3. 33
“In play, a child always behaves
beyond his average age, above his
daily behavior. In play it is as
though he were a head taller than
himself.”
—Lev Vygotsky
5. Jean Lave & Etienne
Wenger
Etienne Wenger
Learning as Social, as ParticipationLearning as Social, as Participation
5
6. Designing courses with these ideas in mind:
• Play. Does not mean easy or fun, per se. But it does mean
imagining new ways of being. Who can students be in my
class? What identities can they take on?
• Open, Open, Open. Use resources (both digital and face to
face) to connect students to actual communities they wish
to join.
• Deliverables. Students make. Work with course ideas and
materials to produce something every day. Always asking:
How am I getting in the way of students’ participation?
6
7. “the term participation describe[s] the social
experience of living in the world in terms of
membership in social communities and active
involvement in social enterprises”
--Etienne Wenger
7
12. Artifact Assignment
You will have a lot of choice here in how you (or as a
group) decide to share your books. You can create a
visual map, a book trailer (using our iPads and iMovie)
or short film, post a review on Goodreads and
tweet about the text,
lead a discussion about the book on Twitter, give
an Ignite talk, act out a scene for our class, write
fanfiction…lots of possible ways to share. You can
decide to do your own thing or work in teams.
Here are some great examples from last semester.
12
29. What is the “why” of your class? Why should
students take it or be in it? How will they be
changed by it? What is your discipline’s or
classroom’s “why”? Why does it matter that
students take __________ class or become
_________ists?
What site and/or classroom resources are available
in order to design for making, playing, and open
learning?
29
I want to talk about frameworks and ways of thinking about learning that guide my course design. Vygotsky on Play. Not trivial. Some might argue: If you’re playing, you are not doing real work. In fact it may be that it is through making, playing, etc that we solve the world’s problems. Tinker, explore, suspend disbelief. If not in higher ed, then where? Our classrooms should be a space of innovation, a space to fail without huge risks, a place for iteration, play…
Participation and Community frameworks arise from Lev Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, and Neo-Vygotskian scholars who research situated learning and distributed learning.
The research discussed in these texts is not focused on schools. Lave & Wenger set out to rescue the idea of apprenticeship.
For the past few years, I’ve thought carefully about course design, particularly focusing on participation, community and open education.
Build participation into the ideology of the course design. The way we make use of a term like participation is in need of rescuing: moving away from a limited view of participation as it is often linked to motivation, engagement, or hand-raising and toward the view that participation as a concept is more generative when connected to the idea of membership in communities of practice, which I borrow from Lave & Wenger. Reviewing syllabi in many of the GE courses on our campus, participation is often listed as 5%, 10%, or in rare cases, as high as 50% of the grade in a course. But I find this to be an odd way to think about participation:
demonstrating engagement by hand-raising and talk are fairly limited views of participation, and in fact, these ways of being are more connected to performance—acting like a student—than participation. We certainly want students to participate more than 10%, of even half, of the time.
Are they participating when they are listening and pondering the ideas of their peers? Yes. In thinking about course design, I consider how students become members of our classroom community, the university, and our discipline. In fact, I think a lot about why students should take my course…or be in my field. And I’ll ask you all to think about this too (and build on this in the workshop with Peter Kittle tomorrow)
Ultimately, I start course design with some basic things about being human: Everyone wants to be seen and heard and that they are needed to make things work.
Sometimes when I talk to teachers, they worry that following some of the design principles, like making your course more open, means they have to host a MOOC. Or go digital or do extra labor on top of the exhausting day they already have. But I am a fan of small moves. Sometimes, I just have two classes I am teaching become penpals…responders to each other’s writing. Kind of a secret responder. Sometimes, I invite colleagues into my class to talk with students. I am sure we can imagine many times we’ve already connected our students… Connected students to communities that exist on the planet…people who share their interests.
Artifact day with 8th graders and college students.
More on the science inquiry course shown here: http://kimjaxon.com/?p=140
Rough Cut Film Festival: http://kimjaxon.com/?p=84
Ignite & Maker Night: http://kimjaxon.com/?p=117
Course designs focused on making, playing, and open learning for me is about choice, going outside, peer support, venues for sharing, inviting community into our class, modeling our practices… like reading for members of our campus community
From Unit 1 of Connected Courses: Why We Need a Why
http://connectedcourses.net/thecourse/why-we-need-a-why/