Hosted by IATL and funded by WIHEA, International Visiting Teaching Fellows Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel will deliver a series of events throughout late October and early November as detailed below.

Critical Digital Pedagogy: a Public Lecture (details below)
[If you have problems viewing this video in Google Chrome, please try a different web browser]

Programme of events

Workshop: Student Agency in Digital Spaces

Friday 20 October 2017 | 12:30-14:30 | free lunch | Teaching Grid

A workshop for undergraduates and postgraduate students on students as active partners in hybrid spaces. This discussion-based workshop will examine what “agency” is from a critical pedagogy perspective, and we’ll discuss the role students play, and the role they expect or hope instructors will play, in digitally-mediated learning environments. We’ll consider the concept of “community as curriculum” and the notion that student contributions in class are a “text” for any given module. We’ll also explore how students integrate their personal digital lives with digital life on campus and in class. Lunch will be provided.

Workshop: Innovative Approaches to Assessment in Digital and Hybrid Pedagogies

Tuesday 24 October 2017 | 12:30-14:30 | free lunch | Teaching Grid

A workshop on assessment and hybrid pedagogy, that may be of particular interest to anyone taking the Academic and Professional Pathway programmes. Workshops will be mapped onto the UK Professional Standards Framework. Lunch will be provided.

Much of our work in education resists being formulated as neat and tidy outcomes. When learning is the goal, space should be left for wonder and experimentation. This two hour workshop will explore methods and approaches for designing assignments and assessments that leverage digital tools and innovative pedagogies. We’ll consider examples together and reimagine and/or refine our pedagogical approaches. In addition to crafting, collaborating, and experimenting together as a group, we will get experience with a variety of new tools. We will also talk about when and how to assess digital and other non-traditional student projects.

Workshop: Critical Instructional Design

Friday 27 October 2017 | 9:30-14:00 | free lunch | Teaching Grid

A workshop for staff on critical instructional design, an approach to course and learning design that investigates ways to design for social justice, student agency, and equity. Lunch will be provided.

Critical instructional design is an approach to course, assignment, and assessment design that privileges student agency, inquiry, and emergence. Although critical instructional design deals primarily with online and hybrid learning spaces, its practice is appropriate for on-ground classroom teaching as well, especially where technology and digital learning may intersect with traditional learning. A critical instructional designer (also called instructional technologist, educational technologist, or curricular technologist) not only assists with or manages the design of learning and teaching in a learning or content management system, but also considers the pedagogical practices most effective at encouraging student agency. In this workshop, we will explore new ways of designing online and hybrid courses, assignments, and assessments that support critical digital pedagogy, often in spite of the limitations or expectations of the technological platforms we use or must use.

Critical Digital Pedagogy: a Public Lecture

Tuesday 31 October 2017 | 13:00-14:00 | OC1.01, The Oculus

A public conversation about the future of edtech/hybrid pedagogies, with digital pedagogue Jesse Stommel, moderated by IATL Director Dr Nicholas Monk.

Digital pedagogy is not equivalent to teachers using digital tools. Rather, digital pedagogy demands that we think critically about our tools, demands that we reflect actively upon our own practice. In the 1915 book Schools of To-Morrow, John Dewey wrote: “Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing.” The less we understand our tools, the more we are beholden to them. The more we imagine our tools as transparent or invisible, the less able we are to take ownership of them. Some tools are decidedly less innocuous than others. And some tools can never be hacked to good use. Plagiarism detection software can’t ensure that students will not cheat. The LMS can’t ensure that students will learn. Both will, however, ensure that students feel more thoroughly policed. Both will ensure that students (and teachers) are more compliant.

Roundtable: Resisting Turnitin - an ethical debate

Wednesday 1 November 2017 | 9:30-11:30 | Teaching Grid (Collaboration Area)

A funny thing happened on the way to academic integrity. Plagiarism detection software (PDS), has seized control of student intellectual property. While students are discouraged from copying other work, PDS companies can strip, mine, and sell student work for profit. The success of this method relies upon the uncritical adoption of their platforms by schools and universities. All institutions that, in theory, have critical thinking as a core value in their educational missions, and yet are complicit in the abuse of students by these corporations.

Every day, we participate in a digital culture owned and operated by others — designers, engineers, technologists, CEOs — who have come to understand how easily they can harvest our intellectual property, data, and the minute details of our lives. To resist this (or even to more consciously participate in it), we need skills that allow us to “read” our world (in the Freirean sense) and to act with agency. Facilitated by Amber Thomas.

Background reading

Digital Pedagogy Lab Warwick

Friday 3 November 2017 | 10:00-17:00 | free lunch | Teaching Grid

A one-day intensive focused on Critical Digital Pedagogy. Faculty and other educators will practice hands-on solutions for the common challenges teachers and learners face when working digitally. However, this will not be simply a day-long tutorial. Instead, Digital Pedagogy Lab Warwick will ground itself in philosophical and theoretical discussions of digital technology, identity, and pedagogy. Participants will do shared reading leading up to the day and will come away with ideas for how to put the work of the day into practice. Lunch will be provided.

Digital Pedagogy Lab offers professional development opportunities that prepare learners, educators, librarians, and administrators to teach, collaborate, and think with digital technology. In addition to free and open online courses, Jesse and Sean have held Institutes at sites around the world including University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Delaware, American University in Cairo, University of Dayton, and University of Prince Edward Island. Our annual 5-day Institute is currently being held each year at University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Digital Pedagogy Lab supports a community of learners and teachers to inspire educational approaches based on pedagogies, policies, and critical practices that support agency, creativity, and inquiry.

Recommended Reading:
Howard Rheingold, Mobile Media and Political Collective Action
Audrey Watters, The Web We Need to Give Students
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Chapter 2
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Chapter 1
Seymour Papert, The Children’s Machine: Chapter 4

Guest Speaker: Pat Lockley (@pgogy) is an academic technologist. His company, Pgogy Webstuff bills itself as an academic outfitter—the goal is to get as close to a custom product as he can. He is a problem solver, with a terrier like persistance crossed with a desire to entertain. Part code, part pedagogy, all singing, all dancing with some knowledge of openness and sharing and usually how to get things done.

When

During the period Friday 20 October to Friday 3 November 2017

Where

Teaching Grid and OC1.01, The Oculus, University of Warwick