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Graduate Training in 21st Century Pedagogy

Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer)

“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”

Visualization by @digisim

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“How we finance public higher education is a matter of political will. Universal public higher education recognizes that college must be affordable for all if it is to help drive our economy and our democracy.” ~ Sara Goldrick-Rab

“I do not care if free college won’t solve inequality … Today’s debate about free college tuition does something extremely valuable. It reintroduces the concept of public good to higher education discourse.” ~ Tressie McMillan Cottom

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If we are to make higher education a public good, and I think we should, then training for teachers must also be considered a public good.

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Adjunct teachers must no longer be required to attend unpaid required job training. If Walmart and Starbucks can pay employees for training, so can institutions of higher education.

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And if graduate programs and employers of faculty are currently unable to offer free pedagogical training (or to pay adjuncts for participating in this training), how about offering any pedagogical training at all?

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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.

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This would mean:(1) Offering more courses, or components of required content-focused

courses, dedicated to pedagogy. (2) Discipline-specific pedagogies would be a significant component of

comprehensive or qualifying exams. (3) 40% of the dissertations or research projects in a field would focus

at least in part on pedagogy. (4) And the culture of every department would acknowledge pedagogy

as a respected sub-discipline as well as a discipline in its own right.

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If college is ever to be “free” in any broad or expansive sense of the word, we must start by fostering pedagogical work as an ethic.

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By “pedagogy,” I mean something much broader than just preparing graduate students to teach in university classes. I also mean preparing graduate students and new faculty for outreach, activism, work in libraries, instructional design, public scholarship, educational journalism, etc. Work that moves beyond content to consider how our study of that content gets shared with others or inflected in the world.

all learning is necessarily hybrid

Hybrid Pedagogy is an open-access journal that

: is not ideologically neutral; : connects discussions of critical pedagogy, digital pedagogy, and online pedagogy;: brings higher education and K-12 teachers into conversation with the e-learning and open education communities;: considers our personal and professional hybridity;: disrupts distinctions between students, teachers, and learners; : explores the relationship between pedagogy and scholarship;: invites its audience to participate in (and be an integral part of) the peer review process; : and thus interrogates (and makes transparent) academic publishing practices.

Hybrid Pedagogy uses a Collaborative Peer Review process, in which editors engage directly with authors to revise and develop articles. Editorial work is done both asynchronously and synchronously in a Google Doc that evolves through an open dialogue between author and editors.

“In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum.”

~ Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel, The Four Noble Virtues of Digital Media Citation

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Increasingly, the web is a space of politics, a social space, a professional space, a space of learning, a space of community. And, for better or worse, more and more of our work is happening there.

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Can the necessary reflective dialogue flourish within web-based tools, within social media platforms, within learning management systems, within MOOCs?

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“Neither is grungy pessimism nor unadulterated optimism going to pave the way forward into an educational landscape that will productively embrace the digital. What we require is a strategic hope, and creativity born from skepticism.” ~ Sean Michael Morris, “Teaching in Our Right Minds”

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Digital pedagogy is not equivalent to teachers using digital tools. Rather, digital pedagogy demands we think critically about our tools, demands we reflect actively upon our own practice. This means knowing when and how to put tools down, as much as knowing when and how to take them up.

“Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing.”

John Dewey, Schools of To-Morrow

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• The large-format blackboard was first used in the U.S. in 1801. • The vacuum tube-based computer was introduced in 1946. • In the 1960s, Seymour Papert began teaching the Logo programming

language to children. • The first Learning Management System, PLATO (Program Logic for

Automatic Teaching Operations), was developed in 1960.

At the invent of each, there was fear, resistance, and thoughtless enthusiasm. At the introduction of the Radio Lecture in the 1930s, Lloyd Allen Cook warned, “This mechanizes education and leaves the local teacher only the tasks of preparing for the broadcast and keeping order in the classroom.” This sentence is not all that different from ones we’ve read about the MOOC over the last 3 years, or about online learning over the last 25.

bit.ly/digpedtimeline

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“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst … I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit and made a satellite instead of a system.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, “On the American Scholar”

We need to handle our technologies roughly -- to think critically about our tools, how we use them, and who has access to them.

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We have built an almost ironclad academic system — and I acknowledge myself as one of its privileged builders — a system which excludes the voices of students, which calls students “customers” while monetizing their intellectual property, which denigrates the work of learning through assessment mechanisms and credentialing pyramid schemes.

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Why do we attempt so often to resolve this...

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Into this?

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If there’s a better sort of mechanism we need for teaching in digital environments, it’s a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not for delivering and assessing content, but for helping us listen better to students.

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And, by “listen,” I decidedly do not mean “surveil.” The former implies an invitation to open dialogue, whereas the latter implies a hierarchical relationship through which learners are made into mere data points. My call, then, is for more emphasis on the tools that help us fully and genuinely inhabit digital environments, tools like ears, eyes, or fingers.

Teachers stand to learn more from students than we could ever teach. Many students come to digital environments knowing very well how to work and learn online. How can we champion and foster the expertise of our students?

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“We often ignore the best resource for informed change, one that is right in front of our noses every day—our students, for whom the most is at stake.”

~ Martin Bickman, “Returning to Community and Praxis”

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