Avid rock music fans among our colleagues would instantly recognise the above phrase, it being adopted by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention as the title for their 1975 jazz-rock masterpiece. However, it was under circumstances totally unrelated to music that the line popped up in my mind a fortnight ago.
I was attending a student-staff consultative meeting, a part of which was devoted to soliciting students' feedback on the teaching and learning of specific subjects and lecturers. One student commented that the PowerPoint slides of his lecturer were not comprehensive enough for self-sufficient revision; another student remarked that her lecturer did not give students enough practice, and the pace of the teaching was too slow; a third student said the format of the practice exercise given was not the same as the coming mid-term test… Half-daydreaming, as I often would be in such meetings—excuse me—I didn't catch all the finer details of everything they so ardently expressed. But what came across clearly though was that those students seemed to have certain standard expectations of the teaching approach of lecturers, and any variations from those standards were regarded as deviations and areas found wanting. The mentality is not dissimilar to the expectations consumers have for any McDonald's the world over, "Give me that same hamburger, those same French fries, and the same cola."
In other words, those students expect all lecturers to come in "one-size." That is one unsettling thought. Why wouldn't it occur to them that they should embrace diversity in teaching and learning? Why wouldn't they think that different teaching and learning approaches have their own merits? After all, to get to where they are today, all lecturers were in their own ways successful students and learners of their days—shouldn't there be some valuable lessons to be learned from the "non-standard" ways individual lecturers approach teaching and learning?
How does this one-size-fits-all—or is it all-fits-one-size—mentality come about? What can we, as educators, do about it?