Hard-To-Master-Language requires critical thinking

November 14, 2006

There’s no Hemingway, Transcendentalists, Melville or Lawrence in English Professor Gregory Ulmer’s course, but there is HTML.

Ulmer’s entry-level class, Hypermedia, a course on basic Web design, is one of the more challenging in the English department. Not only are many of the concepts foreign to a majority of students, but his teaching methods are different from the average English instructor.

As with the other University of Florida faculty members recently inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars, it is Ulmer’s insistence on getting students to really use their minds – to think critically – that helped him gain acclaim as an educator.

“Problems in real life are not so neatly broken down,” he said. “They are all entangled. We want to get students and teachers thinking in a holistic way in regard to learning.”

But Ulmer doesn’t see his course as just a way of equipping his students with valuable knowledge for the digital age. He is getting them to think creatively by first figuring out and then mastering two dimensions of his class: the content and the methodology.

“Over the 16 weeks of the semester, students go from ‘What is this?’ to ‘Oh, I see,’” Ulmer said.

At the end of the term, Ulmer said his students feel a sense of accomplishment in realizing they have solved the problems using his methodology of working in groups and using models to guide them. And they completed the difficult challenge of creating a Web site.

“The course is really about you, the student,” he said. “It offers self-knowledge, which is the essence of discovery. Once you know yourself, you can be valuable in a lot of different fields professionally.”

More than anything, Ulmer said he wants to instill in his students the ability to work out any problem they encounter.

“It doesn’t matter what the topic is,” he said. “There is a method of creatively solving the problem. My course is an opportunity to practice creative thinking.”