About

Welcome to the Graduate Education Development Institute (GEDI) at Virginia Tech.

This is the main website for Pedagogical Practices in Contemporary Contexts (Grad 5114), an interdisciplinary learning community exploring the theory and practice of teaching for today’s students in higher education.

We are an intentional community committed to developing a pedagogical praxis using inclusive pedagogy and problem-based learning to support active learning across a broad range of contemporary teaching sites.

We come from diverse disciplines, backgrounds, and orientations to consider how we might leverage the passion that drew us to our academic fields of inquiry to ignite the curiousity of our students.

As 21st-century educators we use a broad array of teaching technologies, and are especially attentive to the power of networked learning environments to amplify our work.

We are committed to the transformative potential of education and to using our compassion and expertise to make the world a better place.

Priorities for this semester:

  • Contribute to our learning community by actively engaging with the course materials and by collaborative, dialogic interaction with others.
  • Develop a critically-engaged, self-reflective teaching praxis that goes beyond content delivery.
  • Explore and evaluate tools, approaches and learning environments that support active co-learning in our own and other disciplines.
  • Develop a teaching philosophy, syllabus and problem-based learning project informed by one’s critically-engaged, self-reflective teaching praxis using the tools and environments best suited to amplify learning.

We welcome participation (i.e. comment and reflection) from visitors to the site.  If you have insight or experience to share, we would love to hear from you through the comments.

The guidelines for the course are contained in the syllabus and connecting to the course handouts.