Lately, I've been giving some thought to the tensions between teachers' self perceptions and their role in knowledge creation. I am starting to plan a workshop session on developing online pedagogy and it has thrown up all sorts of ideas and thoughts for me. If you can help me with any of this, I'd be very grateful indeed.
Surely, any pedagogy should be embodied in the environment? So if we are talking about traditional, face to face classrooms, or 'online tutorials', virtual lecture halls, whatever, we should be considering and planning for how we can encourage intellectual development? Here's an example:
I have popped into some Year 7 RE classes recently where 11 year olds are grappling with the difference between truth and knowledge. They refer back to the world that they live in - the world of social networking, mobile access to information, multimedia ..... and they test the veracity of that world.
In my other life, as an MA tutor on an education module, my last face to face tutorial really only needed me to ask the questions and step back.... with some guiding 'linkages' provided between the group discussions when drawing back together - just like managing a thread on a moodle forum then? Is this life imitating art?
I think it is fairly commonly accepted that web 2.0 is more about content creation than consumption. Does that mean that 21st century educators should be more focused on providing learning activities that encourage creativity, alongside critical evaluative skills - is that so very different from what we have always done? At various stages of my career I have worked with learners from ages 3 to 70 years old. The first few years and everything over about 25 seem very geared towards creation of ideas and co-construction of knowledge - something perhaps gets lost in the middle? How much of secondary or undergraduate work truly embraces these ideas? Sorry, lots of rhetorical questions here.
Of course, there are tensions: individual work versus possible plagiarism, for example. The tension that I am more interested in, though, is that between our self-perception as teachers, that view that our students must trust us to know the answers, with an emerging realisation that everyone is a beginner all the time (who said that? I am guessing Martin Weller?).
If we refer back to Perry’s (1970) ‘positions’ of intellectual development: absolutism, relativism, commitment, we might take the view that until learners (at any level) are at the stage of relativism, that is, that they are able to perceive a world in which the teacher does not know everything, they can never make the jump to becoming independent learners. I think that we need to consider how to move learners towards commitment, to guide them to be able to develop their own intellectual identities and accept that this may vary and change over time and with new information. And we also need to consider ourselves as learners in this domain.
Please help with any ideas on this!
This is a good read, in my opinion, Mitzmacher, J. (2010) Transparency as Pedagogy, A Floor but no ceiling? http://www.mjgds.org/mitzmacher/?p=135
