Interviewer: This morning, I'm with Ralph Metts from the School of Education. Ralph, thank you so much for coming here today.
Ralph Metts: You're most welcome.
Interviewer: Before we get started, I'm wondering if you could just tell us a bit about yourself. Where do you work? What kind of courses do you teach? What's your background?
Ralph: My background is interesting. I've had a lot of different careers as a Jesuit in the Society of Jesus. My background is that for the 22 years before I came to USF to work in the Institute for Catholic Educational Leadership, I worked with the Jesuit Secondary Education Association. Most of that as a vice president but at the end, as President of the association. They're a service group for all the Jesuit high schools in the United States and Canada.
Before that, my previous career was-- My doctorate's in learning disabilities. I spent nine years as a learning specialist for the Maryland Province Jesuit High Schools. Towards the end of my career, I've wound up at USF and my courses that I'm teaching in the Institute for Catholic Educational Leadership, I teach a one-unit workshop in Jesuit pedagogy. I teach a two-unit workshop on what I'm calling dis-learning-abled, which is getting into some of the new research and learning disabilities or the giftedness behind the learning disability.
Also this summer, I'm teaching required course, the History and Principles of Catholic Education. I'm doing a lot of advising to the masters students, plus reading a few dissertations and the usual University stuff.
Interviewer: Fantastic, Ralph, thank you so much. Ralph, I don't know what the difference is between these terms, but you used the term Jesuit pedagogy. What I've heard a lot is Ignatian Pedagogy. Before we get into what similar difference, or it may just emerge naturally, I wanted to ask about something that I really may have understood improperly. As I understood it, somehow, someway you were part of a team of folks that helped develop the current Ignatian/Jesuit pedagogy approach.
Ralph: Yes, back in the late 80s and the early 1990s, they worked on the document which was published in 1993, called Ignatian Pedagogy, A Practical Approach. I didn't so much help develop as I had early drafts and were able to critique those early drafts of that document. When the document finally got put into its final form-- That had a lot of international input into it. You're writing something that has to go across all the continents of the world, which can be very challenging to try to meet all the different needs.
We had then a workshop at our old retreat house outside of Rome, where we invited about teams of about five to seven from all around the various parts of the Jesuit education world. We spent two weeks really trying to figure out how to implement this and how to present the various techniques that would help develop the Ignatian Pedagogy approach in Jesuit schools.
Interviewer: Fantastic. Now I'm going go back to that. What's the difference, if any, between Ignatian Pedagogy and Jesuit pedagogy? I call my cats by various names. Really the various names all mean the same thing. I don't know if it's true in this case.
Ralph: It is true to some degree. I think if we talk about Jesuit pedagogy, we go back to the founding of the Society of Jesus in the 16th century. For many, many years, the schools were primarily staffed by Jesuits, up until almost 1960s. Back in the 16th century, the Jesuits didn't intend to get into education and actually did get into education, and then had to decide, "What are we going to do? How are we going to do this?"
They spent, from about 1548 when the first school was founded in Siena, Italy in 1548, to 1599 consolidating their educational theory and their educational practices, In 1599, they put out a document that's entitled in Latin, Ratio Studiorum. The best translation is probably the plan of studies. In that, they put together their methodology and their curriculum.
It's very interesting from 1599 on, even during the suppression of the society in the 18th century, the Ratio Studiorum stayed in place. When the society was re-founded in 1814, the Ratio Studiorum just came back and was in place.
We didn't write much on Jesuit education formally until the end of the 20th century. I think the way that the term Ignatian pedagogy-- I think we talked about Jesuit pedagogy. It's that first Founding Fathers, it's that Ratio Studiorum, it's their methodology. I think when we start talking about Ignatian Pedagogy, we're looking at taking some of those principles from the Ratio Studiorum, and also then taking some of the other methodology from the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and trying to bring it up to date and put it into the context of our current times. Since we're down to maybe about 4% to 5% of Jesuits teaching and Jesuit secondary schools and probably universities too around the world, I think the term Ignatian Pedagogy is trying to say, "This is applicable for everybody, and it's not simply for Jesuits."
Interviewer: Got you.
Ralph: That's, at least, my interpretation. Other Jesuits may give you some other thinking on that.
Interviewer: Of course. [laughs]
Ralph: Of course.
[laughter]
Interviewer: Completely natural but at least, that helps me and hopefully, it helps listeners. If we think about Ignatian Pedagogy for a moment, for somebody who's teaching in higher education at a Jesuit-- Actually, it probably doesn't matter whether it's a Jesuit Institution or not. I know there's a lot to it, but what's the broad outline of the approach?
Ralph: The broad outline of the approach is that it really tries to focus on what I would call the heart of the pedagogical project and that's experience, reflection, action. That comes out of our tradition. That was the way the Ratiowas put together through all the years of critiquing, and reformulating and putting it back together, sending it back out to the provinces to respond. That's how the final Ratio got formulated.
Also, that's the heart of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, which are a series of prayer exercises to try to reorient the person's life more to God. In those spiritual exercises, you're reflecting on your experience, and that's always trying to lead to some kind of action. I think the heart of the pedagogical project is experience, reflection, action, which you can find in other educational theories today.
In that sense, it's not unique, but I think we've tried to go back in terms of Jesuit education, to our roots, what were our roots and how can we apply that today and help students become those students we're looking for as we start talking about mission statements for universities. We talk about the slogan here at USF, Change the World from Here. If they're going to change the world, then they're going to have to have some skills, some abilities. I think that comes out of that experience, reflection, action model.
Interviewer: Now, I think, a lot of faculty have a number of good tools. We may not always implement them, but the reflection, action I think makes more intuitive sense. What I want to focus on for a moment, if it's okay, is the whole experience part, the starting off part. What I'm initially thinking of-- So I don't know exactly what's inside of experience for Ignatian Pedagogy, but the general broad movement has been that lecturing too much doesn't work for students.
There's been this general movement that has a variety of terms and names but perhaps the most widely used is active learning. That can come in a variety of forms, but in one way or another, getting students-- Not doing away with lecture but providing a much greater percentage of time in class for students actively experiencing, engaging in some sort of challenge or project. Is the way that experience is used with Ignatian Pedagogy similar to that? Is it different? Is it similar but more--?
Ralph: I would say it's very similar. I would think that if we're talking about Jesuit pedagogy, at least when it first started, was a very active learning model. What I know of the Ratio Studiorum classes back in the 16th and 17th century, they were sometimes very large classes. Actually, the students had a very active role in their learning process. They were broken up into groups of 10 with a leader, and sometimes that student leader would hear the lessons of other students, but they'd work on projects together or what they were learning, in terms of particularly classical language because it was a very classically-oriented curriculum.
I think that active learning is a very essential part of that experience piece. I think that if you're going to broaden students' experience, which we're all trying to do in terms of education, then we've got to get them actively involved. I'm a big advocate of whole-person learning, and that learning really engages the entire physiology. People need to be actively involved in their learning process if it's going to have meaning, if it's going to really get cemented into some kind of working memory or long term memory for them to use.
Interviewer: I'm just asking these questions out of ignorance, but are there particular specific suggestions that Ignatian Pedagogy makes in terms of how to enhance the learning experience, or is it more general and people take very different approaches?
Ralph: Yes, it's more general. People take very different approaches. The document itself, it stays pretty theoretical, in terms of talking about simply, we're trying to-- I think the document talks about engaging the imagination, the mind and the will. The will is an Ignatian category. That's that part of the person that really forms the person into who they are, but I think it talks about that in very general terms. Then I think there are a lot of different approaches for broadening that experience and creating that experience for the student.
Interviewer: Now I want to move on to reflection briefly.
Ralph: Sure.
Interviewer: I think many faculty realize that the importance of getting students to reflect, whether it's in the classroom or out of the classroom. I'm sure people take a variety of tacks. One of the problems may be time in the class. People who are typically doing some sort of reflection exercise in class, they make it quick, write a paragraph and they may take a couple of minutes at the end of class. Are there specific practices or suggestions that Ignatian Pedagogy has with regards to reflection and how often to do it, how to think about doing it, that kind of thing?
Ralph: Document itself does not do that, I do that in my own courses. I try to build in a lot of reflection. I really got into my work with students with special learning needs. I don't like the term learning disabilities. I really got into using a lot of trying to do multi-sensory learning, the visual auditory and kinesthetic. I got into the left and right hemisphere distinctions in learning, which I know a lot of the research puts down now, but I still, from my experience with the students I worked with, I think there's some real validity there, that there are different processing styles.
Interviewer: Right.
Ralph: Then I also got very involved in Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences. I think, for me, in teaching reflection, how do we get reflection across the spectrum of learning styles, left and right hemisphere multiple intelligences? I'll talk a little bit about one of the traditions of the Ratio Studiorum, and that was repetition. In the Ratio Studiorum, there was a preparation piece called prelection where the professor or the student or the teacher would give the students some guidelines for what they were studying, point out some difficult passages, just set up the whole atmosphere for learning.
That was immediately followed by a repetition where the students were asked to repeat everything that they had just heard from the teacher, but it was all auditory. No writing anything down in that day and age. I don't think that would work very well today, but then there was also repetitions at the beginning of every class. Sometimes that was just a traditional quiz. I've tried to use that this summer in the History and Principles course, by all kinds of different techniques. Every day, I give them a repetition. A number of them we've done in class, a number of them they've had to do at home for homework assignments, but I've tried to use different multiple intelligences.
I've tried to use both the left and right hemisphere. We looked at ourselves as a class this summer, and we have a real mixture in the class. The real left hemisphere people have trouble with some of the right hemisphere stuff, and the right hemisphere people have some trouble with the left hemisphere stuff, but I think it's important to stretch people in those areas. The goal obviously always is get the whole person involved. It's using all these different learning channels. I think that reflection needs to go across that spectrum of the students that you have in your class, and try to touch the different learning styles, but then also try to stretch them in some ways.
Interviewer: Without going into a bunch of detail, because you bring up a lot of interesting things, what would be maybe a couple of examples of different reflection exercises you use, but they might get at different aspects of the person?
Ralph: One of the things that I use is I get them to do some web or as I learned it, mind mapping. I'll start a class and have them do a web or mind mapping as the repetition from yesterday. Just take a minute, put down everything you remember from yesterday, put it in some kind of web or design.
Interviewer: In that kind of thing, it's not just the list because when you're creating a mind map, it's looking at the stuff, if you want, but also the connections between the stuff.
Ralph: Try to see what the connections they can make in between them [crosstalk]--
Interviewer: Got you. That's important, yes.
Ralph: That's important to do. Sometimes I ask them, stretching them out a little bit. I would say, "If yesterday's class were a song, what would it be?" That gets interesting results. This is getting to Gardner's multiple intelligences. My repetition yesterday at the end of the class was, "Do you have a slogan for this class? Can you think of a slogan for this class?"
Interviewer: It's part of it, when I do something-- I haven't done these exact things, I may in the future, but when I've done something like this, what I'm actually more interested in is, in what they come up with I'm always asking them, "Okay, what's--" If I was doing the same thing, I'd ask them, "What's the slogan you come up with, but why?"
Ralph: But why? Yes. No, I'm interested in that. Then I have amnesia regularly in a class. They start laughing at me, but I say I get hit by the bus out in the street and I don't remember anything we've done in the class up to date. Then I give them maybe some learning styles. I might pick some different learning styles and I say, "Fill me in, teach me." That's, again, another form of repetition.
They're probably tired of repetition at this point in the class. I'll probably find that out today because today's the last teaching day, but we've done repetition every day, and we've done the other piece, prelection, every day. We've reviewed what the assignments are going to be. I pointed out if it's reading assignments, what I want them to pay attention to. Just that pre-reading. It's a preparation piece. It's an overview piece.
Interviewer: Right. I'm often using reflection. Well, I have to think about it more deeply. I probably use it more in a live class than I remember right now, but it strikes me immediately as I'm doing something with reflection, typically always between classes. To give you the big scope of things, my classes are typically two weeks apart. There's also an important reason for doing it outside of class, but one component of the reflection for me is whatever prompt I give them, then it's shared. Then we get to see what each other is thinking before we come into class. Are there important ways that you use reflection outside of the live classroom? I love these examples of how you do it inside.
Ralph: Well, right now I have not taught on that Saturday schedule where the two weeks are apart. This is intense in the summer. It's every day for two and a half hours.
Interviewer: Which a whole different ball game.
Ralph: It's a whole different ball game for three weeks. I have not stressed how do we keep in contact outside of class. I would, if I were doing the two week piece. I would have to think about that a little bit more, but I would probably try to use some blogs or even the Google Drive in some way, shape or form or maybe get some ideas from the students of some of the pieces they use regularly in their communication and their work because I'm still learning a lot of this stuff myself.
Interviewer: These are all great. I want to finally go to action. Well, I don't know what the percentage is, but I know there's a number of faculty at USF interested in the action bit. It takes form in variety of ways, sometimes just individual nuances of an instructor and how they conduct a class for an individual class. Sometimes it takes a more formal version of-- For example, some of the service learning classes, some faculty have been more involved.
It's not exactly the same as service learning, but in a community engaged kind of actions in the classes. I'm wondering what are general approaches that Ignatian Pedagogy might use for action? I think there's a lot of people who are interested in that and yet, because of time restrictions, student time restrictions, they feel like I can't demand that much. I'm wondering if there are any really nice approaches that you've implemented.
Ralph: I think probably not just giving, again, the course over the summer. I think in Ignatian Pedagogy, the action gets more focused on the person. It's much more that interiorization and interior choices the person is making in order to be able to carry out something for the common good. Jesuit education always has that religious dimension to it. For Ignatian Pedagogy, Ignatius always said-- His famous phrase was, "Action, not words," so don't talk about it, do something. I think for me, in terms of Ignatian Pedagogy and the action I hope will happen from the courses I teach is it will go back into the classrooms of the various-- Or the administrators that are in the class and some things will change and some things will be different.
Interviewer: But your expectation is not to necessarily see it in your class?
Ralph: Right.
Interviewer: The consequences of the class in terms of that person's-- How they conduct themselves comes out a week, a month, six months later.
Ralph: I may never know that.
Interviewer: Exactly.
Ralph: I may never know what happens with all the different things I do in the class. Some of them get some strange looks, but I'm fine with that but I might not know what happens, but every once in a while I'll run into somebody and say, "You tried this physical exercise piece in the middle of class. I tried it with my students and it really worked. I really liked it."
Interviewer: But what I'm hearing from you is within that Ignatian Pedagogy perspective that if magically, we could know what our students did afterwards-- I realize that rarely happens, but if magically you could do it, you would be unhappy or dissatisfied if too small percentage of them weren't transferring what they learned in the class to their practice later.
Ralph: Yes, I would be. I wouldn't be really happy with that, but I always end my classes in the same way and even a workshop, one day workshop and I say, "If one student is affected by what I've done today, then it's worth my time and effort." I always like to remind us, it's [unintelligible 00:20:06] that student out there sitting in the classroom here in the inner city, San Francisco here, in some of the private schools here, in classes around the world, if really one student puts some pieces together for him or herself, then I think it's well worth the time.
Interviewer: I understand. It's interesting the way that you're describing part of this because it seems what you're bringing to it is a vision of-- Even though it's not inside the classroom, you'll never see it, of what that student might look like in the future.
Ralph: Right.
Interviewer: I remember some people who work in radio because they don't see anybody. Right?
Ralph: Right. Right. 
Interviewer: What they do to really help themselves is they think of a specific person they know or-- They may not know well, but they want to communicate well. That helps them to keep things more personal, more directed, more focused, rather than just speaking to the ether, so to speak.
Ralph: Right. It remains, I think, on a theoretical level rather than the practical level. I think all those levels of actions that you talked about are perfectly in line with the Ignatian Pedagogy piece.
Interviewer: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. As a final question, I just want to ask if there's any other issues you think faculty should be aware of in terms of Ignatian Pedagogy and how it may impact how we think about better working with USF students?
Ralph: That's an interesting question. I guess I think we need to be a little more explicit in that Ignatian piece as a Jesuit university. I think that it could have the possibility of permeating a little bit more of our discussion and our thinking. I'm aware that we're always modelling. No matter what we're doing as teachers, we're modelling something and they're picking up something. Sometimes we don't know what they're picking up but that's fine, sometimes it may not be so fine if we're not wanting the right things. I think if we can model that a little bit more, it might be more helpful for the students. I'm thinking more in the undergraduate level than the graduate level.
Interviewer: Sure.
Ralph: I think by the time we get them-- I'm teaching graduate students, the time we get them to graduate level, they're pretty well-formed and set in their ways and thinking, but I still think there's a chance to push them out in some different directions. I think it's the modelling piece would be my first comment on that. I can think about it a little bit more but that's what jumps to mind.
Interviewer: Fantastic. Well, Ralph, thank you for the generosity of your time today.
Ralph: You're welcome. You're welcome.
Interviewer: I think this will be, really, very helpful for many faculty.
Ralph: Okay. Thanks. Thanks very much.
[00:22:50] [END OF AUDIO]


File name: Ralph Metts on Ignatian Pedagogy.mp3
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