The heart of education: alive, but not explicit...

In speaking about the tensions that exist in contemporary post-secondary institutions such as culturally diverse classrooms and challenging students with tasks they resist, Brookfield (2015) proposes that the “market-driven, organizational effectiveness paradigm that has taken hold in higher education” (p. 3) compounds these tensions.  In their study of the corporatisation of community colleges in the United States and Canada, Levin, Kater, and Wagoner (2006) find that faculty are expected to contribute to institutional productivity and efficiency as well as to local economic development.  Corporatism they propose is bound up with neo-liberal ideology where control is transferred from the public to the private sector.  This study concludes that faculty are: pressured to accept larger class sizes, subject to a growing percentage of part-time and non-regularized employment and must tailor their curriculum to business, industry and students. The implication is that students become customers and political and economic agendas loom large (p. 115).

I have almost forty years of experience with Selkirk College. I attended the College in the first half of the 1980s, taught there in early 2000s and now run the Teaching and Learning Institute. Unlike Levin, Kater and Wagoner (2006) I do not see a shift from education to training. There is still a lot of education going on at Selkirk College. Having maintained relatively small class sizes (with the exception of some recent larger classes for international students) the learning environment is known as caring. The challenge, I see, is making education, for example critical thinking, open-mindedness, creativity, problem-solving abilities, explicit. An outcomes-based approach to education is being adopted at the College but some faculty have resisted making the heart of education (example of abilities just listed), which in my experience has been going on since I was a student, part of our course and program outcomes as well as associated assessments. Awareness of the need for cross cultural competencies in both staff and students is relatively new in the Region, bolstered by an enormous increase in international students in recent years and national initiatives like Truth and Reconciliation. Internationalization and indigenization are political and economic agendas but they are also vital to our multicultural society.

References

Levin, J., Kater, S., & Wagoner, R. L. (2006). Community College Faculty. New York, UNITED STATES: Palgrave Macmillan US.

Sharing Our Experiences While Teaching

This idea in Brookfield (2015) caught my interest: “teachers don’t know how to unlock their experiences and reflect on them in a way that provides problem-solving insights” (p. 11). I have been exploring what Brookfield calls our truths about teaching. Here’s an excerpt from my journal:

I feel authentic when I’m scared, anxious, and tongue-tied. These feelings mean I am considering other perspectives, I’m in the process of learning, and I’m not sure that others agree. Still I’m sure this is the best I have at the time and share anyway with good intent.

Brookfield (2015) says that our experience can be distorted, unexamined, constraining and self-fulfilling and so we must be self-reflective, critical, and open-minded when relying on our experience. I’m thinking about how scared I felt opening the Indigenous Education Symposium last week. I told some stories about a teacher and a presenter that were provocative and contentious because they speak to the muddy and chaotic process of decolonizing public education.  When I did a little research on faculty sharing personal experience the importance of student-faculty relationships for enabling learning was prevalent. Brookfield points to sharing experience as part of establishing credibility and authenticity (pp. 46-47).

Yorke and Brennan (2015) say a good story helps students understand a concept from another point of view (para 2). Their advice is to start with a story we often tell.  Before telling the story to your students they recommend practice as well as developing your purpose and clear relationship to the course material.  They also suggest directing students to social media where you have told this story. Now that’s scary! 

The advice that one’s own experience, perhaps through storytelling, can be as effective as scholarly or expert content makes sense.  After all, working on my PhD I am reviewing a lot of poor research, research that is not self-reflective, critical, or open-minded. I feel encouraged to keep sharing more of my own experience, especially as I get older and have more stories to tell.  Of course this will feel frightening in academia, where if the source isn’t published it can be questioned. But I have to remember that a lot of my experience is now based on research as well as confirmed or negated by life experience.

Grandpa the Storyteller, by Sculptor Victor Issa, from City of Loveland

I will consider framing my future opening remarks in a story, perhaps stories I know about the keynotes, or stories of my own related to the event's themes. I’ll return to the instinctual proposals in my journal this week – if this scares me and makes me anxious then I’m probably self-reflecting and being open to others. However, when the moment arrives, I must quiet internal voices so that I’m with the audience.

Brookfield’s provocative idea that instructors underutilize their own experiences in teaching and learning requires more exploration.  Similar to sharing any published scholarly or expert work the practice of sharing experience requires self-reflection, openness to others, and critical thinking. Our insights, intuitions, and insights are part of our professional practice.

Brookfield, S. D. (2015). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom. John Wiley & Sons.

 Yorke, A. M. & Brennan, M.L. (October 30, 2015) Once upon a time:  Integrating stories into your teaching. Retrieved June 27, 2017 from http://scholarlyteacher.com/2015/10/30/once-upon-a-time-integrating-stories-into-your-teaching/