Peeragogy & a New Culture of Learning (2)
The more I explicitly gave some of my teacher-power to learners and asked them to take more responsibility for their learning, the more it seemed to work. Somewhere around the third or fourth course cohort, the magic started to happen. I remember that during one of my earliest versions of my social media issues course at Berkeley, a student started a forum thread about "do you use Napster, and is it stealing?" and within a couple of days the thread had grown to hundreds of responses. I had not yet started using the term co-learning, but we started feeling like a community. When students get excited about discussing curriculum-related issues between class meetings, or bring them up even before class begins, I figured we were going in the right direction. It wasn't clear at first which variables mattered, so I started actively examining which factors contributed to that community feeling.
My classes were always three hours long, once a week. Three hours is a long time (we took a 15 minute break in the middle)! I asked students not only to collaborate by working together on projects, but to learn cooperatively by learning enough about each other's interests to help each other along with interesting references or discussions. That kind of community requires that everyone in the cohort get to know everyone else by name, and grow to know what some of the other students are interested in -- which means that 30 is about the highest number of students that this can work with.
The pace of cooperative learning visibly started to pick up when I stopped asking students to provide oral reports on texts and started asking 3-person teams to take responsibility for one of the three hours of class. I told them that they were not responsible for conveying the entire week's syllabus, but should use a combination of mini-lecture, discussion, and activities to engage everyone in what they, the co-teaching team felt were the two or three most important points of that week's texts. In regard to activities, as different teams tried different things from year to year, we developed a recipe book that gave new teams an idea of what was possible.
Recognizing that the co-teaching experiment was bringing the learning process to life, I started the co-teaching on the first day of class. I wrote on the whiteboard at intervals words that characterized each week's theme: "Community," "Identity," "Public Sphere," etc. I asked the students to cluster around the word that most engaged them and to self-organize so each word attracted three, no more and no less. Then I asked them to spend ten minutes talking about what most concerned them about their theme in the context of our overarching theme of social media issues or social media literacies. Each team took a minute to report out bullet points from their ten minute conversation. Then I told each team that they would be the co-teaching team for that theme. We brainstormed ideas in private forum threads, the teams submitted a written plan two weeks before their session, and we met in person during my office hours a week before their session. They often came up with experiments that sometimes misfired and sometimes ignited real excitement. When we talked about identity, for example, the co-teaching team asked the rest of us to pull a piece of paper from a hat. Each one of us was assigned a username and a brief back-story: "14 year old gamer boy," "30 year old woman," etc., and we used AOL Instant Messaging with the handles they created for us; at the same time, we chatted online while co-present, discussing the material for that week and simultaneously tried to act in the character we assigned. Then we were asked to guess who was who. Another co-teaching team created a replica of our classroom in Second Life and led discussion and made presentations in character as avatars, projected onto a screen in the classroom while they were located in a different room.
Another co-discovery that became part of the recipe for community-building had to do with the seating arrangements. I asked for classrooms that had movable chairs. When the first class session was scheduled to start, I stood to one side of the room and greeted students and asked their names when they walked in. I said nothing about what to do. Of course, they always picked up the chairs from where they were stacked and arranged them. And of course they always arranged them in rows and columns. I pointed out the ways power can be inscribed in physical architecture or software interfaces -- such as a room in which the subordinates sit quietly in rows while the leader stands and talks. So we moved the chairs in a circle. On the third class meeting, I let the students make any arrangement they wanted. Sometimes it was a circle. It was never again rows and columns. One co-teaching team broke out the tables and arranged four chairs around each one and arranged the tables into a square.
My initial reticence and outright fear of revealing that I was making some of it up as I went along was replaced with a reassuring knowledge that although I wasn't sure about how to go about arranging it, sometimes the magic did happen -- something more than even a well-run conventional class. A co-learning community. Now I could frame our endeavor by saying that I could not on my own guarantee that it would happen, but that I know that last year's cohort made it happen, and the year before that. I read a book called "Leadership Jazz" years ago. All I remember from it now is what I recall as the first line: "The first duty of a leader is to define reality." By defining our reality in terms of the possibility of conjuring up a special and rewarding collective, cooperative learning experience, I gave them permission to travel outside their comfort zones...as I had done. Again through trial and error, I found that if we could arrange a lunch or dinner together, on campus or off-campus, early in the term, we multiplied our chances of growing a learning community: in 2009, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone came to our Berkeley class and we all went out for pizza together afterward. The feeling of community was perceptibly stronger after that..
By this time, learning on the job, I became aware of the pedagogies of Paolo Freire, Reggio Emilia, John Dewey and realized that I was stumbling on my own into ways of teaching and learning that these educators had explored systematically for decades. Out of sheer ignorance of this tradition, I had inadvertently, then increasingly consciously, let students in on the process of planning their education. Social media afforded a cooperative pedagogy that extended outside classroom meeting hours. But it was the gaining of learning agency by students, the privileging of inquiries that mattered to the students, the knowing when to shut up and let students discover through discourse and inquiry what I could have told them, that mattered. Some of it could be (and was) done with white boards, sticky notes, 3 X 5 cards. Digital media helped, but it could not, by itself, automatically trigger the coalescence of a learning community. Then I found a book that brought this student-centric pedagogy into focus, particularly in light of digital media and networks:
A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown emphasizes learning now can be:
Learner centered
Self-directed
Social and peer-to-peer
Inquiry-based
Collaborative
Cooperative
Networked
Which, come to think of it, characterized the best outcomes of my ten years of experimentation. I was also learning what each medium could best be deployed to accomplish pedagogically. I was influenced by Phil Agre's really ancient (1999!) piece on "Find Your Voice: Writing for a Webzine." What Agre called "webzine" morphed into the golden age of blogging, which overlapped with my teaching years. The Social Media Classroom enabled each student to have a blog, which the rest of us could read, link to, and comment on -- and students could decide individually whether they wanted to change a preference and make their blog posts readable by the world outside our course cohort. An audience is for the few who broadcast to the many, who very rarely have an opportunity to talk back to their star, but a public in many-to-many media can link to you, write a blog post praising or disputing you, comment on you, join you in online or face to face collective action. For our discourse about social media issues and social media literacies, the blogs represented a kind of model individual public voice -- instead of writing for the teacher, each of us wrote for each of the rest of us, and engaged each other with links, comments, follow-up posts. Although it was somewhat public, the voice of blogs was wholly that of the students. A personal, individual public voice of the kind Agre wrote about. The forum functioned as the voice of the group. Sometimes, when everyone in the room is engaged in conversation about an issue raised by a text, the bell rings and it is time to suspend the conversation for (in our case) a week. Co-teaching teams were asked to pick up those conversation threads that seemed to be going some place face-to-face and transplant them to the forums. (I wrote a post about why and how to use forums a few months ago.) Then there was collaborative writing, which was shockingly new when we did it with wikis, and much less novel -- but nonetheless often daunting -- when we started using Google Docs. What was shocking to students was not the new medium so much as the challenge of changing each other's words to make them better.
After teaching students face-to-face for enough years to feel like I knew what I was doing, I decided to push the experiment of student empowerment and teaching outside pedagogical traditions to the next level by teaching my own courses online. I used the same Social Media Classroom I used with Berkeley and Stanford students. I didn't want to duplicate work I had already done, so I created new courses: "Introduction to Mind Amplifiers," "Introduction to Cooperation Theory," and "Think-Know Tools." I'll talk about my experience with online co-learning communities in the next episode of this series.