My work is deeply influenced by the dedicated, boundary-pushing, forward-thinking team over at Hybrid Pedagogy and their frequent collaborators and contributors–Jesse Stommel, Sean Michael Morris, Chris Friend, Maha Bali, Audrey Watters, Kris Shafer, Amy Collier, Robin DeRosa, Bonnie Stewart, Lee Skallerup Bessette, and countless more. What links all of us is our fierce commitment to our students, which requires an insistent and incessant interrogation of everything we do (and don’t do) in (and out of) the classroom, everything we are told to do, everything we are told the research tells us to do, and everything that is left out of the literature, the “best” or “effective” practices, the Top 10 lists, the guidelines; the workshops and the trainings; the intro videos and the “About Us” pages; the soundbites, the platitudes, the conventional wisdom that goes unquestioned.
We question everything.
We question everything not (solely) because it is in our DNA to do so, but because our students deserve nothing less than educators who practice what they preach: deep, methodical inquiry. Inquiry about pedagogy in higher education, a subject about which far too little is even discussed, let alone interrogated. But interrogate we must, and many of us do. Jesse Stommel, who has devoted his career to exactly this, defines pedagogy this way:
Pedagogy is praxis, insistently perched at the intersection between the philosophy and the practice of teaching. When teachers talk about teaching, we are not necessarily doing pedagogical work, and not every teaching method constitutes a pedagogy. Rather, pedagogy necessarily involves recursive, second-order, meta-level work. Teachers teach; pedagogues teach while also actively investigating teaching and learning.
Pedagogues are on an ongoing quest to figure out what works–while at the same time recognizing that what worked yesterday, or in the previous section, when one is teaching back-to-back sections of the same course, may not work at all a day or an hour later. Good pedagogy is acutely aware that every teaching and learning moment is unique, situational, contextual, new. As Sean Michael Morris, in “Decoding Digital Pedagogy,” puts it: “Pedagogy concerns itself with the instantaneous, momentary, vital exchange that takes place in order for learning to happen.” Morris continues:
Pedagogy experiments relentlessly, honoring a learning that’s lifelong. A pedagogy of writing, for example, recognizes that a teacher is not trying to pull essays like pulling teeth for fifteen weeks; instead, she is cultivating a desire to write that will last well beyond the end of the semester, well beyond graduation. And there are few limits to what can be attempted in the interests of meaningful, sustained learning.
This relentless experimentation is evident in both my work and my approach to it. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that I have gravitated towards working with faculty.
In my work with faculty, I serve in the overlapping roles of mentor, faculty developer, training coordinator, academic technology specialist, IT support, and more. I consider it my privilege to do this work. Indeed, it is because of this work with faculty that I have recommitted myself to questioning everything I do and do not know about teaching, about working with college students, with student writers, with writing and teaching that is increasingly mediated by and through digital technology in some way. This in turn has led me down countless rabbit holes about participatory media and agency; about the attention economy; about the decidedly not neutral technologies, platforms, and sites we use and ask students to use; about students’ rights to their own language, their representations, their privacy; about data systems, filtering, algorithms; about information literacy–or wisdom–and CRAP detection; about visual rhetoric, information visualization, user experience, universal design; about multimodal writing and multimedia literacies; about remix and remediation, fair use and copyleft; about digital literacies, digital rhetoric, digital composition, digital humanities, digital identities, digital pedagogy.
Choosing one hyperlink for each of the above items would be a fraught process. I’ll compile a reading list soon. In the meantime, interested readers could simply search for any of those terms in Hybrid Pedagogy.
The turn to the digital has less to do with my work as a blended (hybrid) instructor and researcher and more to do with my primary field: writing studies. I teach writing, which, in the 21st century, means that I teach, or at least must contend with, digital writing. And I work primarily with faculty who also teach writing, which is precisely why I’ve insisted to my department that I–and anyone responsible for “faculty development”–continue to teach in the classroom. As Stommel argues, “You can’t outsource digital pedagogy, because it is inextricably bound up in the work of teaching and learning.” Faculty need to learn from fellow faculty. Ideally, those teaching the same courses, or at least the same subject area. I am extraordinarily lucky to be in a department that agrees.
In “Decoding Digital Pedagogy, Pt. 2: (Un)Mapping the Terrain,” Stommel explains that “Digital pedagogy is an orientation toward pedagogy that is not necessarily predicated on the use of digital tools.” I learned more about what he meant by that when I went to the first Digital Pedagogy Institute in 2015 and joined his Critical Pedagogy track, which he co-led with Sean Michael Morris. I–along with my colleagues and all of our students–am indebted to Stommel and Morris (and everyone else in the #digped community) for helping me negotiate my reflexive resistance to the promises that the edtech industry peddles with my growing belief, based on what I was seeing with my students, that a well-designed and well-facilitated hybrid course is in many ways ideal for writing classes; for helping me clarify my own views on purportedly archaic classroom practices while at the same time presenting compelling arguments I had not previously considered; for challenging me to reexamine some of my deeply-held beliefs about teaching and learning while assuring me that I could continue to co-create learning communities with my students and colleagues that are unapologetically decentralized, fiercely vulnerable, radically supportive, unyieldingly liberatory.
My graduate teaching mentor, Brock Dethier, was himself mentored by Donald Murray. It was in Brock’s seminar–the crash course to college teaching that we took in the same semester we started teaching–that I met Freire, as well as Murray, Elbow, Mike Rose, others. I’d met hooks and Dewey long before that; along with Parker Palmer, these pedagogues have shaped me the most. They’re who I bring in to my teaching practicum for undergraduate teaching assistants (who rightly call me out for the criminal gender imbalance). They’re who I return to, again and again, to show me how I can do better.
So, too, do I turn to Stommel and Morris, to the Hybrid Pedagogy and ever-growing #digped communities. They often push me way beyond where (I think) I’m willing to go, but we’re coming from the same place. Our pedagogies can be traced to many of the same intellectual forebears. And, perhaps by virtue of the fact that we get to work with students who inspire us daily, students who give us hope when everything else around us seems bent on taking hope away, we share another trait: optimism. I’ll turn again to Morris for this one:
For some, teaching begins with authority and expertise. For the digital pedagogue, teaching begins with inquiry. And that’s why digital pedagogy is so important. It reminds us that the new landscape of learning is mysterious and worth exploring. The techniques of on-ground learning do not translate well. The LMS fails. Only an attitude of pioneering exploration will make heads or tails of the potential for online learning; and it is the digital pedagogue who will lead that charge.
It is with this spirit that, over the next few months, I will bring the pedagogical resources I’ve either written or curated over the years to this portion of my website. Far too many of them are trapped in Morris’s favorite LMS. Others are scattered across the roughly dozen or so digital repositories I (don’t) maintain. It will take me some time to bring them all here. My inner Monica can’t wait to get started.
Photo Credit:Ridham Nagralawala