1.
Centering Teaching
The Human Work of Higher Education

2.
“To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our
students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions
where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.”
~ bell hooks, Teaching toTransgress

3.
Scaffolding can create points of entry and access but can also
reduce the complexity of learning to its detriment (e.g. Bloom’s
Taxonomy,ADDIE, etc.).

4.
Photo by flickr userVictoria Pickering
Why do we attempt so often to resolve this...

5.
Into this?

6.
In my first teaching job 19 years ago, I was given a stock syllabus
and told I couldn’t change anything.“Why would you need to
change anything? Everything you need is right there in the syllabus.
Besides, you should be focusing on your research.”

7.
That stock syllabus had one blank line for me to write my name.
I did change stuff.And that’s the moment I decided higher
education pedagogy would be my research area.

8.
Learning can not be reduced to or packaged as a series of static,
self-contained content. Rather, learning happens in tangents,
diversions, interruptions — in a series of clauses (parentheticals)
… and gaps.

9.
A discussion of pedagogy needs to include a critical examination of
our tools, what they afford, who they exclude, how they're
monetized, and what pedagogies they have already baked in. But it
requires we also begin with a consideration of what we value, the
kinds of relationships we want to develop with students, why we
gather together in places like universities, and how humans learn.

10.
Most higher education teaching practices are unexamined, because
teachers are rarely given space to think critically about pedagogy.
They are asked to structure learning as if students are
interchangeable. So, they deliver content, demand compliance with
course policies, and wield outcomes like a weapon.

11.
I was once laughed at by a fellow faculty member when I argued
that most faculty jobs are 40 - 90% teaching, so graduate
coursework should be 40 - 90% focused on teaching. It doesn’t
seem that absurd to me.

12.
If rich conversations about teaching don’t happen in graduate
programs, they are very unlikely to happen among teaching faculty
and at disciplinary conferences.

13.
We need departments of higher education pedagogy (or
interdisciplinary clusters of scholars focused on higher education
pedagogy) at every school offering graduate degrees aimed at
preparing future faculty.

14.
This would mean:
(1) Offering more courses, or components of required content-focused
courses, dedicated to pedagogy.
(2) Discipline-specific pedagogies would be a significant component of
comprehensive or qualifying exams.
(3) As much as 40% of the dissertations or research projects in a field
would focus at least in part on pedagogy.
(4) And the culture of every department would acknowledge pedagogy
as a respected sub-discipline as well as a discipline in its own right.

15.
Additionally, every higher education institution should have robust
first-year faculty initiatives aimed at filling the gaps for new
teachers.And ongoing development opportunities for continuing
teachers.This kind of structural signposting is how institutions
convey what they value.

16.
By “pedagogy,” I mean something broader than preparing graduate
students to teach university classes. I also mean preparing them
for work in libraries, instructional design, public scholarship, and
educational journalism.Work that moves beyond content to
consider how our study of that content gets shared with others
or inflected in the world.

17.
The bureaucracies of education — seat time, accreditation, grades,
credentialing, standards, norming — encourage teachers to
imagine students work the way machines do — that they can be
scored according to objective metrics and neatly compared to
one another.

18.
If there is a better sort of mechanism for the work of education,
it’s a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not for delivering and
assessing content, but for helping all of us listen better to students.

19.
We can’t get to a place of listening to students if they don’t show
up to the conversation because we’ve excluded their voice in
advance by creating environments hostile to them and their work.

20.
62% of higher education faculty/staff stated they’d been bullied or
witnessed bullying vs. 37% in the general population. People from
minority communities are disproportionately bullied. (Hollis 2012)
51% of college students claimed to have seen another student
being bullied by a teacher at least once and 18% claimed to have
been bullied themselves by a teacher. (Marraccini 2013)

21.
The process that makes teachers increasingly adjunct is the same
process that has made students into customers.And the gear that
makes this system go depends on the pitting of students and
teachers against one another. Not training higher education
teachers is a powerful lever in this system.

22.
Three years ago, I wrote a blog post responding to a series of
student-shaming articles published at the Chronicle of Higher
Education.

23.
In that piece, I argued everyone working anywhere even near to
education needs to:
• Treat the least privileged among us with the most respect.
• Recognize the job of a teacher is to advocate for students,
especially in an educational system currently under direct threat
at almost every turn.
• Laugh at ourselves and not at those we and our system have
made most vulnerable.
• Rant up, not down.

24.
My blog post was read by 50,000 people and spawned articles,
more than two dozen blog responses, and hundreds of comments,
some from the darker corners of the web.

25.
The Dear Student articles weren’t the first published at the
Chronicle to demean students.And they weren’t the last.The first
sentence of an article published more recently:“My students can’t
write a clear sentence to save their lives.”

26.
The Chronicle profits by encouraging a culture that pits vulnerable
students and teachers against each other. Nobody wins. Not
students. Not teachers. Not education in the eyes of its detractors.

27.
Who in our educational system is most vulnerable?

28.
Intersectionality is important when talking about power and
hierarchies.Teacher / student is a binary that needs deconstructing
but never at the expense of the other identities in play (race, class,
gender, sexuality, ability, etc.). No binary exists in a vacuum.

29.
What I listened to intently during the aftermath of Dear Chronicle
were student voices, some of whom commented anonymously:
• “Part of the reason why I never asked for help was because I saw
what my professors thought of those who did.”
• “I dropped out of college, in large part due to the hoops I had to
jump through to get my disabilities recognized.”
• “It’s a lot easier to stay motivated when you’re not made to feel
like you’re stupid or a liar. It’s a lot easier to focus on studying
when you’re not focused on having to justify yourself.”

30.
Sean Michael Morris writes,“At some point, we need to stop
blaming students for the state of education. If, after so many years
of controlling student behavior, analyzing their data to understand
and curtail that behavior, we are still unhappy with their
performance, perhaps it’s time we turn education over to them.”

31.
For education to work, there can be no divide between teachers
and students.There must be what Paulo Freire calls “teacher-
students.” Specifically, he writes,“no one teaches another, nor is
anyone self-taught.” So,“teacher” becomes a role that shifts, and
learning depends upon a community of teacher-students.

32.
Photo by flickr user mirando
Making space for student voices doesn’t start by comparing them to insects.

33.
All of this demands exactly two pedagogical approaches, and
these are what I see at the center of the work of teaching:
1. Start by trusting students.
2. Realize "fairness" is not a good excuse for a lack of empathy.

34.
“Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine … if it is of
such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to
another, then I say, break the law.”
~ Henry David Thoreau,“Civil Disobedience”