Maya Shamansoorian: The case for mandatory participation
The question of whether or not students like mandatory participation has never crossed my mind. To me, I have always seen participation grades as an easy and attainable way to earn a 100% on a core assignment. Not only that, but participating in class requires that you finish the readings, understand the material and stay focused during lectures, which all lead to higher overall performance. I had never considered that mandatory participation derails individual thought and expression. An interesting concept, to be sure, but one I wouldn’t necessarily align myself with.
As a political science major, it seems like every class I take has some form of a mandatory participation grade embedded within its syllabus. In classes that are discussion-based, participation facilitates a wide variety of perspectives, leading to introspection and critical thought among students. When called upon to answer a question in class, you are giving a direct factual response while also embedding your own viewpoints and conclusions regarding said answer. This, in my belief, is the epitome of individual thought.
Some may argue that students may feel the need to “perform” for their professors, seeking approval from them by tailoring their answers to the ideological preferences or perspectives that their professors may hold. But is this performance not a reflection of your understanding of the material and how it is applicable to the real world? In this instance, a student is actively taking on the perspective biases of their professors and peers, displaying an even stronger understanding of the material rather than simply regurgitating sentences from a textbook. Maybe you aren’t making an assessment you necessarily agree with, but the ability to recognize that contention within yourself shows reflective judgment.
However, I would ascertain that at a small school like Trinity, broad ideological conversations are encouraged in the classroom. I have myself argued with professors about politics and have never been penalized for my personal beliefs. As long as you are able to back up your opinions with logic and facts congruent with the material being studied, professors (at least in political science) should be typically responsive and interested in these opposing viewpoints. Conflict inspires discourse, and this discussion facilitates a stronger bond between students, their peers and their professors.
Ariel Ramirez: The case against mandatory participation
The logic that emerges from mandatory participation for students is often to perform for their professors. In a counterintuitive way, initiatives that aim to relocate students’ center of gravity often dislocate it from the classroom to the professor themselves. At small institutions like Trinity, where students often interact with their professors in a more familiar and personal way, students risk internalizing the professor’s gaze upon their intellectual development. But despite the problematic logic for students, the logic that makes mandatory participation attractive to professors is deceptively simple. In an environment where instructors have to compete with distractions like the smartphone, the large language model or even the open tab unrelated to class material, mandatory participation forces students to relocate their attention back to the classroom and the material assigned to them. Some faculty members might contend there’s no other way to engage students, if not with mandatory participation.
When an external gaze informs how you receive material assigned to you in the classroom, your responses to it become performative. In a highly competitive environment like Trinity, the pressure to receive high marks on your assignments also helps construct this dynamic. At some point, students are no longer truly engaging with the material for the “pursuit of knowledge,” but the “pursuit of approval.” This creates a tension between what occurs in the classroom and what students take away from it.
For non-STEM students, this tension feels particularly acute. If you major in political science, for instance, it’s unlikely that you’re entering the classroom without first understanding where your professor, and the rest of your peers, fall ideologically. If you are encouraged to internalize the gaze of your instructor, which may not align with your own understanding of the world, the fear of ideological misalignment prevents you from building upon the project of your own intellectual development. You may understand the class material, and you may even receive high marks, but the alienation that mandatory participation can introduce negates the value in taking the class to begin with if you can’t recognize yourself in your contributions.
Maya Shamansoorian: If so, to what extent?
STEM classes are typically lecture-based, and without consistent dialogue between students and their professor, it seems almost impossible to gain any kind of introspective intellectual insight from merely answering a textbook definition. For these classes, universal law is king, and there will always be a right or a wrong answer, so I do not see the gain in forcing participation among students. However, in humanities classes, where subjectivity and objective truths are more common, mandatory participation is a helpful and even necessary facet of critical thinking and perspective-taking.
In humanities classes, because there is no “right” or “wrong” answer, students have more leeway in how they choose to answer questions and will have a stronger ability to support their logic, even if it is not widely agreed upon in the classroom. In this sense, there cannot be ideological misalignment or alienation because there truly is no right answer. While I recognize that the average Trinity classroom contains a somewhat disproportionate number of students with a single ideology, in a humanities course, this diversity of thought leads to intellectual conversations that focus on facts and perceptions. This is inclusivity looks like.
For STEM courses, when called upon to answer a question, if you answer correctly, you most likely will feel included and like you belong in the classroom. But if you get the question wrong, there is no place for deliberation to back up your statement. This is very isolating for the student, as now, they cannot prove their intelligence or the thought process behind their answer. This feeling of embarrassment and isolation is a result of students being in the “pursuit of approval,” rather than in the “pursuit of knowledge.”
I agree that there is some separation between the kinds of alienation that students can feel, and that this is an issue regardless of the course being taken. There will always be exceptions, but I would still say that mandatory participation in humanities classes is a valuable tool for fostering critical thinking and individual thought. Professors should however employ this mandate considering the experience of the student and how this will facilitate a more discursive classroom environment.
Ariel Ramirez: If so, to what extent?
I readily concede that we’re always performing something. For example, whether or not you agree that gender is socially constructed, it nevertheless requires performance yet crucial to our self-understanding. In this scenario, faculty doesn’t really need to care about what effects mandatory participation may or may not have on students. Mandatory participation doesn’t always produce alienation from the self within students. I think that would be a big claim, and a hard one to seriously argue. But it certainly can and often does. Maybe it doesn’t belong in the categories of good or bad for students, but simply “problematic.” The question, then, becomes about context. Where is it most appropriate for faculty to deploy participation as a tool in the classroom?
I think in STEM classes, the fact there is a shared epistemological framework governing discussion mitigates the issues I see with requiring mandatory participation in the first place. In that setting, there is no risk of ideological misalignment and alienation from your intellectual development if the responses you’re giving can be reduced to a binary “right” or “wrong.” I think that while we might agree that the premise of the original question itself is flawed, we probably disagree on how and where it should be deployed in the classroom. In humanities classes, there is rarely ever a strict binary category in which to place responses. I would say that it is probably rather benign for STEM, but problematic for the humanities.
Although intellectual alienation can also occur in STEM courses, what makes it different is that “feelings of embarrassment and isolation” are emotional states. This certainly produces a state of alienation that can produce sadness in students, but that remains in the realm of the emotional. Intellectual alienation is a slightly more complex process: it is the structural separation from the product of one’s own activity. That is the product of the internalized gaze, which embarrassment and isolation can’t engender. We probably won’t see eye to eye on this. But I think we might both agree that mandatory participation certainly has utility and can’t be excluded as a tool to be deployed in the classroom.
