Classrooms are ‘much richer, more interesting, more human, and happier,’ professor says
It’s back to pen and paper for students in history Professor Helen Veit’s classroom, as she and others grapple with the effects of technology consumption in higher education.
The Michigan State University professor is one of a number of scholars across America who teach no or low-tech classes. Veit told The College Fix in a recent interview that she prefers the terminology “screen-free” to “tech-free.”
“I consider pens and paper superior forms of technology for what I’m asking students to do — listen, think, distill their thoughts, and record them — than a laptop or tablet filled with tempting distractions,” she said.
It was during the fall semester of 2023 that Veit had an idea that would bring back the classroom experience as she remembered it.
“Until recently, college had always been a deeply social experience…” she remembered. “As a young professor walking to my classes in the late 2000s, I could always hear the buzz of student conversation and laughter far down the hallway. But during the last 15 years, this changed.”
The silence wasn’t the only change.
“I knew some college students had felt down in earlier decades, but I was struck by how many students were now talking to me about feeling alone, and I started seeing reports of student loneliness spiking across the country. This struck me as horribly sad, as counterproductive to student learning, as bad news for higher education generally, and – most importantly – as avoidable,” Veit said.
Her solution came with the realization that “the 10 minutes before class starts are a crucial time for student connection.”
So, Veit (pictured) made a decision to change her classroom. She told The Fix she started asking students to put away their phones and laptops before class starts.
Student conversations weren’t mandatory, but they were the result.
Initially, Veit said her students “admitted they were nervous not to have the crutch of a screen before class – not because they wanted more time scrolling on their phones (they didn’t), but because they weren’t used to starting conversations with people they didn’t already know, even while many of them really wanted to make more friends.”
Additionally, Veit said she requires many class assignments to be handwritten, and exams are in person. She also talks with students “at length” about AI.
The responses have been positive.
“I’ve actually been surprised (and students have reported being surprised, too) that even students who normally think they need a laptop discover that not only can they get along without one, but they have a much richer, more interesting, more human, and happier experience when they and their classmates all go without one,” she told The Fix.
“One student told me yesterday that college has been a time of profound loneliness for her, and she’s never had a class before in her college career where students actually talked to each other,” she told The Fix.
Regarding students with special needs, she added, “I’ve had several students with ADHD, specifically, tell me that a screen-free classroom turns out to be much better for their ability to concentrate deeply.”
While for Veit the shifting point came in 2023, for University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Molly Worthen it was around the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The first time I taught a big lecture class after COVID it was … within a matter of weeks that it was clear that so many students were distracted on their laptops that I had to ban them,” the history professor told The Fix in a recent phone interview.
This decision was a difficult one. Worthen elaborated on the complexity of the situation, saying, “I never want to infantilize my students, but I also know that we have so much information now about what our relationship with technology is doing to our brains and … the very real addiction that happens.”
“We need to have that in mind when we construct our learning spaces and that does mean enforcing guardrails,” she told The Fix.
Cutting technology in the classroom has its challenges, though.
For example, there is a “tension between wanting to make reading assignments as cheap and accessible as possible, which usually means providing them to students … online as PDFs … but also wanting students to have the sensory and cognitive experience of reading a text and hard copy,” Worthen (pictured) said.
Some of the difficulties have stemmed from broader issues within the education system itself.
“Our students are coming to us with unprecedentedly low levels of preparation for the basic tasks of reading and writing and critical thinking,” she told The Fix.
Worthen said most were never taught “how to take notes by hand and they confuse notetaking with verbatim transcription.”
There is value in handwriting notes, Worthen said; it “facilitates active listening because you have to be constantly synthesizing and organizing and thinking about ways to abbreviate.”
Another changing piece of the education landscape is artificial intelligence.
Regarding its prominence, Worthen said, “When you google something it doesn’t matter what your views are on AI…immediately the first thing you see is the AI summary.”
Yet, she also understands “AI is here and that we need to prepare students to use it in the way that…their future employers may expect.”
Despite the difficulties, Worthen said she has seen positive results in her classes. “I think that many students come to appreciate it because…at some level…a lot of them realize that their constant interaction with screens is making them feel miserable and they feel trapped. I know I feel trapped.”
As to the future, Worthen’s solution is this: “My dream scenario would be a four year education in which the first two years are incredibly… low tech, that insulates students…as much as possible from using technology to supplement their own reading and writing and thinking processes.”
She said those first two years “could be tightly interwoven with general education requirements so that students would be knocking off requirements they have to do in a two year bubble where they have a bit of time to become autonomous, mature readers and writers and thinkers.”
As for the last two years, Worthen said the students could learn the technology expected of their major.
The Michigan and North Carolina professors aren’t the only ones cutting technology from their classrooms.
Last summer, the University of Virginia began a “Summer Technology Sabbatical” with courses that “require students to refrain from using laptops or other devices when in session,” according to its website. The university’s media relations office did not respond to The Fix’s recent emails asking about the classes.
North of Virginia, religious studies Professor Justin McDaniel teaches “Living Deliberately: Monks, Saints, and the Contemplative Life,” a course at the University of Pennsylvania in which students fast from technology, according to UPenn News.
On the West Coast, humanities Professor David Peña-Guzmán’s class “The Reading Experiment: The Power of the Book” also offers students at San Francisco State University an almost entirely tech-free experience, EdSurge reports.
For Veit, “a screen-free policy helps students in myriad ways: it helps them connect with their classmates and make friends, which contributes to a better classroom environment, higher rates of attendance, deeper understanding of material, more shared investment in the class experience, and general happiness.”
Meanwhile, Worthen told The Fix the challenges of technology are not a teacher versus student issue. “We are in a war right now for our own attention spans and we need to work together … It’s all of us in the trenches together.”
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDITS: College students take notes with pen and paper. Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock, Jafar Fallahi/UNC Chapel Hill, Michigan State University
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