Currently I am an instructor at the University of Maine in the Department of Communication & Journalism, which is a requirement of my funding as a full-time PhD Student. My teaching schedule this year includes two sections of public speaking (24 students in each section) in the Fall 2020 semester and in the Spring 2021 semester I will teach a communication theory and research methods course (55 student cap), as well as a film theory and criticism course (24 student cap). I’m also scheduled to teach a public speaking course (15 student minimum) in the Summer 2021 semester. All of these courses are for undergraduate students at various levels. While I am technically a teaching assistant, as per my status as a PhD Student, I am the instructor of record for all my courses, responsible for syllabus design, course delivery, and assessment.
All of my courses this semester are online, with both synchronous and asynchronous elements. The Spring 2021 courses are also scheduled to be online unless the situation changes drastically between now and late-January. I don’t mind facilitating these courses online—in fact, I think the online experience has added a great deal to the dynamics of the course, and I’m sure I will retain many of the adaptations I’ve made to the public speaking course, specifically, if and when we return to in-person learning.
As far as my comfort and ease with integrating technology into teaching and learning, I feel more or less expert. Before coming to Maine to pursue my PhD studies, I spent nearly six years in New York City working in media education, first as a video production teacher with City Parks Foundation and then as the education director for The LAMP, a media literacy nonprofit. I’ve designed and facilitated over a hundred programs and workshops across a wide variety of media-related content areas for a diverse range of audiences: I’ve collaborated with teachers in all K-12 grade levels; I’ve run after school and summer programming; I’ve worked with children and families in libraries and community centers; I’ve taught young adults in workforce development programs; I’ve facilitated learning experiences for older adults, on their own and in collaboration with teens; and I’ve delivered professional development to both formal and informal educators. I’ve continued my media literacy work to a lesser degree in Maine, though I also spent a year in Kosovo as a Fulbright researcher teaching media literacy programs in all kinds of settings. Digital and media technologies are central to media literacy education and I believe that technology should be central to 21st century education. However, as a media literacy educator I’m also highly critical of the role and influence of media in our lives, so I think every technology we bring into our teaching and learning should be scrutinized and made the focus of our students’ critical gaze. I believe that digital tools should be primarily utilized for student empowerment, to build critical thinking skills, and to facilitate active (and activist) learning. I’m also starting to come around on the utility of learning management systems in both teaching and learning, especially as all my teaching and learning has moved online, though I still think these tools should be used sparingly and only in the service of enhanced student engagement and accessibility.
My particular strengths with integrating technology into learning are my ability to craft learning activities and projects that afford students the opportunity to engage with media content and media technologies in strange and critical ways, and which employ technology in the service of learning. My experiences working as a media literacy educator in NYC and Kosovo within a lot of different kinds of informal learning spaces that were not set-up primarily for those purposes and which varied wildly in their access to technology and Internet access, has provided me with the confidence and the tools to design learning experiences that are highly adaptable and not dependent on, but enhanced by, technology.
What I am less at ease with, however, is working within more formal confines. Particularly, I don’t enjoy nor do I feel comfortable with formal assessments. I don’t really believe in grading systems, as I feel they train students to devalue learning as an intrinsic and lifelong pursuit and that they diminish the potential of the teacher as a facilitator of learning. This has become especially stark as I’ve been teaching undergraduate students—I spend far too much of my energy assigning what feel like arbitrary grades to students are enrolled just to get a passing grade so they can get a degree and move on. Unfortunately, this is a system which is entrenched and to which I must conform in my lowly position as a teaching assistant. Thus, my goal is to develop the tools to build more meaningful and less cumbersome assessments into my courses while also retaining the more informal and self-determined qualities of learning I value as an educator.
So, five areas that I would like to explore are:
- The intersections of pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy;
- Formal assessment techniques within the framework of critical pedagogy;
- Creative applications of formative assessments;
- Heutagogical methods for teaching and learning in higher education;
- How to optimize online learning to redirect student motivations toward self-directed and self-determined learning.
All five of these topics are relevant to both my current teaching/learning environment (higher education, online) and to my future teaching/learning environment, as I plan to continue working in university settings. As for my personal growth, I think it’s important that I begin to connect my skills with designing and facilitating informal learning experiences with the particular demands of formal university teaching and learning, especially the vagaries of grading. However, I’m not sure as of yet which direction to go with any of these ideas in regard to my project in this course. There is definite alignment between the ideas I’ve outlined here and the course questions and outcomes, especially in regard to the areas of professional practice and leadership.