What priorities do syllabuses declare?

The Basics

This third topic may include even more opportunities than the first couple did for engaging in the critical part of critical dialogue — for maintaining the valuable process of sharing interesting, useful, thoughtful, and sometimes moving conversation, but also intentionally adding more critical analysis and self-examination to our dialogue. That's a good thing.

It's important for us to describe our practices, perspectives, intentions, and experiences as educators. There's value in naming those things. It's also important for us to critique what we do and why we do it, and to investigate whether it produces the effects we want it to produce and might believe it's producing. Educators need to engage ourselves and each other in productively posing problems about what we do, the intentions with which we do it, and the beliefs that underpin it all. We need to explore whether or not our actions, intentions, and beliefs support the student-learning effects we say we want to achieve.

Syllabuses — or syllabi, or syllabises, or whatever — and other documents that educators use to declare what we expect of students expose our conscious and subconscious priorities and values. They show what and who we consider most important. If those documents focus on closing loopholes and describing punitive measures, perceptive students know a lot about how to manage us and themselves. If our answer to every question that can be answered by consulting the syllabus is an exasperated, "It's on the syllabus," we show students a lot about what we believe the purpose of teaching is. And syllabi and other expectation-based documents that emphasize learning instead of policies seem to convey a whole other set of beliefs.

That's some of what we'll be talking about this week. In most ways it will feel similar to conversations during the first two dialogues. In some ways the facilitation will guide us all toward productive self-critique.