Fostering Academic Humility in Students

[Header Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash]

Throughout my public school teaching career as a high school English teacher from 1984 until 2002, I always centered in my classes a love for popular music. In fact, my poetry unit was grounded in songs by R.E.M. (and a wonderful part of that is that my students drew me into their music in the late 80s and early 90s).

In the 1980s, however, students were well aware that my favorite music then included Dire Straits and Pink Floyd (among others).

Some where in that first decade, I had a student turn in a brief essay that praised lavishly the music of Pink Floyd—except that the student referred to Pink Floyd throughout as an individual performer, not a group.

The essay was equal parts very authoritative misinformation and somewhat impressive sentences that expressed absolutely nothing. This was many decades before ChatGPT; however, this essay was a harbinger of the sort of nonsense AI produces under the guise of human expression.

While this was an extreme example, many if not most students I have taught over the past 40 years are victims of two problems with both thinking and expression (writing)—the grand overstatement as a first sentence in an essay and the Dunning-Kruger Effect (“a lack of self-awareness [that] prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills”).

The impact of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is pervasive and complex:

The Dunning-Kruger effect effect occurs when a person’s lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area cause them to overestimate their own competence. By contrast, this effect also causes those who excel in a given area to think the task is simple for everyone, and underestimate their relative abilities as well.
Why can we not perceive our own abilities?

To the latter point, I have seen in sports many examples of excellent athletes who struggle and even fail as coaches because they misread the simplicity of performing as an athlete. But the primary way this effect impacts students is the danger of expounding on a topic with which someone has little or no experience or expertise (see below for a parallel problem, epistemic trespassing).

Journalists, politicians, pundits, and public intellectuals often reinforce these behaviors, a naive arrogance, and students have seen far more evidence of inexpert bombastic pontification than valid and credible expressions of claims and explanations.

As well, a central cultural phenomenon in the US is a disproportionate trust in entrepreneurs and outside-the-box thinkers to the exclusion of people with a depth and breadth of experience and expertise; for example, the billionaire effect on a field such as Bill Gates performing as an expert on education.

Young people (more often than not, young men) routinely are compelled by and drawn to mainstream discourse that is overwhelmingly corrupted by the Dunning-Kruger Effect; Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Christopher Rufo, and others are among the punditry who excels in almost exclusively holding forth with authority and certainty on topics with which they are provably wrong.

Podcasts, interviews, and written expression grounded in the Dunning-Kruger Effect are representations of the power of rhetoric and purposeful expression to supersede credibility and even facts. And there is a symbiotic relationship in that phenomenon because, for example, neither Rogan nor his audience have enough knowledge in the topics to know what they don’t know so Rogan’s bravado and certainty are compelling despite the lack of facts or even evidence.

Further, the political norms in the US allow politicians and political candidates (especially in formal debates) to gain power and influence through how they express and carry themselves even as they distort evidence and even outright lie. During the Trump/Clinton debates, Trump was declared a winner in one event even as most people acknowledged his responses were overwhelmingly false claims.

Here, I think, is an important distinction between the popular and scholarly world (and not to suggest one is somehow superior to the other, but substantially different and different in ways that could benefit humans broadly).

When a person, especially a young person, who hasn’t been formally educated—such as graduate school—in gaining and navigating knowledge (or “Knowledge”) has a “new” thought on a topic, that person often feels that the newness is universal, not just new to them. It is easy, as well, in a burst of excitement with a new idea to believe you now have something wonderful and new to share with others.

In the scholarly world, when a scholar has a new idea to them, the first thought is assuming other people with expertise have explored that idea thoroughly, and the rush of excitement, then, is to find out what knowledge there is on the topic, often as preparation for sharing their exploration of the ideas with others but grounded in an intense examination of other people’s authority on the topic; in academia, there is a culture of standing on the shoulders of giants, the exact opposite of popular trust in out-side-the-box thinkers and billionaire pundits.

I must stress here that even as this approach to knowledge is a norm of academia, scholars are too often victims of both the Dunning-Kruger Effect and epistemic trespassing; however, typically within the scholarly world, those failures are challenged and even shunned.

I have begun calling that norm “academic humility,” and I directly teach that in my first-year writing as part of expectations for student thinking and writing.

A great deal of instruction with first-year students is grounded in unlearning habits about writing and thinking instilled in K-12 schooling. A major concern I address is traditional essay elements, specifically the assertive introduction with a thesis statement.

Directly and indirectly, students are often encouraged to make blunt claims in essay writing, starting with the direct thesis. That expression comes after students are encouraged to draft and have approved an introduction and thesis sentence before they can draft their essays.

Also, students are taught to write conclusions that restate their introductions.

These traditional approaches foster static and narrow thinking and expression (especially writing an entire essay simply to restate what the beginning of the essay has already asserted).

Therefore, as we interrogate and then re-imagine essay writing, I emphasize the value in discovery drafting and raising questions to be considered in an essay instead of the thesis-sentence-as-proclamation.

Academic humility in thinking and writing allows for nuance and, ironically, for working toward ideas and expressions that do in fact bring something new to the conversation.

If we are careful when consuming media, public, and political discourse, we often notice a great deal of dogmatic expression grounded in ideology and not careful consideration or evidence.

Without academic humility we are left victims to not knowing what we don’t know.

Education rightly approached fosters in students ways to navigate the world with the sort of humility that can and will lead to a tentative authority that benefits not only them but all of us.