Comment on Diversity by Nayara Faria

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Nayara Faria

Hi! I enjoyed your post! In my country many people racism does not exist, and thus, they refuse discussing the topic. Even though the Brazilian culture is composed by many different cultures and “races”, most people in the power are white males. In this sense, the common sense is that we are a diverse population and we do not need to do anything else to improve diversity in the universities. It is sad, but it is true!

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Comment on The Theoretical Impact of an Inclusive Classroom in Saudi Arabia by Nayara Faria

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Nayara Faria

Hi Khaled! I really enjoyed your post. It is interesting to think that something trivial for me like having both males and females in the same classroom is not a standard practice in other countries. It is nice that you see the importance of inclusive classrooms in your country! I wonder how girls feel when they first come to US to study and then for the first time in their life they have males in the classroom!

GEDI Post 5: Inclusive pedagogy, diversity and implicit bias

Posted on March 17, 2019 by Nayara Faria

Inclusive pedagogy deals with creating a supportive and inclusive classroom that ensures all students have equal access to learning, and both professor and student participate in this environment with mutual respect to differences among groups. Inclusive pedagogy is crucial to student’s learning because social identities of both student and teacher have a direct impact on the learning experience. Also, when students feel they socially belong to the academic community, they increase their probabilities of both academic success and well-being.

Creating an inclusive environment in the classroom, involves thinking about six main aspects of your teaching philosophy: content, pedagogy, assessment climate and power (check out more details about this topic in this link).

Content: What material have you chosen? In what ways is your curricular design accessible and relevant to your students? Are there any barriers to inclusion?
Pedagogy: How are you promoting student engagement in ways that are meaningful and relevant to students?
Assessment: How are you asking students to practice and perform what they’re learning? How can we diversify the ways that students demonstrate their growing proficiencies?
Climate: In what ways are you creating an atmosphere for learning that is accessible and meaningful for all?
Power: How can you craft a learning environment that empowers students and helps to bring attention to or disrupt traditional power dynamics between teacher and student and among students?

Besides these points, I believe it is crucial that we understand the difference between inclusion and diversity. This is important because: a) with inclusion we can be diverse; b) with diversity we might not be inclusive.

Just pay attention in the following images and you will understand what I am talking about:

Exclusion:

Segregation:

Integration:

Diversity:

By promoting an inclusive environment, we also can promote a diverse environment in our classroom. Diversity is important because it enhances creativity, encourages the consideration of alternatives even before any interpersonal interaction takes places and it leads to better decision making and problem solving. However, by promoting diversity in our environments, we are also subject to the pyramid of hate:

Source: https://darfurgeno.weebly.com/pyramid-of-hate.html

In this sense, it is crucial that we understand how our hidden brain works (see How 'The Hidden Brain' Does The Thinking For Us for more details) , because we are all subject to implicit bias towards some topics that might prevent us to promote a truly inclusive classroom.

But what is implicit bias?

According to the Ohio State University implicit bias, also known as implicit social cognition, refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.

I always thought of myself as being conscious, intentional and deliberate about my actions and behavior. I never thought I was a biased person regarding religion, sex or age. However, when I took an implicit association test, I got shocked! Look at my results:

Automatic preference for Judaism over Islam.
A moderate automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family.
A slight automatic preference for Young people over Old people.

I am only a MS student going for a Ph.D in the next semester. I do not have classroom experience to share regarding how I have been dealing with inclusion, diversity and implicit bias. After reading more these topics, I can say that I have become much humbler about my views and much less certain about myself.

How about you?

Have you taken the implicit association test? Did you get shocked with your results?
What have you done to promote inclusiveness in your classroom?
How do you deal with implicit bias?

Comment on Take your nose out of the grade book and behold wonder! by Nayara Faria

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Nayara Faria

Omg! I really enjoyed your blog post. You can invite me to go to the conference in the next year 🙂
You have an excellent point! I do not have much networking skills, but i have been trying to attend as many events as possible so that i can meet people outside my field. However, I do not see many graduate students from my major attending these events. In fact, many of them think it is a waste of time! This is insane indeed!
Before, I would miss some opportunities so that I could stay at home studying for exams. I can say that I am “physco” about my grades. However, since I have started grad school I have realized that networking and interacting with people will get me much further than only focusing on my grades. I have a lot to work on still, but i believe i am in the right way to change my mindset about the weight of grades in my life.

Comment on Qualitative Grading and its Bias by Nayara Faria

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Nayara Faria

I agree with the part that Alfie Kohn says that “the more students are led to focus on how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to be with what they’re doing”. In fact, i agree with you that our current system is broken. I had qualitative grades up to 5th. I remember that I was never worried about my performance, but in what i was learning instead. After 5th grade, i started focusing too much on my grades, and so, I wanted to learn for exams and not because i thought the subject was interesting. I like the idea of qualitative grades, but as you said, this is also a challenge that our current professors and teachers need to learn how to deal with!

Comment on Assessment by Nayara Faria

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Nayara Faria

I really enjoyed reading your post. I did not know that in Tunisia they rank students and give prizes just to the first and second students in the class! This is in a fact a grading drawback!
In Brazil, grades are not as important as in the US. Companies do not care if you have a 4.0 GPA or a 2.5GPA. All they care about is that you get your degree in a recognized school. In fact, I never had to disclosure my GPA to ANY company for an internship or full job process. We do not put this type of information in our CV. So, in school students do not care as much to get a perfect grade letter. Most of them just care about passing the class, and not getting the highest grade. A lot of times, a student who has a full time job and a 2.0GPA has more opportunities after graduation than a 4.0 GPA full time student. Companies in Brazil believe that experience is more important than GPA. This is not true for the USA though!

Human Factors view on attention and multitasking

Posted on February 10, 2019 by Nayara Faria

Many people see multitasking as a way of increasing efficiency in our daily life. However, multitasking is a thread of degrading performance. This is true specially in the classroom environment. In simple words, when multitasking we are executing two or more tasks that are not equally important: these are the primary and the secondary tasks.

Let's suppose a common example in the classroom environment:

Primary Task: Main task a person is concentrating on: paying attention on a lecture and taking notes
Secondary Task: Distraction task which has to be executed in parallel: using the cellphone to text

Perfect execution of two parallel tasks is possible but requires learning and depends on several context factors. Usually, automatic tasks that require no attention can have a good time sharing with more difficult tasks. However, being in a classroom involves controlled tasks that require attention. These type of tasks are considered hard and require more attention and cognitive resources. Learning a new subject , taking notes, paying attention to a conversation and texting back are controlled tasks take can not be automate even with practice.

In fact, these tasks are considered in nature and therefore, they are harder to execute in parallel than more distinct ones. When tasks are similar, they compete for same abstract cognitive resources. As humans, we have a fixed pool of available resources. In this way, conflicts between tasks occur when more resources are concurrently requested than available. We do not allocate resources evenly between tasks. If a conversation is more interesting than a task, more cognitive resources will be allocated to this task. In this way, a perfect time-sharing is not possible.

Additionally, most dual tasks require enormous “mental effort”. For instance, if you are trying to learn a difficult subject in class but at the same time you are engaged in a controversial subject with your friends using your cellphone, both tasks require enormous resources. If tasks requirements are greater than your available resources, you start experiencing mental workload. Yes! You can get more exhausted in class by using your cellphone!

What are your thoughts on using cellphones in the classroom vs attention and multitasking?

Comment on VR learning for Generation Z by Nayara Faria

Posted on February 6, 2019 by Nayara Faria

Hi! I am new to this VR and AR world. I did not know anything about it before last year. I agree with your point that students are not interested in showing up to lectures, make notes and them memorize for exams. In my experience as a TA, these were the complains that I heard the most! However, I believe we have a huge challenge in front of us! We need a new generation of professors that believe in learning as an immersive and engaging experience. We need to break paradigms of the traditional learning method. Also we need to make sure that the technologies of the new learning era are available to all!

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Ten years challenge: How did my learning process changed?

Posted on February 3, 2019 by Nayara Faria

If you are a social media user, you have noticed that in the last weeks many people are posting then-and-now profile pictures: the ten years challenge. Even though many might believe that this is a movement created by Facebook to train their facial recognition algorithm, I think it is a nice opportunity for me to reflect what changed in my learning process in the last ten years.

Before College...

I got my first computer in 2011 in my first semester in college. Up to that time, learning for me was basically an offline process. In my high school, we did not have PowerPoint classes. If we were lucky, maybe in one of our classes the professor could show some pictures in this old projector. It was the closest thing from PowerPoint that we had:

Old Projector

Because we did not have PowerPoint classes, some professors did an effort to give us some handouts so that we did not have to copy too much from the black board. However, the handouts were not photocopied. Who does remember this machine?

What is the name of this machine?

We did not have books for every class. Even the classes we had books, most of them were borrowed from our school. Therefore, we needed to copy in our notebooks most of the subject taught in class.

Some part of our grade was based in our notebook. We did not have smartphones to take pictures from the board that we would never look back. In fact, we had to practice handwriting a lot. At some extend I believe that this process made me a better writer and I could learn a lot of the subject because I needed to read it while writing. Last semester at Virginia Tech I remember one of my classmates complaining to the professor that we should have extra time in the exams, because handwriting was a slow process, and everybody was used to write using their computers.

Schools did not have electronic resources

Project Cover: written by hand

I had more opportunities for "hands- on" learning. This is an example of a biology homework we used to do at school.

Example of a biology homework

Do not get me wrong! We had internet on 2011. However, not everybody had easy access to the internet and the school did not have computers in the classroom. I remember we had to be really creative for presenting projects. Nowadays, I am used to do a nice PowerPoint presentation for any type of project presentation. Not too long ago, we used to create songs, dance, perform or find new creative ways to present something.

The most common way of presenting projects besides PowerPoints

I have made so many cardboard TV's to present project's and homework:

Cardboard TV example

This book collection was my google up to year 2010 or so:

Barsa Collection

In college ...

When I went to college, everything drastically changed. I went to a good private school and so, they had many resources that I was not used to. It took me a while to get used to the "PowerPoint class idea". Even though my whole life I was exposed to the traditional lecture-oriented classroom, the lack of technologies made us to find creative ways to engage students. In college, learning became quite boring. The creative ways were always based on "showing videos" or "PowerPoint presentations". I had to learn basic rules to write academic documents. I did not even know what a citation was. It was a difficult change and I had to start taking computer classes and start learning more about the idea behind computer programming. However, not everything was more difficult. Doing homework and projects became an easier process. Google came to save my time looking for references. However, I feel that I learnt more how to Ctrl+c and Ctrl+V. Because I did not have to handwrite anything, I could only scan read most of my references. In fact, with less time, I had more information (But, do students really read the references? ).

Exchange Program ...

Comment on Week 2 / Networked Learning — Critique of “What Baby George Taught Me About Learning” by Nayara Faria

Posted on January 30, 2019 by Nayara Faria

Hi. I do not completely agree with you when you say that ” all the technical classes require some degree of knowledge before the students can begin adding novelty to their field of study — hence “dumping information” proves to be effective in most of the cases”. I believe that we all have different learning styles, and therefore, dumping information might not be effective for many of us. In my case, I am good at memorizing dumped information for exams, but does it mean that I am actually learning something? I wish that we had different classroom options to learn the same subject because we all learn differently from each other.

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