Philosophy and Methodology in
Curriculum and Instruction
Most of my education was built around questioning and challenging the schooling systems that struggled to provide many of the digital literacies I—and many others—both needed and desired. As a result, I sought to cultivate them through other means, which ultimately led to my often non-traditional approach as an aspiring teacher. Being an effective teacher goes beyond simply recognizing that we’re not all empty vessels to be filled with knowledge or that all of us have the potential to be teachers. It’s really about enabling individual agency and building community capacities.
(1) I think most learners are socially motivated. For many grades matter much less than feedback, guidance and meaningful deliverables. Marks and inappropriate standardization have the potential to reduce schools to factories that grant titles or invalid classifications rather than cultivate meaningful learning experiences. The recent trend of large-scale online learning may only exacerbate issues of impersonalization. The primary finding of my research over the past two years with project MAPLE, a grant studying metacognitive learning strategies in STEAM middle school classrooms focusing on at-risk and youth with learning disabilities, is that the most fundamental barrier to participation, which is a prerequisite for any kind of academic success, is relevance. Students need to do more than understand the process of how something works, but also figure out why it matters (or could matter) to them, personally and contextually.
(2) Ivan Illich, Ken Robinson, Lisa Delpit and hundreds of others have explored these issues, as well as their alternatives, for decades. Rather than refusing to participate in existing systems, however, I’ve explored more realistic ways to complement formal assessment by integrating relevance into metrics of learning for my students. For instance, instead of relying primarily on grades for motivation, students can be expected to regularly present to their peers, or asked to create deliverables for external audiences. Often these additional sources of feedback provide a kind of implicit and explicit “reality check” for what students should know and be able to do. It is best when it happens in a classroom with a supportive culture, where students work with one another, recognize each other's accomplishments, and diligence and curiosity are praised. The class becomes more of a collaborative team.
(3) I work to promote learning experiences that involve reverse engineering and remixing through inquiry and iteration. After graduation few folks have the time to crack open a book and sit down to methodically learn the principles of something for long periods of time before engaging in it. For many activities only so much can be learned without practice and answering successive “why” questions. Most industries are looking for workers who are “T-shaped”, able to specialize and to successfully relate to other roles or fields. The process of determining how something works, as well as to adapt its constituent components in new and interesting ways, is a skillset that can help to enable empathy and interdisciplinary success.
In Action
An assignment I give in my class, “The Design of Usable Information Interfaces”, which serves as a foundations course for user experience in the Informatics minor at UIUC, demonstrates several of these concepts in action. A great deal of the way we communicate now is through creating and interpreting visual mediums. In most formal schooling students are taught how to read and write but receive little guided practice communicating with visual mediums. The times it is taught it often employs prompts like “show the concept of negative space” that result in abstractions that aren’t immediately actionable.
To compliment this sort of approach I ask students to start the way we ask musicians to learn: find and copy a dozen visual interfaces they like and reduce them to their basic layouts and colors. In doing this the students create a successive library of shape arrangements and palettes that they then use to recombine elements to yield new expressions and organizations.
This process takes multiple attempts and many of them are deemed insufficient. The value accrues as they are then asked to study what they made to understand why different mashups work (or fail) to create or direct attention and interactions as they do. They then make use of a traditional art reference textbook to grow their vocabulary for this kind of analysis, creating a report with visual annotation, done as a kind digital think-aloud, like a written a cognitive walk-through.
The final stage of the assignment involves taking one of the remix designs and building it out to become a robust visual layout for a specific context, filled with dummy text, images and, potentially with another iteration, simple interactivity prototyping. This assignment, while complicated, has dimensions of choice, contextual application, practice, reappropriation, investigation and more.
Where possible I systematically identify and connect the goals and guiding principles to each assignment I have in a camp or class, along with how I measure them. See my portfolio for an example Learning Objectives and Assessments Alignment graphic for the class featured above.
Concrete Mechanics
I’ve selected more key instruction principles that integrate into my formal teaching methodology:
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Choice - Nearly ever assignment I issue offers constrained choices that allow students to alter it to fit their interests or express their individuality. I find this helps them to feel in control and less likely to feel resentful of requirements.
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Iterative Hands-On, Variable Approach - While I spend considerable time sharing concepts through lecture, I try not to let this occupy more than half of it talking. One of the best uses of in-class time is to begin work on projects with guidance. Prompts and discussions are usually started with smaller break-out groups or given with quiet time to consider and write before reports or exchange. Students must create something and share it in stages. The variance in avenues and access facilitates different types of personalities and learning preferences. It fits with many of the recognized Universal Design Learning Guidelines that are good for inclusion and impacts.
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Intrapersonal - Social networks, negotiated collaboration and situational awareness are strong of predictors of success. I believe it is important that students learn to do this implicitly and in-person in the classroom. I avoid online-only discussions and often require teamwork and reflection on assignments.
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Scaffolding – Many people, including students, procrastinate until the last-minute. Rather than let students do this, I help them to break up larger projects into portions with forms, timelines and regular feedback from myself and peers to help model the process of long-term task and information management.
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Late Policy - I want students to benefit from learning opportunities regardless of grades. Assignments can only lose up to 50% of their grade value from lateness, that way a student can always go back to something they’ve missed to make it up. In the spirit of iterative learning I usually allow students to redo work that they’ve done poorly. They can’t achieve a maximum grade with a redo but I want to acknowledge the importance of persistence.
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Contagious and Reflexive Enthusiasm - Like many teachers I’m on my feet most of the time, walking around and engaging with students directly, redirecting and pointing out what I think is interesting about their work. I have the benefit of teaching topics I find fascinating which makes it possible for my excitement to spread to others. I try to solicit input and anticipate student needs to not just adapt the class to evolving needs and interests but also to implicitly state that I care—about them and the process. Combined with positive encouragement, this seems to help engagement for many.
