When we discuss participatory learning, we are talking about creating autonomy. In my favorite book about online teaching, Darby and Lang (2019) write that, “We can’t give people agency; we can, however, provide the conditions and support for it to flourish.” This notion is incredibly powerful in our goals as teachers! I want to create environments that spur and support learning rather than present content and hope my students master it. Increased autonomy boosts engagement, which in turn, increases workplace benefits. When we teach participation and neglect to teach autonomy, the result is a workforce full of people that do not take responsibility for their actions. Principles of participatory learning should be intertwined with principles of accountability.

Education is as much a science as it is an art, with chaos always nearby: “The art of effective pedagogy is to calibrate just the right balance of open-ness and structure” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2017, p. 23). It’s the art of finding the sweet spot between what we allow students to do and what we require of them. We want to offer choices to increase learner agency and foster independence, yet we also don’t want anarchy or decision overload/paralysis.

So how do we provide the conditions that support participatory learning? One example is the co-design of the course syllabus. Educators can make the syllabus a living document when we solicit active feedback from students. This can be done through annotations to the syllabus where students can ask about assignments/policies, comment on major assignments, indicate where they have concerns, ask for potential tweaks, share practical advice about how to be successful, and/or voice opinions on familiar texts and suggest supplemental ones. Educators can even leave one learning objective blank on the syllabus for students to write their own, design it, and execute an assessment to measure their achievement of it. EdTech tools that make this practical example possible are Hypothesis and Google Docs. I’m going to adopt this technique next semester on Google Docs!

Darby, F., & Lang, J. (2019). Small teaching online: Applying learning sciences in online classes. Jossey-Bass.