In the article by Groom and Lamb, I’m struck by the comment from the professor who says: if he has to think about it [technology for teaching], it’s a problem. One factor informing this comment that merits more discussion—and always weighs on my mind—is the status of teaching in higher ed. In the current merit/status system, professors and grad students alike are often disincentivised to put too much time or energy (i.e. thinking) into teaching. So the message is: don’t think too much about teaching; prioritize research. In this paradigm, if technology matters to one’s own creative and intellectual work, then by all means, think about it, shape it, make it part of your intellectual labor and professional portfolio. If not, let those ed. tech people “manage” it for you. This culture around teaching perpetuates the LMS reign, despite the five problems Groom and Lamb so convincingly lay out.
Given this situation, how do we create a positive culture around teaching, technology, and innovation—around promoting new paradigms for teaching and learning and putting faculty energies there—when the University is pretty much the opposite of a positive, promoting culture when it comes to teaching? One way is to make our (and our students’) digital efforts in teaching and learning into a meaningful part of our professional portfolios. As I consider the move to hybrid in Great Works of Literature, I hope to come up with some ways to link hybrid course design to a professional/teaching archive where teachers can document their innovations and feel more incentive to develop their teaching with technology.
Another complicating factor is the economy of educational technology and innovation. Many faculty members at Baruch, hearing the goal of 20% online or hybrid by 2018, assume financial incentives drive this goal and suspect that any pedagogical benefits—that meaningful innovation around teaching and learning—are low on the priority list. So suspicion is our starting point. But the suspicion is hardly unfounded. Groom and Lamb talk about the soul-sucking focus on vendors and bids, the shift toward privatization of ed. tech and of the web more broadly. Further compounding the problem: Educational reform writ large privileges funding sources (The Gates Foundation) and profit (Pearson) and downplays or side steps practitioner experience, creativity, and input. Organized/sanctioned reform—like the Common Core, for example—doesn’t necessarily (ever?) mean innovation; it doesn’t necessarily privilege the learner or the teacher. (Beware Core to College, by the way, when it comes to educational reform movements.) Innovation in teaching is a profoundly complicated process.
And yet another complication when it comes to technological innovation is the question of a teacher’s own digital literacy, and how it limits how innovative and effective she can be. I recently read this NPR post about how all students and young professionals will—or should—learn to code, that learning to code is learning to think; it’s mastering a language that increasingly shapes our interactions and our world. Graduate students at CUNY have access to programs that support their digital literacy and ed. tech savvy (like this, and this, and this). None of this was part of my formal training and I worry that I am an old goat when it comes to educational technology. What knowledge and abilities do I need that I don’t have to be innovative and effective as an instructor of a hybrid course?
On a final note, I’m fascinated by the “coping mechanisms” (Bass 11) students bring to college. In my own teaching, I actively work to undo some of the bad habits and destructive beliefs that such mechanisms promote (e.g. the belief that reading should easily yield “meaning,” and if it doesn’t, it’s because the reader just doesn’t “get it” so the reader gives up). For me, truly innovative classroom practice confronts and challenges learners’ assumptions about themselves and their capacities (as readers, writers, and scholars) and changes how they consume and create art, information, and argument. After reading these articles, I can see how the LMS reduces learning into systems and silos that ultimately reinforce both students’ and teachers’ coping mechanisms. How can I design a hybrid course that will help me resist and challenge these mechanisms (in myself and my students) more and more effectively?
I was particularly struck, Cheryl, by your thoughts on thinking critically about how to use technology to design specific assignments, as this is what I’m wrestling with right now. We can theorize as much as we want, and thinking about methodologies and pedagogies is a fundamental and engaging part of our work, but our assignments need to be concrete, even if the balance between specific instructions and a generous allowance for freedom of expression/interpretation is always a tricky one. Your suggestion about using online sources to go more deeply into “visual art, artifacts, and material history,” is a viable, greatly accessible way for students to get more involved in our Great Works texts (as is your wonderful annotation project). This type of assignment lends itself well to the kind of longer, scaffolded assignment that could nicely connect different learning environments, as well as various genres and academic disciplines, and the kind of assignment that could well result in an innovative, thoroughly researched essay or project.
If I brainstorm along these lines at this moment, an assignment idea that comes to mind is one that might involve a series of exercises/tasks working with various deconstructions of a short text. Some possible ideas (any of which could involve the student working alone or in pairs/groups): unearthing early versions of a text; researching a variety of translations (and one doesn’t have to know the original language to comment on the disparity between translations); interviewing (in person or video chat) a native speaker of the original language and integrating those insights; investigating where the text is mentioned on the internet, and trying to make connections between the various contexts; exploring contemporary film and audio media that speak to the text; researching various cultural/political/historical constructs; examining literary criticism from a variety of cultures/eras; uncovering the art/music contemporary to the period of the text; visiting a museum (Met, Rubin, etc.) where the student might peruse an exhibit of the same culture/period as the text, then discuss one or two pieces, etc. As a final project the student might even (alone or with others) creatively “translate” the short text, emphasizing one or more of the researched items.
As you imply, using online sources doesn’t only make research much more accessible to us all, it helps us to readily see the interconnections between text, self, and world.
This is so important to acknowledge. I know how some of my more established colleagues are about teaching. They switch off when I ask advice or share some stories and quickly veer the conversation to “Well, did you get anything published this semester?” or something like that and it does give you the feeling that focusing on teaching is not what academics are supposed to do. But I never understood why there was such a lack of focus on pedagogy. And true the tech folks were always anonymous “tech person” who served some function then disappeared. I am constantly thinking about how to teach better because I was one of the worst college students. Actually, I was a rather horrible High School student as well and used to sneak out of the building to go sit at the beach and write poetry. I was not interested in anything until I took a fabulous English composition class and the professor was an adjunct. We were allowed to be creative and even her group works were not a waste. This transformed me. Group work was an atrocious thing for me until we were put in groups to prep for a final class conference. This was in my African Literature class. We presented a full on panel with research papers and there was an open Q&A. It felt like we were contributing something. I want that feeling in the classroom as a teacher. I’ve found some ways that tech can make their work look nicer, more tech fancy. But I am excited about this workshop because now I wonder how I can bring technology to help them build up work that will culminate in something that is inclusive, shareable, and gratifying. So I appreciate thinking through all of this.
Cheryl, your post definitely resonated with me. I also worry that the technological skills I don’t have will make me a less effective instructor, especially as we contemplate hybridization. I’m heartened by the thoughtful interrogation of technology happening on this blog and am hoping that a willingness to learn and inquire will take us part of the way. However, you brought home the point to me that we, as graduate students or as professors, are contemplating entirely new sets of skills in order to carry out our jobs.
I love the idea of linking teaching innovation to professional development. As Zohra said, graduate students still get very little incentive to spend time on our teaching. I’ve gotten some of the same responses to talking about teaching, and in many ways my teaching work is very separate from my research. An archive like the one that you describe would be a great reason to devote effort to innovation and could maybe be a great teaching resource for others as well. Maybe it’s a step towards another answer to the question you posed to me, about what to do to support part-time faculty in innovation. Documentation, recognition, and a space to see what others are doing with technology.
Cheryl, I’m so glad you bring up labor issues because they gird any discussion of teaching at most universities, and definitely at CUNY. What constantly amazes me is how invested many of us remain in improving our teaching despite the lack of incentives to do so–and this drive to improve pedagogy spans a range of positions. It’s a worthy endeavor to create a project that inspires and documents these efforts. But, and maybe this is overly optimistic, perhaps, as Groom and Lamb imply, the disruption that technology offers can tip the scales a bit. Teaching and learning are changing, and even though the venture capitalists are certainly lying in wait, within this change lies opportunities to enact long-lasting, beneficial modifications. In my experience, there seems to be very few discursive and disruptive moments allowed in high school and junior high school classrooms. I thought of this when you brought up the Common Core and breaking students of bad habits, or shaking them out of Bass’s “coping mechanisms.” And I think that the willingness to learn something new trumps any ability to code brilliantly, in terms of teaching (or maybe I’m just rationalizing my own ineptitude. I dropped out of a PHP class I enrolled in last summer after two sessions. I couldn’t face spending my summer sitting in front of a computer with my head splitting open).