We can use digital media to prolong the life of old ways of learning - for instance, where the video-lecturing teacher, the monovocal e-textbook or the the bullet-pointed PowerPoint presentation transmit facts and concepts to (presumably) unknowing learners. How can we use the affordances of networked digital media to do something different? Can we imagine learning where the knowledge that learners bring to the table is also valued? Where learners' knowledge repertoires are extended as they actively make new knowledge? Which build collaborative knowledge cultures? In this learning module, we explore ways in which a "reflexive pedagogy" can offer some practical answers to these questions.
Digital Learning, Active Learning, Educational Technology
Background Reading for this Course
From our New Learning e-book:
Post-Covid Thoughts
This Update
One of the key artifacts of this classroom was the student writing book—pen or pencil writing into a book of blank pages. This is where notes were written and assignments undertaken.
Digital media offer new potentials for learning, and new kinds of artifacts that students can create. However, this is not a merely a translation of old medium to new. The pedagogical purposes of the work change, from training memory (notes) and testing (assignments) of received knowledge, to active knowledge making and the active assembly of knowledge into multimodal knowledge representations. The following video examines this change.
Comment: How have the media of student activity changed (or not changed)? How does this change (or not changed!) the nature of learning? You can also respond to other people's comments by starting comment, @Name.
For new users of Scholar, admins may wish to post the "Participating in Community" secton of the Getting Started in Scholar Learning Module.
Essential Reading and Update
Following are some (mostly recent or upcoming) scholarly publications by Cope and Kalantzis. We'd like you to read some of them to get a broader sense of our thinking. Please join the New Learning community in CGScholar for updates as we publish new work!
Comment: Read two of these articles. Analyze the selected articles and write at least 200 words that focuses on a theme addressed in these readings. Comment on three others' comments.
In her pathbreaking book, Classroom Discourse, Courtney Cazden characterizes the classical pattern of classroom discussion as Teacher Initiates—Student Responds—Teacher Evaluates (I-R-E). Over here in our New Learning community (please join while you're there—it's an open community), see how how discussions in Scholar's Community space are completely different. Also, these online discussions work the same way whether they are in-person and synchonous (in the lecture hall, classroom, or training space), or at-at-distance and asynchronous (homework before the next class, or online learning). This is a phenomenon we have called Ubiquitous Learning—any where, any time learning.
Comment: What is your experience of the strengths and weaknesses of oral and online discussion?
Here's the way a traditional assignment works: the student is given a prompt, with "how to" instructions, they write up their assignment, they hand it in, the teacher has a whole pile of work to grade (tediously!), then the student gets back their work with B+ or some such grade and if they are lucky, a few cursory comments.
This does not to help the student learn, or not much; it is just a judgement about whether they have been good person, and whether they should smarten up your game for the next assignment. This kind of assignment is a one-way trip, with precious little space for the reflexivity that is needed for highly engaged learning.
Now, for the CGScholar contrast: we have interim or formative assessment that helps you while you work, and we "crowdsource" the feedback across the learning community, involving not just the instructor but peer and self-reviews (and now also, AI reviews, a pseudo-peer!).
The students do their work in the Creator, the work on the left of the screen, with various social and machine feedback tools on the right.
Here are the phases:
And here are the dimensions of recursive knowledge making and learning, in the play between the left side of the screen and the right:
LEFT SIDE | RIGHT SIDE |
Learning: the knowledge representation made by the learner | Assessment: formative assessments by peers, teachers and self; retrospective learning analytics |
Learning Activity: a focus on representation of specific information, argument or disciplinary content knowledge | Self-regulation of Learning: explicit awareness of project objectives and phase outline; ongoing dialogue around processes |
Disciplinary Practice: thinking about a specific topic, its facts and arguments | Disciplinary Thinking: a focus on the general conditions of knowledge making in this discipline |
Cognition: Thinking about a specific topic, and expressing one’s thinking in writing | Metacognition: Thinking about the conditions of effective thinking and action |
Empirical Work: outlining specific content, applying disciplinary reasoning to that content, thinking about specific details of knowledge in this field of knowledge or practice | Theoretical Work: thinking based on the general precepts of the discipline, thinking about the conceptual frameworks that tie this field of knowledge and practice together |
Individual Intelligence: the activity of representing knowledge | Collaborative Intelligence: structured feedback; productive diversity in learning as students benefit from multiple and varied feedback perspectives |
Are all collaboration spaces equally suited for learning? Not necessarily. Here are some tangential thoughts about Google Docs/Google Classroom.
Comment: What are the main dimensions of collaborative learning? What are its challenges and benefits?
As early as the eighteenth century the great philosopher of modern democratic politics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was complaining about didactic pedagogy, as a matter of human principle. Read him in his own words over here, at our New Learning online website.
If Jean-Jacques Rousseau spoke philosophically about an alternative to didactic pedagogy, Maria Montessori (1870-1952) turned his ideas about greater learner freedom, into classroom practice. She speaks here.
Building on this long and proud tradition, here's the contrast we would like to make between didactic pedagogy and reflexive learning:
Didactic Pedagogy | Reflexive Learning |
Balance of control with the instructor, transmission pedagogy, learner as knowledge consumer | The learner has equal responsibility to be in control of their learning, learner as knowledge producer |
Focus on cognition, specifically long-term memory | A focus on the knowledge artifacts created by the learner, and the processes of their making |
Focus on the individual learner | A focus on the social sources of knowledge |
Narrow range of knowledge activities: remembering facts, deducing the right answers | A wider repertoire of knowledge activities, including recognition of perspective, argument and a more dynamic and evolving understanding of the nature of knowledge |
You'll find a longer version of this case over at our New Learning community. And you may also like to read this:
Comment: Is freedom to learn a matter of principle, or pragmatics, or both... or is this naïvely romantic? When learners are freer and more actively responsible for their learning, how does the role of the teacher or instructor change? Not to dismiss didactic pedagogy, when is the right time and place for moments of teaching which are didactic ("overt instruction," we might call this), and moments that are more experiential?
Over on our New Learning website, we have an extract from the Rule of St Benedict. Here in the early middle ages we see the first signs of a new form of pedagogy—the talking teacher and the silent learner. The Academy of Ancient Athens had not been like this. Confucius had not been like this. Apprenticeship learning to become a carpenter or a farmer had not been like this. These older forms of learning had been interactive and dialogical. Benedict was the founder of Western Monasticism, and the monasteries became the first colleges and universities, filling their lecture halls with obediently listening students.
Let's look at two digital media that seem modern: the PowerPoint and the Flipped Classroom. Just because they are digital we think they are an advance, but much of they time just preserve the didactic aspects of the lecture. (Now, we are not wanting to say, abandon your PowerPoints, because they can be well done and are very convenient, and recording video lectures can have lots of advantages over having students sitting through in-person lectures.) But ...
1. Death by PowerPoint
We could never say this as eloquently as Edward R. Tufte, the PowerPoint slide deck as co-conspirator in relentless telling and excruciatingly boring listening. You can purchase his very entertaining short book (just 32 pages) on the web. You can also find bootlegged PDFs quite easily, if you don't mind conspiring with the web to defeat the spirit of copyright.
In our CGScholar learning communities, we rarely if ever see learners using PowerPoints. If they are presenting online or presenting in person, they talk to their update in Community or the their published work from Creator. This can be on the screen of online meeting or in the physical room, or both, and other learners can scroll ahead, scroll forward, and read while they are listening. This is not a bullet-point synoptic text (how painful it is when you read the whole of slide, and the speaker is only up to dot point 2!). It is the whole text. There is more space for engagement while the creator is speaking.
2. The Flipped Classroom
Of course, it's great that students can access lectures at any time. Or watch them several times until they understand a point. Or pause, or fast forward, or watch at 2x speed. But a video lecture is still a lecture. It's St Benedict only slightly updated. The speaker speaks, the listener obediently listens. Here's some of the good and bad of the flipped classroom, and you'll find more here.
We can do a version of the flipped classroom in CGScholar, but we do it quite differently. We like to say that we do it dialogically. Have a look at our e-Learning Ecologies Learning Module (which, by the way, we also offer in Coursera). We have lots of video mini-lectures, but they prompt dialogue (the "comment" request at the end of each update), and ask the participants to illustrate the idea with their own content, and to share (the "post an update" request).
Comment: What are the efficiencies—and inefficiences—of the teacher lecture? What are its limitations as a form of communication and pedagogy? When are new educational media just old wine in new bottles?
How often, in our digital learning environments, do we simply use new media to bring old pedagogies back to life?
If we can do the same old things using shiny new technologies, this tells is that technology is pedagogically neutral. We can change the technology without changing the way learners learn.
But what can we do to innovate pedagogically? How can we use the affordances of new media to create new learning? Here's our answer, in one flower diagram:
Didactic Pedagogy | Reflexive Pedagogy |
Confined by the four walls of the classroom and cells of the timetable | 1. Ubiquitous Learning: anywhere, anytime, anyhow |
The learner as knowledge consumer, passive knowledge acquisition, memorization | 2. Active Knowledge Making: the learner-as-knowledge producer and discerning knowledge discoverer/navigator |
Academic literacies: traditional textbooks, student assignments and tests | 3. Multimodal Meaning: new media texts, multimodal knowledge representations |
Emphasis on summative assessments and retrospective judgments that serve managerial purposes but are not immediately actionable | 4. Recursive Feedback: formative assessment, prospective and constructive feedback, learning analytics |
The isolated learner, with a focus on individual cognition and memory |
5. Collaborative Intelligence: peer-to-peer learning, sourcing social memory and using available knowledge tools appropriately |
Focus on facts to be remembered, theories to be correctly applied | 6. Metacognition: thinking about thinking, critical self-reflection on knowledge processes and disciplinary practices |
Homogenizing, one-size-fits-all curriculum, standardized teaching and assessment | 7. Differentiated Learning: flexible, self-expressive and adaptive learning, addressing each student according to their interests, self-identity and needs |
You may also wish to read this:
Comment: The seven affordances can also serve as a checklist. What items on the checklist do you consider "low-hanging fruit"? What will be harder to achieve?
Make an Update: Take a learning technology or resource, and "parse" it for its affordances.
Here's a page from the English translation of a textbook by the inventor of the genre, Petrus Ramus (1515-1572):
In learning environments, we have a challenge: how do we bring stuff-to-be-learned into the classroom? Historically, we have had two ways to do this—the teacher lecture, and the textbook. In theory, there is no knowledge in the world that cannot be brought into the classroom via these means.
The textbook is a peculiar knowledge artifact:
How do we do things differently in CGScholar? We want learners to be knowledge producers at least as much as they are knowledge consumers. We want them to construct knowledge actively from a range of sources. The textbook may have been a convenient way to package knowledge in the age of the printing press, but in the age of the internet the whole world of knowledge is a weblink away—and learners need to be able to discern reliable and unreliable sources. Instead of reading Chapter 8 in the textbook, we can ask them to write that chapter.
In CGScholar, we have designed and trialed an alternative to the e-textbook, an artifact that we call a “Learning Module.” The Learning Module is a hybrid of syllabus, lesson plan, and textbook. It is all of these things and none of them.
A Learning Module has a two column format: a "for the member" side where the instructor speaks directly to the learner, and a "for the admin" side where the instructor speaks the professional discourse of education, articulating learning aims, curriculum standards and teaching tips. You will find lots of already-published Learning Modules here, here, here, and here in the CGScholar Bookstore.
The Learning Module offers three modes of interaction in a learning community:
Here is what has changed: whereas a textbook summarizes the world, transmitting content to learners in the single voice of the textbook writer, the Learning Module curates the world—web links to textual content, videos and other embedded media. It is multimodal. And it uses a variety of sources, requiring students to critically evaluate sources, not just to memorize content that has been delivered to them to consume. It suggests that learners may also find and curate content. Whereas a syllabus outlines content and topics to be covered, a Learning Module prompts dialogue—an update prompts class discussion; a project sets in train a peer reviewed work; a survey elicits a student response. It is a medium to facilitate active and collaborative learning, rather than individualized content acquisition. And whereas a lesson plan is the teacher’s private activity outline, the Learning Module can be shared with the class, and optionally published to the web, for other teachers to use within a school or beyond, so building a school-based pedagogical knowledge bank. For professional collaboration and learning, a learning module can be jointly written and peer reviewed before publication.
The underlying shift in textual architecture from a textbook to a Learning Module reflects a shift in the assumed role of the learner, a recalibration of the balance of learner and teacher agency. From the content transmission model of the textbook, the Learning Module sets up a series of reflexive, dialogical relationships with and between learners—the comments they make on an update, the peer- and self-reviews, the responses to surveys. This is a move from telling to dialogue, in which every learner must participate. The Learning Module also places responsibility up learners to be knowledge producers: when they make an update to initiate a discussion: when they create a “work” for peer review; and when these works are published and shared in a class knowledge bank. This represents a change in direction of knowledge flows, from hierarchical, top-down knowledge flows to lateral knowledge flows and distributed model of learners as co-creators or designers of new knowledge. This aligns with the logic of contemporary, participatory media and the skills and sensibilities for a "knowledge society" and "knowledge economy."
However, this process is also highly scaffolded, in the design of open-ended updates, the nature of the requests that students receive to create updates, the project prompts and review rubrics, and the survey instruments. This changes in a quite fundamental way the nature of the teaching profession, from a talking profession (someone else has written the textbook), to a profession where the central medium of interaction with learners is a documented, web-deliverable, interactive learning design.
If you are interested to dig deeper into the historical origins of modern textual forms, you may find this video interesting:
Comment: How are digital media changing our media of learning and instruction? How far have we come? How far do we still have to go? (And by the way, Learning Management Systems not necessarily the answer, as we argue here.)
For instructions on how to make a Learning Module, direct participants to Section 5, "Creating Learning Modules", in the Scholar Help area.
Henry Ford an educator? That sounds strange, you say? Well, he was an educator in the sense that he tried to teach his modern world that same is good.
Didactic pedagogy assumed the same kinds of things. Every learner should be on the same page at the same time. Learning outcomes should be standardized. Answers needed to be strictly correct. We all needed to learn the same stuff so we could fit into the modern world of mass production and uniform mass culture. The teacher and textbook ruled, just as the boss and the supervisor ruled. The learner was to learn what the teacher and the textbook told them to learn. In Ford's day, didactic pedagogy was industrial-strength education.
In CGScholar, by contrast, we try to honor the principles of what we call "productive diversity" in learning:
For an example of productive diversity in practice, see this blogpost and this report of a "Learning in Emergency Operations" training program run by the International Red Cross. Red Cross trainers could have taken their PowerPoints into training rooms and told emergency workers about the protocols for Emergency Operations. Instead, participants wrote case studies in Scholar of describing and analyzing their experiences of working in emergency situations, applying the protocols, systematizing their thoughts, and at the same time sharing their experiences with others. An earthquake in Haiti is not the same as a Tsunami in the Philippines, but there is much to be learned from each other as course participants share their experiences. This sharing deepens their tacit knowledge, as participants refine their analysis using a peer review rubric that is organizes thinking systematically against operations protocols.
Here is a book chapter where we have written at greater length on these ideas:
And here, we have written about the range and dynamics of learner differences.
Comment: How do didactic and reflexive pedagogies negotiate learner differences?
The Test is Dead! Log Live Assessment.
Here are some propositions, argued at greater length and more formally over in our New Learning community:
In CGScholar, our Analytics area tracks project progress—offering a visualization based on many thousands of datapoints. Says the teacher in this space: “Analytics is allowing us to have insights that we never had, when with one teacher and a bunch of papers, it was just too overwhelming.”
For more a description of the rationale behind the Scholar Anatytics, take this link. You may also be interested to read this article on big data in education.
Comment: Perhaps it's time for a paradigm shift in educational assessment? After the test, "learning analytics"?
This course includes peer-reviewed projects as a part of the course requirements. These projects must be fully completed for course credit.
To see details of these projects and the peer review rubric, refer to the Learning Design and Leadership Course Framework Learning Module from the CGScholar Bookstore. Refer to your course community and the course syllabus for specific timelines.