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The Basics
The Basics
As was true of the first round of dialogues in this series (and as will be true for the two rounds after this one) lived experience as an educator is all you need to be prepared for participating in this conversation. Our shared intention will be to see what comes up when we try to answer the question, "What do we avoid and emulate?"
That's an abbreviated version of a much longer, more complex question that goes something like this: "In our work of teaching, educating, mentoring, guiding, helping people learn, or however else we perceive and describe it, what parts of our formative influences' approaches to we try to avoid, and what parts do we try to emulate?"
Basically, we're going to use these conversations to see what we can see about how we're consciously and sub-consciously influenced by our influences. Something like that.
This week's conversations are meant to be just as warm and open as the chats we had a few weeks ago in response to the huge, unanswerable question, "What does it mean to teach?" They're also meant to elicit responses and ideas that might seem more concrete to some folks. This week's question lends itself to much more focused on really trying to find clear, precise, answers. Our shared purpose will still be to help everyone who participates find connections among our actions, intentions, and beliefs as educators. But instead of just letting ourselves go as broad as we can in order to see what comes up, we'll keep our process focused. We'll try to figure out as much as we can about how our attempts to emulate and avoid our influences connect to our own actions actions, intentions, and beliefs.
The process still won't be didactic. It will almost certainly be a bit more intentionally facilitated. Ideally, it will help us all build self-awareness about what we do as teachers and why we do it.
Some Reading
Some Reading
If you'd like to do some reading to help prime your thinking before these conversations, here are some of the many articles and other pieces about how college educators are (or aren't) educated:
- "How Do Professors Learn to Teach (or Do They)?" (2012) by Jason Fertig of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
- "How to Create Terrible Professors" (2008) by Jenna Robinson of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
- "Professors Must Learn How to Teach" (2017) by Mariappan Jawaharlal at Huffington Post
- "Turning Good Teaching on its Head" (2018) Part I and Part II by Paul F. Diehl at Inside Higher Ed
- "Teaching Blunders to Avoid: Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes" by Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent, at the Iowa State Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning
- "Education as Emulation" (1991) by Albert Blum in College Teaching
- "What Makes a Good Teacher? You may never be as funny, approachable, or creative as your favorite teacher — the key is to try" (2016) by Rob Jenkins at The Chronicle of Higher Education
- "Great Teaching -- Observe It, Emulate It, and Pass It On" (2016) by Gabriel Keith Harris at the Journal of Food Science Education
- "Preparing the Next Generation of Faculty: Graduate School as Socialization to the Academic Career" (2002) by Ann E. Austin at The Journal of Higher Education
- "Peers in Doctoral Education: Unrecognized Learning Partners" (2012) by Emma M. Flores-Scott and Maresi Nerad in New Directions for Higher Education
- "Creating a Bridge to the Future: Preparing New Faculty to Face Changing Expectations in a Shifting Context" (2012) by Ann E. Austin in The Review of Higher Education
Some reflection on this week's notes and the next two dialogues:
Some reflection on this week's notes and the next two dialogues:
This week's Dialogue 2 conversations were as relatively diverse and wide-ranging (in both content and attendance) as the conversations were for Dialogue 1. That all been very cool to be part of. It's really neat to be in deeply thoughtful conversation among folks who care enough about education and each other to tell and listen carefully to honest, vulnerable stories.
It also became fairly obvious by the end of the week that we still have a lot of unexplored opportunities for engaging in the critical aspects of critical dialogue. There is undeniable value in educators sitting around a table to share experiences, ask each other questions, and commiserate. That engagement almost inevitably produces the type of enhanced metacognition and self-awareness these dialogues are intended to produce. But if we don't intentionally pose problems to ourselves and each other -- about what we do as educators, the intentions that drive those actions, and the beliefs that underpin those intentions -- we'll be missing out on chances to engage in the sort of productive challenges critical dialogue is uniquely positioned to produce.
The gentle but firm challenge for the next two sets of dialogues is to maintain the camaraderie we've established and use it to examine ourselves a bit more deeply.
The Dialogue 3 topic -- What priorities do our syllabuses (syllabi?) declare? -- will be perfect for getting to that place. .
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