This is what I mean by working on the ethos of the course. It may seem odd to think of a course as having an ethos (I mean usually we think of ethos as the property of speakers or audience) but I do see courses as "having a life of their own" in important ways. Parker Palmer writes about 'putting the subject matter in the center of the room' when teaching, in such a way that neither the students nor the instructor own it. In this way the subject itself becomes a party to, or participant in, the conversation --in much the same way that the physical classroom (or online classroom) becomes a participant or actor. So in some ways "the course" is a kind of virtual being. In any case, it's in these ways that I think a course can be said to have an essential holistic, a spirit, or an ethos. Interestingly, Julian Semilian remarked in an interview I did with him that when he considers becoming involved in a film project the first question he asks is "What is the spirit of the thing?"
Thinking about the DMA course on this level is not only pleasurable but crucial for me, because I think ethos sets the innermost/synaptic stage for the play of teaching and learning. Each year I try to improve on the feel of the course, and I think I've made reasonable progress. The redesign of the physical space over the first four years has helped the feel quite a bit. The development of the curriculum to explicitly include and intertwine liberal arts skills, media studies knowledge, and new-media/technology projects, has improved the feel quite a bit as well. This year's task is primarily pedagogical. I'm not starting from ground zero on this thankfully, yet I have significant work ahead of me to get the pedagogical aspect of the course to fully resonate with the feel of the room and the feel of the curriculum.
Institutions also have lives of their own, no? So part of my job in this regard is to create a resonant or synergistic relationship between the ethos of the DMA course and the ethos of UNCSA as a professional school. Here's my framework: I regard the essence or ethos of professional education as multi-level understanding. A professional needs to understand and operate within their field on all of its levels --technical, procedural, and conceptual. A professional school is thus a complex context that runs continual risks of: 1) lapsing into a trade school if technical and procedural aspects are over-emphasized, or 2) becoming a theory-driven hot-house plant if conceptual aspects are overdone. A professional school runs into even deeper trouble if it has no purchase on people's emotions or affective domains. So, I want the ethos of the DMA course to be open, welcoming, challenging, and relevant. And I want it to combine the technical, procedural, and conceptual aspects of digital media in a way that is optimally relevant to emerging professionals in the arts. All of the designs I've implemented have referenced this goal. The new design is no exception, yet it nonetheless represents a kind of sea-change in terms of further shifting the pedagogy further towards an explicitly learner-centered model.
NOTE: learner-centered pedagogy is something I have done successfully in the context of teaching graduate-level and undergraduate-level courses elsewhere, but I have found the UNCSA context to be particularly challenging in this regard due to numbers of students enrolled in the DMA course, and the first-year student audience for the course (I have relied on multiple-choice quizzes rather than dialog/conversation due to the automatic grading (via the use of Blackboard or, now, Moodle) and the odd/ironic comfort level that quizzes provide for first-year students who are in many cases just emerging from the test-based environments typical K-12). I think it's time to move beyond MC quizzes now, and started this move last year. Again this year is a major ramp-up or sea-change --I guess it's appropriate that I am starting my fifth year, having seen the students I had in my first year graduate last year.BUT, I am as guilty as can be of "teaching about" learner-driven education more so than enacting it, and the new design attempts to rectify this understandable yet undeniable hypocrisy. Part of my design process this year has thus been to come out of denial on this point: I simply do not know how to take the final steps to design and operate learner-driven courses that are effective, and manageable from an evaluation/grading standpoint. So my work is cut out for me. I know I want to infuse the course with more peer-based communication and small-group work/projects, for example. But I don't know how to do this in a way that provides enough structure and individual accountability to ensure that students will engage the content with adequate feedback from myself and their peers. There it is.
Thankfully there are now some foundational touchstones in the education landscape that I can work with to build this new learner-centered model of practice.
The Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey (COLLES), which is built into Moodle, is one touchstone. It provides a concrete way for instructors such as myself to perform reality-checks with students as to whether or not a particular online lesson or unit contains adequate learner-centered provisions:
The COLLES survey comprises an economical 24 statements grouped into six scales, each of which helps us address a key question about the quality of the on-line learning environment:
Relevance
How relevant is on-line learning to students' professional practices?
Reflection
Does on-line learning stimulate students' critical reflective thinking?
Interactivity
To what extent do students engage on-line in rich educative dialogue?
Tutor Support
How well do tutors enable students to participate in on-line learning?
Peer Support
Is sensitive and encouraging support provided on-line by fellow students?
Interpretation
Do students and tutors make good sense of each other's on-line communications?
More...COLLES website
Another useful touchstone is the well-known Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. This set of principles is oriented towards course design and evaluation more so than lesson design and evaluation:
1. encourages contact between students and faculty,
2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,
3. encourages active learning,
4. gives prompt feedback,
5. emphasizes time on task,
6. communicates high expectations, and
7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning.
More...Seven Principles website
Another useful touchstone for those of us trying to re-design our practices to be more learner-centered is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). This tool is designed for institutions to use to gauge their learner-centered provisions, but can be easily adapted by instructors such as myself to scaffold our moves to learner-centered instructional praxis:
1. Level of academic challenge
Challenging intellectual and creative work is central to student learning and collegiate quality. Components of academic challenge include the nature and amount of assigned academic work, complexity of cognitive tasks presented to students, and standards faculty members use to evaluate student performance.
Sample Questions: How much reading and writing do students do? --In the first year? --In required general education courses? --In the major field in which you are interested? What is the nature of assignments in various courses and majors? Is memorization emphasized? Or higher order, complex cognitive skills? How much time do students spend preparing for class? --In the first year? --In the major field in which you are interested? What does the campus do to encourage students to spend significant amounts of time studying and on academic work? What do faculty and staff do to challenge and support students so they work to their potential?
2. Active and collaborative learning
Students learn more when they are intensely involved in their education and have opportunities to think about and apply what they are learning in different settings. And, when students collaborate with others in solving problems or mastering difficult material they acquire valuable skills that prepare them to deal with the messy, unscripted problems they will encounter daily during and after college.
Sample Questions: In what percentage of courses do students work in teams to complete assignments, solve problems, or apply course content? How many courses require students to engage in service learning or take part in community-based projects? --In the first year or in general education courses? --In the major field in which you are interested? --How do students work with other students on projects during class? Is an internship required to graduate? What about for the major field in which you're interested?
3. Student-faculty interaction
In general, the more contact students have with their teachers the better. Working with a professor on a research project or serving with faculty members on a college committee or community organization lets students see first-hand how experts identify and solve practical problems. Through such interactions teachers become role models, mentors, and guides for continuous, life-long learning.
Sample Questions: How often do students meet with faculty members outside of class? --To work on committees? --To meet in faculty homes or offices? What does the institution do to promote such contacts? Do campus committees require a certain number of students participate? How many students collaborate on research with faculty members? --In the first year? --In the senior year? --In the major field in which you are interested?
4. Enriching educational experiences
Educationally effective colleges and universities offer a variety of learning opportunities inside and outside the classroom that compliment the goals of the academic program. One of the most important is exposure to diversity, from which students learn valuable things about themselves and gain an appreciation for other cultures. Technology is increasingly being used to facilitate the learning process and -- when done appropriately -- can increase collaboration between peers and instructors, which actively engages students in their learning. Other valuable educational experiences include internships, community service, and senior capstone courses that provide students with opportunities to synthesize, integrate, and apply their knowledge. As a result, learning is deeper, more meaningful, and ultimately more useful because what students know becomes a part of who they are.
Sample Questions: What percentage of students participate in internships, study abroad, and community service? --In the first year? --The senior year? --In your major field What programs and activities does the institution provide to insure that students from different backgrounds meet and work together? --In the first year? --In the senior year? --In your major?
5. Supportive campus environment
Students perform better and are more satisfied at colleges that are committed to their success and cultivate positive working and social relations among different groups on campus.
Sample Questions: What does this institution do to assure that students get the academic and social support they need to succeed and thrive? What is the nature of student relations with administrative personnel and offices? --Is it cooperative? --Or do students complain about the bureaucratic "runaround" when they have problems to solve?
More...NSSE website
Add to the above Mizuko Ito's research which documents the extent to which students' learning online in their own lives is interest-driven, choice-infused, and conversational/dialogic in format, and we have a reasonable picture of how contemporary education can be designed to optimize learner-centered learning.
What can be said of the overlaps in the above three indexes? First, I think all three enjoin the affective and/or ethical domain of how people feel about what they are doing (i.e., do they feel included in the planning, do their views matter, are they given an opportunity to voice their own ideas and hear the ideas of others, do they feel actively involved or just passively receptive, etc.). In this regard, Dewey's focus on "experience" perhaps encrypts the affective/ethical domain, in that experience can mean more or less anything. So current work, reflected in the above tools, is I think an attempt to decode, decrypt, and/or elaborate on the notion of experience --a notion which in some ways launched the ship that is now finding safe harbor in the current age of personal-industry media, which includes and encompasses the affective domain.
So, bringing it all back home, I guess the E is for Experience and Ethos. My practical aims for this year may also be Enterprising or Extreme, but here goes:
- I will infuse the course with more ample dialog/conversation.
I started using Facebook discussions last year and these worked very well. My task now is to create a system to assess this work (mastery-based? Rubric?).
- I will start the course with an "interests and issues" survey and/or conversation (the conversation option may be better, since this sets a resonant tone with item #1 above).
- I will use small-groups substantively, again to incorporate conversation/dialog (i.e., groups can use Facebook, Skype, etc.) and also to build more peer interaction into the mix (peer evaluation perhaps in some instances? Again rubric-based?)
- I will work out ways to give helpful feedback and fairly assess student work in this new pedagogical framework.
The new content will be learner-generated issues, structured initially by serious play in the early part of the course around identifying important problems related to new-media/technology. The plan (again, still sketchy at this point, but I have a month to articulate it) is to then form groups around issues, and set in place an iterative, cyclical algorithm of small-group research, conversation, content-production (in a variety of media including but not limited to text), and sharing (presentations, postings, etc.).
Please wish me well on this voyage :)
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