Integrative essay

My learning about learning

I started the PFF program without any teaching experience in a post-secondary setting. For me, PFF has been my introduction to the whole world of college-level teaching. I would say that I started on the program with my set notions on pedagogy. As I have been learning about teaching, I have been able to observe that teaching is evolutionary. This change has over time been driven by new challenges in the teaching arena as well as advancements in pedagogy. I think teaching if it is to be viewed as a discipline, has been developed by new ideas as educators continue to contribute new skills and insights to be implemented in the classrooms as teachers facilitate the acquisition of knowledge. Teaching has incorporated best practices and has been responsive.

Self-discovery

Through the course some of my notions on teaching have been corrected, some reinforced, and others challenged. In this integrative essay I will review how my viewpoints have changed assessing how far I have come since starting the program, my pedagogical discoveries with emphasis on active learning, and my transformative moments with observations from the recently instituted changes compelling distant learning due to school closures because of the Covid19 pandemic.

In my early education, I witnessed the harms of an educational system built on exclusion, without regard for community, and no attention to student diversity without attention to creating learning environments that are accessible and effective for all. Success in my early education in Africa was measured by success national examinations. The national examination system, that is still a practice of many African countries was a standardized test that was set and administered by a national examination board. It was given to all students of a given grade level without any consideration of differences that may have existed between students of specific regions or accommodations for students that might not have had the ability to test just as well as others. While the national examination system determined if a student moved on to the next level of her education, and when she did, the grades decided the ranking of the next level of school that she would attend, it did not account for any practices that considered inclusivity.

The standardized national examination system left many learners behind. It branded those that did not achieve good enough grades to move on as failures. In retrospect, I see that it is the system that failed them. The grading and ranking of schools and students did not account for the disparity in resources available to the schools or the individual circumstances surrounding each student at the time of the examination. My success in that system was due to my having a position of privilege because I was a son of teachers who knew the system well. I did not appreciate my position of privilege then, but now I can see many that were left out by the design of the system.

I am glad to see inclusivity and appreciation of diversity being an essential part of my American education. I have greatly benefited from the Preparing Future Faculty program at the university from where I have gained a deep appreciation of diversity, equity, and inclusivity ideas. The coursework has included learning ways to plan for diversity and ensure that it is reflected in pedagogy and assessment. Considering the diversity in class and the community from which the students are drawn also presents teachers with an opportunity to help students appreciate other members of the community that do not share the same privilege as they do as well as assuring those that feel different and left out that there are active efforts to include them. Much of my learning in that system was where the teacher told me what to learn without my involvement in how I understood it.

I have also learned the importance of creating community in the classrooms by recognizing that students come from various backgrounds with different cares and concerns. These cares are related lived experiences of the students, care for a sense of belonging, geographic contexts, and cultural and ethnic identities. These are all aspects of the community that have a bearing on the students. I now recognize that teachers should be aware of other issues that are factored in the student community such as numbers of students affected by homelessness, hunger, gender orientation, international student status, and disabilities. It is not possible to create community and inclusivity in the classroom without considering external factors that are the realities of the students. For example, peer expectations, classroom layout, instructor positioning, curriculum, and class size are some of the factors might affect the balance needed to create community and inclusivity. Other factors outside of the classroom include homelife, community expectations, and even politics. Events such as active shooter situations in school could have a bearing on the safety of the students.

My pedagogical discoveries

One of my principal discoveries in pedagogy has been active learning with knowledge creation moving from the concept of the sage on the stage to the involvement of learners each contributing to the effort of creating an understanding. I am not surprised that the concept of active learning is new to me because over the time of the coursework at PFF I have seen seasoned professors discover it late in their teaching careers. Besides the beauty of student involvement in learning active learning also takes account of the diversity of the body of students in the class. Students participate in the learning process based on their own experiences’ members of society.

Active learning works best when teachers recognize the classroom as a community. The classroom is in every way a complex system. The school has been about one place where society coalesces. A public school in a community is an appropriate representation of the structure, hopes, fears, and expectations of society. In school, the teacher is uniquely placed to speak back and contribute to the community. The school is the arena of the expression of the true status of the society. As teachers implement active learning in class, they are advantaged in seeing different viewpoints as everyone, if effectively curated, contributes to the learning based on their unique backgrounds.

To enhance an atmosphere of active learning teachers are to make the best effort to make everyone feel included and recognized as a learner. One way to create a sense of recognition is by helping students understand that they are accepted and accommodated in the classroom. To create this acceptance the teacher may be able to start to take steps on the first day of class or even prior to the first day of school. Some of the ways the teacher might do this are by taking purposeful steps to make the students feel included. The teacher could use items available before the start of class such as the roster to get to know the students. To the acceptable extent possible, the teacher should provide as much information about themselves to the students. This is because students are pleased when the teacher comes across as open to students’ access, prepared, capable, and confident that all students have a contribution to the learning process and that they are an integral part of it.

Connectedness also promotes the environment for active learning. Students feel included when the teacher knows their names to the extent possible. It is good to give the students a chance to introduce themselves, learn how to say their names properly, and accommodate and gender orientation driven factors that may affect how their names are said, or their preferred names. To foster a greater sense of belonging the teacher should be purposeful about connectedness between the students. This could be done by using icebreakers in an appropriate way and to the extent that helps the students to get to know each other better and avoiding practices that would make students feel singled out in any way.

Speaking from the viewpoint of a technology teacher I would like to incorporate group work in my class projects. This is primarily because technology projects are carried out in teams in the workplace with defined roles for people playing different parts. I would also like to ensure that all the students are able to participate in the project considering those that would require accommodations under universal design guidelines. A technology project is one with individual participation where each person's task becomes a part of the complete whole. I would not directly assign roles for the team but would like to leave that to the project team to determine how they would like to share out the tasks. One of the universal design guidelines is optimizing individual choice and autonomy. One of the advantages of not assigning roles is that the teacher is not seen to be pushing the students but is seen to be providing an opportunity to practice decision-making.

Active learning in technology requires an acceptance that all students can contribute to the design technology artifacts such as website and mobile application design, database systems, computer arrangement, and connectedness. Design is an important part of technology. Design as a construct is not fixed and the best of it comes when more people contribute. This opens for active learning as students bring in their ideas to create designs address to solve technological problems. It is ideal for the active participation of students to have input on the design of technological artifacts.

Transformative moments

As the composition, culture, and structure of the community changes so should the school be set to be responsive to the changes. The recently started spread of coronavirus and the compulsory closures of institutions and businesses has thrown schools and the whole arrangement of construction of learning as we know it into a whole new arrangement. Schools and dissemination of knowledge have taken a turn to adapt to the new reality of distant learning without much advance preparedness. Distant learning is not a new concept. In its earliest forms, people learned by correspondence with material delivered over mail. Over time technology has supported distance learning by creating the experience of online learning. Online learning has continued to evolve by creating better tools of access to students and collaboration.

Distant learning occasioned by Covid19 has had a significant impact on teaching and learning. This change has brought a need to rethink approaches of pedagogy in areas such as assessment, group work, lecture, and class projects. Educators must rethink summative assessments. Distance learning cannot work well with proctored assessments leaving educators to think evaluation that is gradual over the course of a school session. The use of learning management systems and collaboration tools have taken a center stage role in managing the process of teaching and learning. These tools have created ways that are arguably close to in-person classroom interactions. The use of online learning tools is probably gaining easy acceptance to a population of learners that are already given to online interaction through social media platforms.

Can we Instagram education? While distance learning has in the past incorporated lectures, group work, and other aspects of class interaction, the new changes must evolve to reflect and piggyback on the existing social media structures that already thrive among young people. It means that online learning is not in any way new to many high school and college students. Young learners are already accustomed to online interaction by video or text. If the changing circumstances prevail much longer there will be a need to blur the line between online interaction for everyday use among young people to enhancing learning and the interactions among college-age students that is already going on in social media. It should be possible to implement active learning as a pedagogy in distance learning in cases where active learning is supported by technology. Video conferencing tools have opportunities to implement interactions in chat rooms (called chat rooms in zoom).

On the darker side, the need to learn online has also exposed the inequalities that are already existed among learners. To some students, access to computers and the internet are only possible at the school. Schools have done well to respond to the need of the learners without access to equipment that facilitates learning. These are not limited to computers and access to the Internet but also the room and environment that could support learning. For college students, there is an expectation that the learners bring a motivation to learn and would work to find ways of accessing the material outside of the classroom. Teachers have gone out of their way to prepare to send class material by mail where internet supported methods such as email and learning management systems have not been found to work. Systems thinking shows us that not all the technology and safe space for learning is possibly available for everyone.

Conclusion

The PFF program has guided my thinking as an agile and inclusive educator. Agility calls for responsiveness. I am now able to observe responsiveness in the teaching arena following changes occasioned by the prevailing pandemic as well as the days when active shooter situations had been rampant in schools. I see how responsiveness in teaching approaches needs to be ethical and inclusive to provide an opportunity for everyone to learn. Active learning is designed for greater student participation. When we consider students' backgrounds as we form communities in classrooms and recognizing each student's unique story, active learning becomes the structure from which the varied student backgrounds can be brought to bear on the construction of knowledge.