses require (or even could use) library research. Citations are not that hard — the hard part is getting students to take the trouble to do them according to a certain style, not teaching students how to do that style.

But since some instructors insist on MLA, some insist on Chicago, some insist on other styles, and some (like me) don't care at all — and many classes do not have any need for citations — a lab would mean a lot of time spent on stuff that would need relearning at some point later anyway. I mean, if a lab taught Chicago and MLA citation styles, then it's likely that maybe two semesters down the line, the student would have a class that required MLA, and they'd look it up to refresh their memory since they learned it two semesters before; and in another year they'd have one class that required MLA and one class that required Chicago, and they'd look them both up again. So all that lab time would be sort of a waste of time.

If it were practical, I'd favor labs that were a sort of study hall, so the students would actually be forced to do the reading. But they'd probably insist it was online (as it sometimes is), and be noodling around on the internet when the instructor wasn't look anyway. Of course I'm joking about study hall — but I wish there were some way to ensure more of them do the reading.  Of course they get poorer grades if they don't do the reading, but that doesn't seem to matter to them until the end of the semester.

[Aster]

One alternative to offering additional, standalone "lab" credits would be to transform the existing lecture class into an Inverted ("Flipped") Classroom format. Which is basically how most STEM labs normally operate. Students teach themselves during class, by practicing their learning skills through various application or practicum-based assessments supervised by the professor.

But asking someone to "flip" a conventional lecture class would be a massive headache and loss of curriculum freedom/flexibility for multi-section courses without massive and near-universal buy-in from all of the professors teaching that course. I would never ask any professor to up-end their curriculum design that way unless he/she specifically desired it, and I certainly wouldn't mandate it across a multi-section course type either.

And we don't really do this much or at all in STEM. Our lecture courses are lecture courses. Our laboratory courses are laboratory courses. Our 4-credit lecture/lab hybrids mostly compartmentalize the two different curriculum models so that they're basically independent of one another.

Also, I've found that the few people that adopt the Inverted Classroom model don't tend to stick with it for very long. Most of my colleagues eventually reverted back to regular classroom curriculum models. If they want to teach in Inverted Classroom style, they just assign themselves to teach a laboratory class.

[mamselle]

Lots of humanities courses have these. Document handling and archival work are the obvious examples, but there are many others.

Often taught in conjunction with university libraries. 

Language courses often have labs as well.

Both language courses and music theory courses have lab offerings.

Some are just made available to students for ad-hoc, ad-lib practice on their own.

Some are set up for grading and assessment structures to, say, confirm that students can properly identify a Major 6th from a minor 3rd interval, or a diminished seventh from a tonic triad.

Ours were usually folded into the basic music theory courses when I took them; I think we had to show up as having visited the lab so many times and having completed x number of trials successfully, but I don't recall exactly.

I know I used the music lab because I can sort-of picture where it was on the OSU campus (overlooking the Oval, with a lot of noise not always so well-masked-out by the acoustic tiles, since they usually left the windows open...!) I remember where the language lab was but I don't recall its use being mandatory in the same way, and my French and German pronunciation were already sort-of decent, thanks to a Belgian grandfather and a dad who'd learnt German while stationed there, and would speak (and sing, and play) it around the house.

Our high school had language lab installations at each desk for French and Spanish (but not Latin....interthreaduality...we did read and speak it in class,though....)

The instructor would be plugged in, too, and could go around listening to each of us, making corrections or giving encouragement as needed

The university music lab was also more stand-alone in that sense; the person running the room didn't offer help or listen in unless you had a problem with the equipment, and the trials were all self-grading, so they didn't need to intervene to get assessment scores.

The place I was teaching French as an adjunct never mentioned having a language lab, but their programs were fairly small and they were more interested in in-person pedagogy, I believe--although they did offer an online sequence; I don't know what that instructor used.

M.   

[spork]

Labelling library research as "lab" is not going to save undergraduate humanities programs. Library research, as it is commonly conceived of and taught at the undergraduate level in the USA,* is simply not compelling to the majority of college students.

*i.e., perceived as women's work, which is why it's often handed off to librarians. The real scholars teach the all-important content and are too busy to teach anything else.