A bit more on gatekeeping

[mareserinitatis]

Motorhead9999 left a comment in my last post which I think deserves a response on its own. Part of the comment was:

I've never considered what you call "gatekeeping" a bad thing. I actually think they're aimed at a complete different set of people than you're identifying. I feel that these weeder classes are there to a)give people a clear sense of what

Comments

[ext_93272]

"In a standard circuits class, the teacher presents a concept on the board and then some hokey lab is done to reinforce what they saw in the class. The students go through the steps of the lab mindlessly and nod their heads as whatever they learned in lecture is supposedly reinforced.

Why aren't the students going to labs first? Why aren't they deducing, for themselves, how to solve circuits using nodal analysis (as an example)? Why aren't they playing with op-amps to see how they work before the lecture ever takes place?"

I see this as a flaw of teaching in general, not specifically related to the gatekeeping issue. I have similar questions about how mathematics and the sciences are taught. Very often students are simply given a certain type of problem and then taught an algorithm for solving problems of this type. Rarely are they given the opportunity to simply play with the problem and use their prior knowledge to work out a solution themselves (and because they're never asked to do this, they wouldn't know what to do if they were given the opportunity).

[mareserinitatis]

Actually, I see this as a gatekeeping issue in STEM precisely because this may be the best way to learn for some people. If they are not allowed to learn that way, that doesn't mean they are bad scientists, mathematicians, or engineers. It means that they are not being presented material in a way that is optimal for them to learn, which means people who are potentially good problem solvers might be kept from going on in their studies. So while I was using an example from engineering specifically, I do think it applies to all STEM areas, and I do think there is gatekeeping going on in those other areas as well.