Cal State Faculty Test New Methods : Education: About 350 get previews of latest teaching strategies. Sessions range from the Internet to diversity.

Some of the Cal State University system’s best and brightest faculty gathered here Saturday for a teaching symposium on how to enhance student participation through a host of methods, ranging from diversity awareness to using the Internet.

About 350 professors from across Southern California attended the third annual Symposium on University Teaching at Cal State Fullerton.

They attended 20-minute sessions on alternative teaching strategies that included the use of videotaped lectures and laser disks in classroom presentations, and were also told of ways to help minorities succeed in business and law.

“In the future of education, there will be more group work,” predicted Ruby Trow, a food and nutrition teacher at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

“Students will be actively interacting with the material and the faculty. There will be more group interaction than straight lecture,” said Trow, adding that she had ordered a videotape about the Internet to learn how to use it in her classwork.

Sessions on teaching with technology were a “hot ticket,” said one of the event’s coordinators. The rooms were packed with faculty eager to learn how to use the Internet, VCRs, laser disks, computer animation and on-line library resources in their classrooms.

Walter Oliver, a foreign-language and literature professor at Cal State San Bernardino, lectured to his audience about the possibilities and pitfalls of the technology explosion.

“We are going to have a difficult time not becoming road kill on the information superhighway,” warned Oliver, a computer buff who said he has purchased about 25 computers in the past 15 years.

“The prevailing opinion among certain administrators is that (the superhighway) is the salvation of the system,” he said.

“They can put thousands of students on-line and use two to three professors to communicate by e-mail. What will happen to the quality of our instructional programs will be a tragedy,” Oliver predicted.

Oliver also said that bringing universities into the electronic era will entail enormous costs, both for the purchase of equipment and its maintenance.

But he applauded the opportunity to use on-line bulletin boards as ways of generating conversations among different academic disciplines and gathering peer reviews. “You could submit a three-page mini-essay and the next week be barraged with all sorts of intriguing answers mentioning things you have never heard of,” he said.

Another issue facing educators, said finance and accounting professor John Pierre, is the ever-growing stream of minority and first-generation students from immigrant families whose upbringing did not expose them to complicated accounting or legal issues. Pierre said that while teaching at Cal State Bakersfield he learned that many of these students felt intimidated by the terminology and concepts they encountered in the university.

The solution, he said, “is (for professors) to simplify. When we speak with another professor, it becomes part of the lingo, but when you speak with someone else, they can’t tell what the heck you are talking about.” The result is that students begin to pass the word among themselves “that if you’re not really smart, you should not take this class,” he said.

Pierre also advocated an interactive approach to teaching. He said that by using a check that was endorsed by a chain of different people, he was able to illustrate an endorser’s liability in 10 minutes. He said the same explanation would have taken four chapters in a textbook.

Learning to deal with multicultural education is a challenge that all of today’s teachers face, said Nancy Faust, an art teacher at Cal State Los Angeles.

“Here in Southern California, we have such cultural diversity. We are all having to learn how to deal with the immense isolation we see in these culturally diverse students, and find ways for them to interact with each other,” she said.

One of the more innovative methods of improving student participation was discussed in Hal Johnston’s session about using videos to reach classes of 150 or more students.

His construction-management courses are broadcast three times daily around campus, and can be checked out on videotapes from the library at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Johnston acknowledged that videotaped lectures cut down on interaction in class, but that a three-hour weekly lab and free e-mail accounts helped address the problem.

Helen Ross, a child-development professor at San Diego State University, said she was impressed with Johnston’s presentation of the subject. “He has a good ability to step back and see what the faults in the system are,” she said. “But there is also a certain amount of envy on my part that (Cal Poly) has a lot of equipment they can use. I am going to go back more determined to take the time to use the equipment we do have.”

Behavioral science professor Barbara Goza said she devised her method of student interaction to help students make the transition into college culture. “Some are coming from high school where they get As and Bs without really studying and then suddenly they find they are getting Ds and Fs. Others are parents or working and they are not used to playing the role of students,” she said.

Goza used a series of open-ended questions about what constitutes a good grade, a productive class or makes negative impressions on the teacher or other students. “They learn that teaching and learning are a reciprocal process and this continues throughout the quarter, with them telling me what they think.”