Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

In the last two decades, North American post-secondary institutions have seen a precipitous drop in humanities enrolments at the undergraduate level. Regarded as abstruse, dry and essentially irrelevant to students’ day-to-day existence, the humanities have been marginalized as merely an academic extravagance, to be engaged with only in passing, if at all. Cognizant that our students have grown up in the internet, smartphone and YouTube age, I have developed a pedagogical method that aligns with their increasingly audio-visual way of learning and concomitantly demonstrates that the humanities do indeed occupy a prominent place in their lives. “Augmented Lecturing” functions through pairing conventional speech with sensory stimuli: relatively brief audio-visual excerpts, curated to target lecture points. All extraneous material is edited out of the original video and audio (through, e.g., iMovie) and excerpts are then embedded within the presentation program (e.g., PowerPoint). Pauses in the shift between verbal and audio-visual modalities are eliminated. Modalities amplify and reinforce each other in a framework that continually links sensory stimuli to course material in order to activate areas of the brain that enhance learning and memory. In a study funded by my university, I ran a survey during the 2022–2023 academic year in four of my classes (60-percent response rate) to measure the efficacy of Augmented Lecturing on student engagement, motivation and memory. At a time when academic instructors were struggling hugely with post-pandemic student apathy and disengagement, there was a positivity score on every question, ranging from 70 to 95 percent.