teaching

So long 2021

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Thank goodness we have reached the end of 2021! I am taking a longer break than usual and looking forward to no Zoom meetings for a month.

The greatest accomplishment of the year was getting through 105+ days of lockdown and simultaneous schooling and working from home. The week that school returned on campus, I tweeted: I cannot overstate how much better my working week has been with my children back at school. I have managed complex tasks requiring concentration and uninterrupted thinking. Still catching up but the seven things on my list marked urgent are almost finished.

Despite the interruptions, there is much collective work to be proud of and I am fortunate to be part of an accomplished team (pictured below on Zoom). We made a fun video to celebrate the highlights of the year. These included: a Beginning to Teach professional development program, Spotlight on Practice interviews, iLearn (learning management system) drop-in clinic, Bite-sized Learning and Teaching podcast, supporting 23000 online exam sittings in second semester, and facilitating Zoom for Teaching workshops.

I am also proud of: the work of the Teaching and Leadership community of practice (I presented these slides summarising the CoP at the Council of Australasian University Leaders in Learning and Teaching (CAULLT) conference), co-leading the Contemporary Approaches to University Teaching MOOC with Marina Harvey, and publishing an autoethnographic journal article on parenting and promotion in Life Writing.

Outside of work, the pandemic made the world feel small. Walking in our local area helped.

A special shout-out to my father who facilitated weekly Zoom lessons for his grandchildren, individually crafted according to their interests: time, water, chess, The Great Depression, maps, left-handedness, food, money, computers, building a house, book publishing, inventions, family history, electricity, and colonisation among other topics.

Finally, no yearly wrap up would be complete without sharing some of my favourite books of the year: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom (a novel about a Ghanian American PhD candidate’s family), Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days (a novel about a pregnant teenage Korean Australian detained by her mother), Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (fictionalised account of gay Vietnamese American son writing to his mother), Sara Foster’s The Hush (dystopian fertility fiction), Lisa Fuller’s Ghost Bird (an Australian Aboriginal YA mystery novel by award winning Wuilli Wuilli author), and Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (oral history of Russian women in WW2).

So long 2021!

Edited to add: in my rush to farewell 2021, I forgot to share the news that the Slow Academic will have a new look next year thank you to the talented Fidel Fernando. I commissioned him to redesign the blog after the success of his artworks for the Over a Cuppa reflection series this year. Sadly he is leaving my team for a great opportunity at another university, but said farewell with this lovely image:

In a hurry

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This is the 13th post in Over a Cuppa, a series which offers prompts to reflect on learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa. Cross-posted from Teche, original artwork by Fidel Fernando.

Since mid-February, once a week (other than a fortnightly mid-session break) I have posted 300 or so words for Over a cuppa, a series of prompts to reflect on learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa.

The posts have been focussed on the practice of teaching, rather than students’ reflections for learning. My starting point was a belief that reflective practice is a learned skill, as outlined in Macquarie University’s Professional Learning and Capability Enhancement (PLaCE) Framework, which includes the following capabilities from Foundational to Expert levels:

  • Articulate the principles of, approaches to, and the values of, reflective practice.
  • Reflect on own teaching, learning support and/or curriculum/assessment design practices.
  • Explain actions taken in response to reflection on, and in, practice.
  • Engage in sustained reflection on own educational practices and critique actions taken in response.
  • Implement strategies to promote a culture that values reflective practice.
  • Develop and support the strategic and systematic embedding of reflexivity into educational practice.

I have read (or reread) several books, including Schön’s (1983) The Reflective Practitioner; hook’s (1994) Teaching to Transgress; Brookfield’s (2017) Becoming a critically reflective teacher; Carter’s (2020) Academic Identity and the Place of Stories, as well as numerous journal articles.

I also linked to an interview with Stephen Brookfield, poetry, a meditation, creative non-fiction and my favourite tools for reflective practice – the Teaching Perspectives Inventory, ImaginePhD and the AdvanceHE comprehensive scholarly practice guide.

For each post, my colleague Fidel Fernando created an original digital artwork. Here is a time lapse video of Fidel creating the image for this post:

https://echo360.org.au/media/019d8a01-4bdc-4a38-8434-ed6170ef15d8/public

The reading, writing and drawing that has contributed to these posts belies the fact that this was reflection in a hurry. My initial plans for the series went off-piste as my ‘writing along the way’ took me in unexpected directions, and some of the posts include aphorisms – Put on your teaching cloak, Don’t be the wizard behind the curtain – inspired by conversations with colleagues.

There is still a lot of reflection to be done and the series will continue at the end of July. I am looking forward to finishing Ashwin et al’s (2020) Reflective Teaching in Higher Education and posting about Mary Ryan’s work on reflexivity and Marina Harvey’s ecology of reflection.

In the meantime I want to catch up on some Slow Academic posts that have been sitting in my drafts folder for several months. Slow by name, and slow by nature.

Questioning

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This is the 11th post in Over a cuppa, a series which offers prompts to reflect on learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa. I have set myself the challenge of keeping these posts to 300 or so words. Cross-posted from Teche, original artwork by Fidel Fernando.

If I had to sum up reflection in one word I would say: questioning. Reflection treats teaching as an experimental learning process.

After (too much) thinking for one word, I discovered Reflective Teaching in Higher Education (2020) has questions as its table of contents. It opens: Who are we as teachers and who are our students? How can we develop the quality of our teaching? Then questions on spaces, curriculum, communication, inclusion… It ends: How do we develop a career-long fascination with teaching? How does reflective teaching contribute to society? I’ll let you know when my copy arrives! In the meantime, the website includes useful individual and group activities.

I am currently reading Sarah Krasnostein’s (2021) The Believer: Encounters with Love, Death & Faith, a work of narrative non-fiction that resists description. Krasnostein writes:

It is thinking—in the specific sense of an honest interior conversation that tries to distinguish between right and wrong, both factually and morally—that anchors the human world. Arendt speaks of the willingness to hold these inward interrogations as the disposition to live with oneself (p 45).

Bell hooks’ (1994) in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom offers the inward interrogations of reflection as a process of imagination:

Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process … Critical reflection on my experience as a student in unexciting classrooms enabled me not only to imagine that the classroom could be exciting but that this excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serious intellectual and/or academic engagement (p 7).

Initially I thought this post would ask ‘why reflect?’ but the process of writing it, and the books I am reading, made this seem like asking ‘why think?’ or ‘why imagine?’ How could we do otherwise?