Keynote at WILU2019, The Workshop for Instruction in Library Use
Scaffolding can create points of entry and access but can also reduce the complexity of learning to its detriment. And too often we build learning environments in advance of students arriving upon the scene. We design syllabi, assemble content, predetermine outcomes, and craft assessments before having met our students. We reduce students to data. And learning to input and output.
Radical openness isn't a bureaucratic gesture, isn't linear, offers infinite points of entry. It has to be rooted in a willingness to sit with discomfort. Radical openness demands educational institutions be spaces for relationships and dialogue. bell hooks writes, “for me this place of radical openness is a margin—a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a 'safe' place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.” For hooks, the risks we take are personal, professional, political. When she says that “radical openness is a margin,” she suggests it is a place of emergent outcomes, a place of friction, a place of critical thinking.
Scaffolding can create points of entry and access but can also reduce the complexity of learning to its detriment. And too often we build learning environments in advance of students arriving upon the scene. We design syllabi, predetermine outcomes, and craft rubrics before having met the students. We reduce students to data.
5 things we can do to create more inclusive spaces in education:
1) Recognize students are not an undifferentiated mass.
2) For education to be innovative, at this particular moment, we don’t need to invest in technology. We need to invest in teachers.
3) Staff, administrators, and faculty need to come together, across institutional hierarchies, for inclusivity efforts to work. At many institutions, a faculty/staff divide is one of the first barriers that needs to be overcome.
4) The path toward inclusivity starts with small, human acts:
* Walk campus to assess the accessibility of common spaces and classrooms. For example, an accessible desk in every classroom doesn’t do much good if students can’t get to that desk because the rooms are overcrowded.
* Invite students to share pronouns, model this behavior, but don’t expect it of every student.
* Make sure there is an easy and advertised process for students, faculty, and staff to change their names within institutional systems. Make sure chosen names are what appear on course rosters.
* Regularly invite the campus community into hard conversations about inclusivity. For example, a frank discussion of race and gender bias in grading and course evaluations.
5) Stop having conversations about the future of education without students in the room.
A joint keynote with Sean Michael Morris at the Dream 2019 conference in Long Beach, California.
It is urgent we have teachers, it is urgent we employ them, pay them, support them with adequate resources; but it is also urgency which defines the project of teaching. In a political climate increasingly defined by its obstinacy, anti-intellectualism, and deflection of fact and care; in a society still divided across lines of race, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and privilege, teaching has an important (urgent) role to play.
Scaffolding can create points of entry and access but can also reduce the complexity of learning to its detriment. And too often we build learning environments in advance of students arriving upon the scene. We design syllabi, predetermine outcomes, and craft rubrics before having met the students. We reduce students to data.
5 things we can do to create more inclusive spaces in education:
1) Recognize students are not an undifferentiated mass.
2) For education to be innovative, at this particular moment, we don’t need to invest in technology. We need to invest in teachers.
3) Staff, administrators, and faculty need to come together, across institutional hierarchies, for inclusivity efforts to work. At many institutions, a faculty/staff divide is one of the first barriers that needs to be overcome.
4) The path toward inclusivity starts with small, human acts:
* Walk campus to assess the accessibility of common spaces and classrooms. For example, an accessible desk in every classroom doesn’t do much good if students can’t get to that desk because the rooms are overcrowded.
* Invite students to share pronouns, model this behavior, but don’t expect it of every student.
* Make sure there is an easy and advertised process for students, faculty, and staff to change their names within institutional systems. Make sure chosen names are what appear on course rosters.
* Regularly invite the campus community into hard conversations about inclusivity. For example, a frank discussion of race and gender bias in grading and course evaluations.
5) Stop having conversations about the future of education without students in the room.
A joint keynote with Sean Michael Morris at the Dream 2019 conference in Long Beach, California.
It is urgent we have teachers, it is urgent we employ them, pay them, support them with adequate resources; but it is also urgency which defines the project of teaching. In a political climate increasingly defined by its obstinacy, anti-intellectualism, and deflection of fact and care; in a society still divided across lines of race, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and privilege, teaching has an important (urgent) role to play.
A guide-to-school-reform-booklet-build-the-future-education-humanistic-educat...Steve McCrea
Mario Llorente, Steve McCrea, Francois Savain, Nicholas Boucher, Milena Toro, Matt Blazek, Dennis Yuzenas, Jeff Hutt and other have combined their readings and experience to share this information about how to bring USEFUL TECHNIQUES into classrooms. Introducing these procedures can change attitudes and lives, even in an oppressive, 1950s, top-down authoritarian environment. Call me for more tips +1 954 646 8246 EDDSteve@gmail.com VisualAndActive.com GuideontheSide.com
Centering Teaching: the Human Work of Higher EducationJesse Stommel
Most higher education teaching practices are unexamined, because teachers are rarely given space to think critically about pedagogy. We need departments of higher education pedagogy (or interdisciplinary clusters of scholars focused on higher education pedagogy) at every school offering graduate degrees aimed at preparing future faculty.
How do children learn? How are they taught? These are two fundamental questions in education. Caleb Gattegno provides a direct and lucid analysis, and concludes that much current teaching, far from feeding and developing the learning process, actually stifles it. Memory, for instance, the weakest of the mental powers available for intelligent use, is almost the only faculty to be exploited in the educational system, and holds little value in preparing a student for the future. Gattegno’s answer is to show how learning and teaching can properly work together, what schools should achieve, and what parents have a right to expect.
In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf writes, "To sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery."
Ultimately, the future of education is humans not tools, and our efforts at hacking, forking, and remixing education should all be aimed at making and guarding space for students and teachers. If there is a better sort of mechanism that we need for the work of teaching, it is a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not for delivering and assessing content, but for helping all of us listen better to students. But we can’t get to a place of listening to students if they don’t show up to the conversation because we’ve already excluded their voice in advance by creating environments hostile to them and their work.
Any authority within the space of the classroom must be aimed at fostering agency in all the members of our community.
Science & Arts Academy
1825 Miner Street
Des Plaines, Illinois 60016
847-827-7880
http://www.scienceandartsacademy.org
Science & Arts Academy is an independent, non-denominational, co-educational, not-for-profit day school for gifted students in Junior Kindergarten through eighth grade.
White Paper: The Essential Characteristics of a Boy-Friendly Learning Environ...Jack Purdom
An often overlooked issue in today’s schools is the dire state of boys’ education. Research shows that institutions are failing to engage male students, and the outcome couldn’t be any clearer. Across all age, ethnicity, and economic demographics in the US, boys consistently account for the overwhelming majority of disciplinary referrals, failing grades, and ADHD diagnoses. While boys are as capable of learning classroom material as well as girls are, they are often not given the support they need to learn effectively. Fortunately, studies have also pointed us toward the environments that boys learn in best. The following white paper describes some key features of a boy-friendly learning environment.
Designing for Care: Inclusive Pedagogies for Online LearningJesse Stommel
We need to be thinking about how we respond in the moment to this emergent crisis, but it’s just as important that we talk about sustainable ways forward. What we are facing right now will have an effect on education that lasts years (or longer), and it’s exposing inequities and systemic injustices that many students have faced all along.
Virtual Learning Communities: 6 Theses for Creating a Sense of Belonging OnlineJesse Stommel
There is no one-size-fits-all set of best practices for building a learning community, whether on-ground or online. We have to start by finding out who are students are, what they need to be successful, and how our institutional mission does (and sometimes doesn’t) align with our practices.
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Mario Llorente, Steve McCrea, Francois Savain, Nicholas Boucher, Milena Toro, Matt Blazek, Dennis Yuzenas, Jeff Hutt and other have combined their readings and experience to share this information about how to bring USEFUL TECHNIQUES into classrooms. Introducing these procedures can change attitudes and lives, even in an oppressive, 1950s, top-down authoritarian environment. Call me for more tips +1 954 646 8246 EDDSteve@gmail.com VisualAndActive.com GuideontheSide.com
Centering Teaching: the Human Work of Higher EducationJesse Stommel
Most higher education teaching practices are unexamined, because teachers are rarely given space to think critically about pedagogy. We need departments of higher education pedagogy (or interdisciplinary clusters of scholars focused on higher education pedagogy) at every school offering graduate degrees aimed at preparing future faculty.
How do children learn? How are they taught? These are two fundamental questions in education. Caleb Gattegno provides a direct and lucid analysis, and concludes that much current teaching, far from feeding and developing the learning process, actually stifles it. Memory, for instance, the weakest of the mental powers available for intelligent use, is almost the only faculty to be exploited in the educational system, and holds little value in preparing a student for the future. Gattegno’s answer is to show how learning and teaching can properly work together, what schools should achieve, and what parents have a right to expect.
In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf writes, "To sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery."
Ultimately, the future of education is humans not tools, and our efforts at hacking, forking, and remixing education should all be aimed at making and guarding space for students and teachers. If there is a better sort of mechanism that we need for the work of teaching, it is a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not for delivering and assessing content, but for helping all of us listen better to students. But we can’t get to a place of listening to students if they don’t show up to the conversation because we’ve already excluded their voice in advance by creating environments hostile to them and their work.
Any authority within the space of the classroom must be aimed at fostering agency in all the members of our community.
Science & Arts Academy
1825 Miner Street
Des Plaines, Illinois 60016
847-827-7880
http://www.scienceandartsacademy.org
Science & Arts Academy is an independent, non-denominational, co-educational, not-for-profit day school for gifted students in Junior Kindergarten through eighth grade.
White Paper: The Essential Characteristics of a Boy-Friendly Learning Environ...Jack Purdom
An often overlooked issue in today’s schools is the dire state of boys’ education. Research shows that institutions are failing to engage male students, and the outcome couldn’t be any clearer. Across all age, ethnicity, and economic demographics in the US, boys consistently account for the overwhelming majority of disciplinary referrals, failing grades, and ADHD diagnoses. While boys are as capable of learning classroom material as well as girls are, they are often not given the support they need to learn effectively. Fortunately, studies have also pointed us toward the environments that boys learn in best. The following white paper describes some key features of a boy-friendly learning environment.
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Designing for Care: Inclusive Pedagogies for Online LearningJesse Stommel
We need to be thinking about how we respond in the moment to this emergent crisis, but it’s just as important that we talk about sustainable ways forward. What we are facing right now will have an effect on education that lasts years (or longer), and it’s exposing inequities and systemic injustices that many students have faced all along.
Virtual Learning Communities: 6 Theses for Creating a Sense of Belonging OnlineJesse Stommel
There is no one-size-fits-all set of best practices for building a learning community, whether on-ground or online. We have to start by finding out who are students are, what they need to be successful, and how our institutional mission does (and sometimes doesn’t) align with our practices.
Critical Pedagogy, Civil Disobedience, and EdtechJesse Stommel
The majority of development in edtech is driven by the bureaucratic traditions of education more than the pedagogical ones.
If we object to the increasing standardization of education, how and where do we build sites of resistance? What strategies can we employ to guard ourselves and our students? What systems of privilege must we first dismantle?
An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital PedagogyJesse Stommel
Critical Pedagogy is as much a political approach as it is an educative one, a social justice movement first, and an educational movement second. Digital technologies have values coded into them in advance. Many tools are good only insofar as they are used. Tools and platforms that do dictate too strongly how we might use them, or ones that remove our agency by covertly reducing us and our work to commodified data, should be rooted out by a Critical Digital Pedagogy.
Can we imagine assessment mechanisms that encourage discovery, ones not designed for assessing learning but designed for learning through assessment? Much of our work in education resists being formulated as neat and tidy outcomes, and yet most assessment takes the complexity of human interaction within a learning environment and makes it “machine readable.” When learning is the goal, space should be left for wonder and experimentation.
A keynote based on two blog posts:
Why I Don't Grade: https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/
How to Ungrade: https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/
This workshop offers participants a hands-on introduction to the concepts and practices of digital pedagogy. We discuss the intersections between “online,” “hybrid,” and “digital” with regards to learning approaches and environments. And we launch into an exploration of assignment design, creative assessment, and digital tools. This workshop is suitable for educators--teachers, librarians, instructional designers, technologists, and others--at all levels who have an interest in exploring new techniques for digital teaching and learning.
Radical Openness: the Work of Critical Digital PedagogyJesse Stommel
Radical openness demands the classroom be a space for relationships and dialogue. Far too many tools we’ve built for teaching are designed to make grading students convenient—or designed to facilitate the systematic observation of teachers by administrators.
The first mistake of many online programs is that they try to replicate something we do in face-to-face classes, mapping the (sometimes pedagogically-sound, sometimes bizarre) traditions of on-ground institutions onto digital space.
We need to recognize that online learning uses a different platform, builds community in different ways, demands different pedagogies, has a different economy, functions at different scales, and requires different choices regarding curriculum than does on-ground education. Even where the same goal is desired, very different methods must be used to reach that goal.
Open Pedagogy: Building Compassionate Spaces for Online LearningJesse Stommel
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes, “for me this place of radical openness is a margin—a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a ‘safe’ place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.” For hooks, the risks we take are personal, professional, political. When she says that “radical openness is a margin,” she suggests it is a place of uncertainty, a place of friction, a place of critical thinking. This is not an Open pedagogy neatly defined and delimited.
Open pedagogy pushes on the notion of education as content delivery in favor of education as community and dialogue. The work is less crudely didactic, more ephemeral. This can be especially true in online teaching and learning, where presence is signaled in very different ways and risk is felt differently. When we ask students to work openly on the Web, it’s critical that we make space for them to critically interrogate digital culture and to contribute to knowledge on the Web. As online educators and designers, we must also make space for students to teach us about working on the Web, about learning, about what education can be.
[Plenary at Open SUNY Summit, March 2018]
To queer Open is to imagine it as an emergent space always in process. Open Education is not confirmed by courses, platforms, syllabi, hierarchies, but exactly resists those containers, imagining a space for marginalized representation -- a space that recognizes our unique embodied contexts and offers opportunities for liberation from them.
My keynote from Digital Pedagogy Lab Vancouver.
If bell hook made an LMS: Grades, Radical Openness, and Domain of One's OwnJesse Stommel
This is the text of the presentation I gave at the Domains17 conference in Oklahoma City, OK on June 5, 2017. The learning management system is a red herring, a symptom of a much larger beast that has its teeth on education: the rude quantification of learning, the reduction of teaching to widgets and students to data points.
A link to the full text of the presentation: http://jessestommel.com/if-bell-hooks-made-an-lms-grades-radical-openness-and-domain-of-ones-own/
Against Counteranthropomorphism: The Human Future of EducationJesse Stommel
In Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, Stanley Milgram coined the term “counteranthropomorphism” — the tendency we have to remove the humanity of people we can’t see. These may be people on the other side of a wall, as in Milgram’s famous (or infamous) experiments, or people mediated by technology in a virtual classroom. Our turn to digital solutionism has frustrated our attempts at imagining a humane future for higher education. The less we understand our tools, the more we are beholden to them. The more we imagine our tools as transparent or invisible, the less able we are to take ownership of them. It is essential that we consider our tools carefully and critically—that we empty all our LEGOs onto the table and sift through them before we start building. Some tools are decidedly less innocuous than others. And some tools can never be hacked to good use. Remote proctoring tools can’t ensure that students will not cheat. Turnitin won’t make students better writers. The LMS can’t ensure that students will learn. All will, however, ensure that students feel more thoroughly policed. All will ensure that students (and teachers) are more compliant.
Ultimately, the future of education is humans not tools, and our efforts at hacking, forking, and remixing education should all be aimed at making and guarding space for students and teachers. If there is a better sort of mechanism that we need for the work of digital pedagogy, it is a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not for delivering and assessing content, but for helping all of us listen better to students. But we can’t get to a place of listening to students if they don’t show up to the conversation because we’ve already excluded their voice in advance by creating environments hostile to them and their work.
Graduate Training in 21st Century PedagogyJesse Stommel
If teaching, or related activity, is 40 – 90% of most full-time faculty jobs in higher ed., pedagogical study should constitute at least 40% of the work graduate students do toward a graduate degree.
Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarship: Exclusivity, Disruption, an...Jesse Stommel
A Presentation by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris for the Digital Currents initiative at University of Michigan.
Where DH grew out of positions of deep and necessary inquiry — especially in that its early advocates had to form communities of practice beyond the pale of traditional academic communities — today that inquiry has eroded into gratuitous and massively-funded career-building projects.
Learning is Not a Mechanism: Assessment, Student Agency, and Digital SpacesJesse Stommel
An objective and portable system for grading students was created so that systematized schooling could scale. And we’ve designed technological tools in the 20th and 21st Centuries that have allowed us to scale even further. Toward mass-processing and away from subjectivity, human relationships, and care.
Video at: http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/announcements/digital-pedagogy-lab-key-moments/
Digital Pedagogy Lab 2015 Institute Keynote
Amy Collier and Jesse Stommel
Far too much of education revels in knowing rather than not knowing. Sitting fastidiously in a place of not knowing is one of the hardest, most rigorous, parts of learning. But this is rigor of a different color. Learning is not something we can script in advance. Syllabi should be living documents, co-created with students. Full of possible paths. Not a barrel of predetermined outcomes, carefully crafted to be specific, measurable, loved by our accrediting bodies. Outcomes, and rubrics or assessments we design, should be wild-eyed and tentative. Assessment as an act of agency, a learning activity in and of itself not something delivered ex post facto by an external authority.
It’s important to know what open educational resources are and how we might use them. But it’s just as important to pause and take stock — to think carefully about when and why we might have students working openly on the web. This presentation focuses on the ethical and pedagogical considerations in having students using open resources but also on learning in public, doing public work, and engaging with open learning communities.
The digital humanities is as much about reading humanities texts with digital tools as it is about using human tools to read digital text. We are better users of technology when we are thinking critically about the nature and effects of that technology. What we must do is work to encourage students and ourselves to think critically about new tools (and, more importantly, the tools we already use). Far too much work in educational technology starts with tools, when what we need to start with is humans.
Stand and Unfold Yourself: MOOCs, Networked Learning, and the Digital HumanitiesJesse Stommel
I have Shakespeare tattooed on my forearms. On my right arm is the first line from Hamlet in binary code. On my left arm is the latter half of the second line of Hamlet in hexadecimal code.
The first line of the play, “Who’s there?,” does several things: quite literally, the speaker asks the listener on stage to identify herself; when performed, the line is also spoken to the off-stage or off-screen audience, calling attention to their simultaneous presence both within and outside the world of Shakespeare’s play; finally, it is a deeper question from Shakespeare about the nature of being. The question takes on a new and different set of potential meanings when it is read on the screen of a computer, iPad, Kindle, or smart phone, forcing contemporary readers of Shakespeare to question the nature of their own humanity in the face of rapid technological changes. Just as who we are as humans could be contained and expressed in the language of a theatrical play, now we must also consider who we become when our selves are reduced to the flurry of 1s and 0s that constitute us in our Facebook profiles, Tweets, and text messages. No matter which medium or device we use to encounter a play like Hamlet, no matter what self we bring to the encounter, Shakespeare continues to ask these questions of us, continues to ask who we are, what we see, and how we know.
If Freire Made a MOOC: Open Education and Critical Digital PedagogyJesse Stommel
Ceding authority is an active endeavor. Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, "A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education." The pedagogical value in openness is that it can create dialogue by increasing access and bringing together at once disparate learning spaces. A presentation at OpenEd 2014 by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris
Macroeconomics- Movie Location
This will be used as part of your Personal Professional Portfolio once graded.
Objective:
Prepare a presentation or a paper using research, basic comparative analysis, data organization and application of economic information. You will make an informed assessment of an economic climate outside of the United States to accomplish an entertainment industry objective.
Operation “Blue Star” is the only event in the history of Independent India where the state went into war with its own people. Even after about 40 years it is not clear if it was culmination of states anger over people of the region, a political game of power or start of dictatorial chapter in the democratic setup.
The people of Punjab felt alienated from main stream due to denial of their just demands during a long democratic struggle since independence. As it happen all over the word, it led to militant struggle with great loss of lives of military, police and civilian personnel. Killing of Indira Gandhi and massacre of innocent Sikhs in Delhi and other India cities was also associated with this movement.
A Strategic Approach: GenAI in EducationPeter Windle
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Generative AI, Image Generators and Large Language Models have had a dramatic impact on teaching, learning and assessment over the past 18 months. The most immediate threat AI posed was to Academic Integrity with Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) focusing their efforts on combating the use of GenAI in assessment. Guidelines were developed for staff and students, policies put in place too. Innovative educators have forged paths in the use of Generative AI for teaching, learning and assessments leading to pockets of transformation springing up across HEIs, often with little or no top-down guidance, support or direction.
This Gasta posits a strategic approach to integrating AI into HEIs to prepare staff, students and the curriculum for an evolving world and workplace. We will highlight the advantages of working with these technologies beyond the realm of teaching, learning and assessment by considering prompt engineering skills, industry impact, curriculum changes, and the need for staff upskilling. In contrast, not engaging strategically with Generative AI poses risks, including falling behind peers, missed opportunities and failing to ensure our graduates remain employable. The rapid evolution of AI technologies necessitates a proactive and strategic approach if we are to remain relevant.
2024.06.01 Introducing a competency framework for languag learning materials ...Sandy Millin
http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/iateflwebinar2024
Published classroom materials form the basis of syllabuses, drive teacher professional development, and have a potentially huge influence on learners, teachers and education systems. All teachers also create their own materials, whether a few sentences on a blackboard, a highly-structured fully-realised online course, or anything in between. Despite this, the knowledge and skills needed to create effective language learning materials are rarely part of teacher training, and are mostly learnt by trial and error.
Knowledge and skills frameworks, generally called competency frameworks, for ELT teachers, trainers and managers have existed for a few years now. However, until I created one for my MA dissertation, there wasn’t one drawing together what we need to know and do to be able to effectively produce language learning materials.
This webinar will introduce you to my framework, highlighting the key competencies I identified from my research. It will also show how anybody involved in language teaching (any language, not just English!), teacher training, managing schools or developing language learning materials can benefit from using the framework.
Honest Reviews of Tim Han LMA Course Program.pptxtimhan337
Personal development courses are widely available today, with each one promising life-changing outcomes. Tim Han’s Life Mastery Achievers (LMA) Course has drawn a lot of interest. In addition to offering my frank assessment of Success Insider’s LMA Course, this piece examines the course’s effects via a variety of Tim Han LMA course reviews and Success Insider comments.
2. “A class is … an independent organism with its own goal and
dynamics. It is always something more than what even the
most imaginative lesson plan can predict.”
~ Thomas P. Kasulis, “Questioning”
3. In my first teaching job 19 years ago, I was given a stock syllabus
and told I couldn’t change anything.
4. That stock syllabus had one blank line for me to write my name.
I couldn’t help but feel interchangeable. A cog in a machine I didn’t
yet understand.
5. Learning can not be reduced to or packaged as a series of static,
self-contained content. Rather, learning happens in tangents,
diversions, interruptions — in a series of clauses (parentheticals)
… and gaps.
6.
7. Scaffolding can create points of entry and access but can also
reduce the complexity of learning to its detriment. We design
syllabi, predetermine outcomes, and craft rubrics before having
gotten to know the students. We reduce students to data.
8. Scaffolding is too often a mechanism of control under the guise of
care — with too much of the work done presumptively, sometimes
patronizingly, in advance of students arriving upon the scene.
9. “Any effort on my part to scaffold (and effort to scaffold learning
at all) would be colonial, patriarchal, and disempowering.
Instead, I wish to lay upon the table before you the works which
can — do, should, maybe will — inform what each of us also
brings.”
~ Sean Michael Morris, “Subversion and Instructional Design”
10. The scaffolding process “enables a child or novice to solve a
problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal which would be
beyond his unassisted efforts. This scaffolding consists
essentially of the adult ‘controlling’ those elements of the task
that are initially beyond the learner’s capacity, thus permitting
him to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that
are within his range of competence.”
~ David Wood, Jerome S. Bruner, and Gail Ross, “The Role of Tutoring
in Problem Solving” (1976)
11. We haven’t been nearly imaginative enough with outcomes. I
want outcomes like “for us to have an epiphany” or “for
students to do something I couldn’t anticipate.”
12. Scaffolding, at its worst, breaks learning up into neat and tidy
chunks, discrete linear steps, without being responsive to the
specific contexts, backgrounds, and experiences of students.
13. “Where the human tutor excels or errs, of course, is in being
able to generate hypotheses about the learner’s hypotheses and
often to converge on the learner’s interpretation. It is in this
sense that the tutor’s theory of the learner is so crucial to the
transactional nature of tutoring. If a machine program is to be
effective, it too would have to be capable of generating
hypotheses in a comparable way.”
~ David Wood, Jerome S. Bruner, and Gail Ross, “The Role of Tutoring
in Problem Solving” (1976)
14. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues against the
banking model of education, “an act of depositing, in which the
students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”
15. In place of the banking model, Freire advocates for “problem-posing
education,” in which a classroom or learning environment becomes
a space for asking questions -- a space of cognition not information.
16. A few approaches for scaffolding with students
1. student-designed rubrics
2. leave blank space on the schedule, syllabus, lesson plan for
students to fill
3. have students do lots of metacognitive work, process letters, self-
evaluation, public blogging
4. have students read and discuss articles about metacognition,
learning, grading, outcomes, etc
5. design learning spaces together with students
17. The bureaucracies of schooling flatten students, reducing them
to rows in a spreadsheet and their work to columns.
19. An “objective” system for grading was created so systematized
schooling could scale. And we’ve designed technological tools in
the 20th and 21st Centuries that have allowed us to scale further.
Toward standardization and away from subjectivity, human
relationships, and care.
20. Photo by flickr user in pastel
Prior to the late 1700s, feedback systems in Education were
incredibly idiosyncratic. Throughout the 19th Century, they became
increasingly comparative, numerical, and standardized.
21. Photo by flickr user Shelly
The first “official record” of a grading system was at Yale in 1785.
The A-F system appears to have emerged in 1898 (with the “E” not
disappearing until the 1930s) and the 100-point or percentage scale
became common in the early 1900s. Letter grades were not widely
used until the 1940s. Even by 1971, only 67% of U.S. primary and
secondary schools used letter grades. (Schinske and Tanner)
22. Google Trends shows increased search volume around the term
“grades” over the last 14 years. It also shows an increasingly
furious pattern of search-behavior centered each year around the
months of May and December, like a heartbeat beginning to race.
23. “Research shows three reliable effects when students are graded:
They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in
learning itself.”
~ Alfie Kohn, “The Trouble with Rubrics”
24.
25. Some Data About Bias in the Classroom:
• Black girls are twelve times more likely than
their white counterparts to be suspended.
• While Black children make up less than 20% of
preschoolers, they make up more than half of
out-of-school suspensions.
• Teachers spend up to two thirds of their time
talking to male students; they also are more
likely to interrupt girls. When teachers ask
questions they direct their gaze towards boys
more often, especially when the questions are
open-ended (In STEM fields).
~ Soraya Chemaly, “All Teachers Should Be
Trained to Overcome Their Hidden Biases”
26. 62% of higher education faculty/staff stated they’d been bullied or
witnessed bullying vs. 37% in the general population. People from
minority communities are disproportionately bullied. (Hollis 2012)
51% of college students claimed to have seen another student
being bullied by a teacher at least once and 18% claimed to have
been bullied themselves by a teacher. (Marraccini 2013)
27. “Today’s college students are the most overburdened and
undersupported in American history. More than one in four have a
child, almost three in four are employed, and more than half receive
Pell Grants but are left far short of the funds required to pay for
college.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, “Teaching the Students
We Have Not the Students We Wish We Had”
28. “The reason we are talking about basic needs today is because the
students brought it to our attention. A student spoke up, ‘the reason
I am not succeeding in college is because I haven’t eaten in two
days.’ In fact, 1 in 2 of your students are experiencing food
insecurity. In the last 30 days.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab, Dream 2019
29. This means we can’t presume to know the reasons students are
distracted. Or craft laptop policies that make it impossible for
disabled students to receive accommodation without their disability
made visible to an entire classroom. Or throw students (with
nowhere else to go) out of their dorms over the holidays.
30. “You cannot counter structural inequality with good will. You have to
structure equality.”
~ Cathy N. Davidson
31. “We need to design our pedagogical approaches for the students
we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires
approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging,
and compassionate. And it requires institutions find more creative
ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching.
This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, “Teaching the Students
We Have Not the Students We Wish We Had”
32.
33. When at least 50% of the teachers in higher education have no
direct preparation for the work of teaching, the conversation about
what higher education is for should begin there. And not from a
place of demeaning those (or any) teachers.
34. By “pedagogy,” I mean something broader than just preparing
graduate students to teach university classes. I also mean
preparing them for public scholarship and leadership roles in labs,
non-profits, libraries, etc. Work that moves beyond important
disciplinary content to consider how our study of that content gets
shared with others or inflected in the world.
35. “It is urgent we have teachers, it is urgent we employ them, pay
them, support them with adequate resources; but it is also urgency
which defines the project of teaching. In a political climate
increasingly defined by its obstinacy, anti-intellectualism, and
deflection of fact and care; in a society still divided across lines of
race, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and
privilege, teaching has an important (urgent) role to play.”
~ Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, An Urgency of
Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy
36. To innovate, at this particular moment, we don’t need to invest in
technology. We need to invest in teachers.
37. Tools are made by people, and most (or even all) educational
technologies have pedagogies hard-coded into them in advance.
This is why it is so essential we consider them carefully and critically
—that we empty all our LEGOs onto the table and sift through them
before we start building. Some tools are decidedly less innocuous
than others. And some tools can never be hacked to good use.
38. Radical openness demands our schools be spaces for
relationships and dialogue. Far too many tools we’ve built for
teaching are designed to make grading students convenient—
or designed to facilitate the systematic observation of teachers
by administrators. These are not dialogues.
39. “Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and
unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and
transformed through artistic and literary practice.”
~ bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness”
40. bell hooks means something very specific when she talks of
Radical Openness, and so far the Open Education movement
has failed to tread that particular water.
41. bell hooks writes, “for me this place of radical openness is a
margin—a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet
necessary. It is not a 'safe' place. One is always at risk. One
needs a community of resistance.” For hooks, the risks we take
are personal, professional, political. When she says that “radical
openness is a margin,” she suggests it is a place of uncertainty,
a place of friction, a place of critical thinking.
42. Radical openness isn't a bureaucratic gesture. It has to be
rooted in a willingness to sit with discomfort.
43. A discussion of pedagogy needs to include a critical examination of
our tools, what they afford, who they exclude, how they're
monetized, and what pedagogies they have already baked in. But it
requires we also begin with a consideration of what we value, the
kinds of relationships we want to develop with students, why we
gather together in places like universities, and how humans learn.
44. Critical Digital Pedagogy:
1. centers its practice on community and collaboration;
2. must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus
requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication
and collaboration happen across cultural and political
boundaries;
3. will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather
together a cacophony of voices ;
4. must have use and application outside traditional institutions of
education.
45. Photo by flickr user Fio
For education to work, there can be no divide between teachers and
students. There must be what Paulo Freire calls “teacher-students.”
Specifically, he writes, “no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-
taught.” So, “teacher” becomes a role that shifts, and learning
depends upon a community of teacher-students.
46. “Critical formative cultures are crucial in producing the knowledge,
values, social relations and visions that help nurture and sustain the
possibility to think critically, engage in political dissent, organize
collectively and inhabit public spaces in which alternative and
critical theories can be developed.”
~ Henry Giroux, “Thinking Dangerously: the Role of Higher
Education in Authoritarian Times”
47. We need to stop having conversations about the future of education
without students in the room.
48. “We need more, not fewer, ways to listen for the voices of students
reflecting on education. We need more, not fewer, ways to include
students in conversations about the future of teaching and learning
in college. These conversations cannot begin by sending a signal to
students that their voices don’t matter.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, “Teaching the Students We Have
Not the Students We Wish We Had”