Author: Dan Li

Connecting Dots in the Big Picture

This week’s reading and videos make me think of the meaning of school and education. After we talked about so much about different styles, different thinking ways, different ideas of teaching in this pedagogy class, I feel I learned a lot before this week’s talk hits me. I suddenly realize that I am too into all the details and forget about the whole picture. The whole picture about why do we teach, why are we so passionate about education, why are we so into different aspects of pedagogy. The answer is about the future. We want to change the future of the world through education. This is the mindset we always want to have when we pick up the details about teaching and connecting them together.

Picture Source: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/how-to-unleash-your-creativity

There is another fundamental thing we need to figure out here. What kind of results do we expect from our teaching? Before we start to plan a course and put the pedagogy we learned in this course, we need to think about the learning outcomes we expect. For teaching landscape architecture, I expect to help my students gain more creativity. “Creativity” starts to sound old, since we seem to talk about it a lot. However, as future designers, my students are expected to create the landscape for an empty land. They are expected to solve the design problems in creative ways. I don’t expect them to remember all the knowledge we talk in class, but I do expect them to change their thinking ways and offer more possibilities for the future clients and the future world. Creativity will always be my ultimate goal when I set up a course and think about pedagogy.

Achieving Diversity without Doing a Disservice

Inclusive pedagogy is a comprehensive topic. To discuss it, we need to fully understand diversity issues first.

I took the course, Diversity and Inclusion for a Global Society, last semester with Dean DePauw. The course talks about diversity issues from different aspects. I learned a lot from that course, I do suggest anyone who would like to learn more about diversity and inclusion can think about taking that course.

The most important lessons I learned from the course is that we always thinking about diversity issues as big, obvious aggressions, but microaggressions in daily life are more urgent for us to realize and solve. I recommend a short video from YouTube for microaggressions, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDd3bzA7450.

The video used a metaphor that comparing microaggressions to mosquito bites to emphasize how microaggressions hurt people in daily life. Sometimes, even if people think they are so nice to say something can hurt others in different ways.

 

 

Three “Wow”s about Finding My Teaching Voice

When I tried to discover my authentic teaching self, I went through three “wow” moments.

Wow, panic is a common thing. That was the first feeling I went through when I was discovering my teaching voice. When I started to try to picture myself teaching, and search for a suitable and strong teaching image, I felt so embarrassed and panic that I couldn’t really see one, which got me into an even worse situation. I kept this secret to myself at first, I tried to think over and over again, and I still didn’t get an answer or come up with a good model. Then I finally decided to open up to people around me about this, I found I was not the one wondering about their teaching image. Just like if you get a new pair of glasses, you start to pay attention to glasses on the road. Suddenly, I saw the same problem everyway, even in the TV shows. In How I Met Your Mother, the main character Ted Mosby got hired to be a professor at university, he went through a change from an architect to a professor of architecture. He was so panic that he even forgot if there was one or two “F” s in the word professor when he would like to write down his self-introduction.

Source: https://www.pinterest.com/courtnysauer/how-i-met-your-mother/

Wow, role model is important. That was the second feeling I found out about the searching journey. When I tried to anchor myself, I started to think about all the great professors I had courses with before, their teaching voice, their personality, their ways to connect with students. At one level, I noticed that I always talked about the professors’ teaching style with my friends, and always assumed that if I was teaching, I would like to be like them or make improvements. I heard so many other students talk like that too. For example, when I posted about pink time inspired by Dan Pink, I noticed that some comments said that they would like to try so. That is an important kind of imitating and learning, just like the basic one human species did million years ago. At another level, I felt that my teaching voice at this point is still adjusting, so it is always changed according to different professors’ influences. Role model is important to this standard since our teaching, like our lives, are influenced by different people we run into, different incidents happen, different path we choose every day.

Wow, acting can’t last long in teaching. That was the third thing I realized along the searching way. Going back to Ted Mosby, he set himself up as a teaching image too far away from his own personality, all the weird and awkward acting only leaded to those moments made him lose sight of who he was for a second. I felt the same, if we want to follow up a teaching role model that is too different from our true self, acting can’t last long.

Source: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/15-relationship-lessons-that-ted-mosby-taught.html

Thus, my teaching style and approach so far are as followings. First, I accept myself as a learner when it comes to teach, so I would not be too panic once I feel I am still searching for my style. I would be always trying new activities and approaches to get the feedback from students and adjust more. Second, I gain new knowledge and new teaching images from my professors every day, I always associate their teaching with their personality to see how they fit themselves into teaching, and discover how different people teach differently. Third, I try to keep the true me when I teach, since I recognize myself as kind, energetic, genuine, creative, but I also like to live up to perfection. So I would teach in an energetic and genuine style, filling with creative activities. I would lay down detailed rules about the class and the assignments, and grade students in a strict way focusing on their learning process and learning effort.

Brain Puzzle and Unspeakable Intension : On-line Course Learning

When digital learning and social media usage become new trends in higher education, we start to hear so many good things about digital learning, and we begin to get showed by “Big Data” about how powerful social media is. People start to use digital learning on line to deal with long distance. On-line courses are offered more and more frequently to give both teachers and students time and location flexibilities.

However, according to my personal experiences, on-line courses are not always so effective. I took two on-line courses among my two-year PhD study here. Both of them are offered by great teachers, and they both prepared a lot judging from what they offered on line. The way these two courses have been taught in is similar. Teachers offered video lectures on line with the slides and their voices, they assigned a lot of readings according to different topics, and they set up a weekly due day for the assignments.

But I went through so much trouble when I tried to learn from on-line courses. First, I find it is difficult to gain a clear knowledge structure or thought process after I watched the lecture videos. It was usually the case that I tried so hard to follow the content on each slide, but I couldn’t get a big picture after I watched the whole thing. I agree with Robert Talbert, “modeling thought processes” and “sharing cognitive structures” are two important things in-person lectures offered, which are hard to describe or pursue in the video lecture.

Second, it is hard to make deep impression of knowledge and create engagement using video lecture and discussion section. Lack of context and stories, video lectures can be kind of boring compared to in-person lectures. And the engagement of students dropped a lot when we can’t talk immediately face to face. Using the discussion section seems like a solution to the communication problem, but the talk lack of tone and expression tend to lose some of the original meanings.

Third, it is always unspeakable intension in the on-line course. Since the teachers would like to make sure students put enough effort to the courses, they give more readings and assignments to students comparing to in-person courses. The due time is very strict that students always need to submit a lot of materials at the same time every week. So that due time, that day every week suddenly become nightmares. At least for me, nervousness was always there since I took the due time and assignments as the only chances to prove that I learnt. Even after the submission, new kind of intension began because of the grading, and sometimes an unexpected low score came out and limited reasons would be offered on line. That would be so different if students could talk to teachers to see what happened and what could be improved.

Picture Source: https://meduza.io/feature/2016/05/02/net-tolko-ne-eto-ni-za-chto

In general, I feel that the knowledge gained from the video lectures is like being fed by a puzzle piece of other people’s brain set, which would make you so confusing and nauseous even if you try so hard to swallow it. And the communication difficulty and higher expectation of yourself always make you nervous and shaking, and did worse in on-line courses.

In addition, some students around me also hold weird thoughts that if you choose on-line courses, you are trying to take the easy cut to get credits. I would say that is not the case at all.

Call me old fashion, but I will say do not throw away the in-person lectures. New media can be used in the classroom to help with the in-person lectures, I think that should be a better solution to bring in the benefits of social medias and digital learning. Creative lectures, activities and interactions should always be the core of the course, I call that my “teaching innovation statement”.

 

References

Jean Lacoste. “Jean Lacoste’s Teaching Innovation Statement”. Retrieved from https://canvas.vt.edu/files/2741612/download?download_frd=1

Robert Talbert. (2012). “Four things lecture is good for”.  Retrieved from http://www.chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/02/13/four-things-lecture-is-good-for/

FedEx Day – A Real Pink Time Experience

When we started to talk about the next topic “Assessment” in class, we watched video, called “Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, created by Dan Pink. The unique last name “Pink” suddenly caught my attention, related to his lecture’s topic, I finally realized a interesting fact that my past experience about a special class activity, called “Pink time”, in my research methodology class, should have something to do with this person. After I watched his video of TED talk, “The puzzle of motivation”, I was pretty sure that my special class activity came from his thoughts. So I decided to share a real Pink Time experience.

Picture source: https://www.pinterest.com/explore/achieving-goals/

Pink Time activity I went through came from a research methodology course taught by Dr. David Kniola from Educational research and evaluation program, VT. He told everyone at the first day of class that he would have a Pink Time this semester. Everyone would get the same week off to do anything they would like to do, he called it “Pink Time”. The only rule was people need to share about what they did and what they learnt from that one week later. The surprising part came next that he announced that students didn’t need to worry about the score part, since the score would be self-judgement, that students should just told he how much points they would like to give to themselves out of 10 full points, and the reason of the certain self-judgement.

This should take off the pressure since the assessment of the assignment was always the focus of a lot of students. However, that wasn’t the case. People were panic after he explained this Pink Time activity. I still remember the the most common question that day, “You mean anything can be done in that Pink Time? Anything? Do we need to do something related to research or methodology?” He smiled and said, “Anything. There is no limitation.” Actually, at that time, I was a little bit confused too.

It took me weeks to finally decide that I would like to do interior design for my new apartment I would move in soon. That was something I always want to do and I didn’t really have time to actually do it. After I made the decision, I was very excited about it, I took the week he gave us to view examples of different designers, research on how human use spaces, figure out my needs of the functions, and analyze my new place. I even spent all my spare time that week to finish my design drawings.

At the sharing week, I brought my hand drawings of design, and intention pictures to share with the class, and I was so confident and happy to talk about my design, and the knowledge I learnt about interior design and furniture arrangements. That was the same case for most of the other students, especially the ones did something creative and unique. What impressed me the most was a student showing how he tried to make his own wine. And at the end of that semester, he actually brought the wine he made at the Pink Time to share with everyone. I also actually carried out my Pink Time design at my new place after I moved in at the summer break.

I felt so inspired and cheered by Pink Time. Just as Dan Pink said in the TED talk, it was a FeDex Day that we knew we had to deliver something over certain time. At the same time, we tend to achieve more under self-direction. I was so engaged in the Pink Time that I forgot I was in the middle of a special assignment. Here, I really want to thank Dr. Kniola to give me the chance to discover the fun of self-direction and creativity.

Dr. Kniola didn’t show us the talk from Dan Pink right away when he announced the Pink Time. I guess he didn’t want the purposeful talk form Dan Pink influence us when we carried out Pink Time. He would like to see the real situation if that fitted into Dan’s theory.

I think it was a successful experiment. Now, after I read and watched Dan’s talk, I start to look back at the Pink Time, and think more. First, it was sad that us, students were panic and confused when we got autonomy of our time. The doubt of what could we do was the result of the mind set trained by modern education. We always wait for instructions when we are carrying out the mission of learning. We always know there are a lot of limitations, and we tend to think less, especially about what we want to do and what we can do.  Second, Pink Time was a good activity to test “autonomy, mastery, purpose” in educational settings, I think when I start to teach on my own, I would like to carry out Pink Time with my students. I would like to help them see the value of self-direction and the potential of themselves.

Go Back to the Original Intention of Learning

Everybody must have the doubt more or less as why do we live. It is kind of ironic that we tend to think more about it when we are sad, when we are down at the bottom of our life. When things go so smoothly that we just go with the life and hardly think about the meaning of life. I think that it is the same with the question why do we learn. It is usually when the teaching and learning failed, we will stop, take a look at the path we have been on, and think about the significance of learning. Michael Wesch (2008) said that “the most significant problem with education today is the problem of significance itself.” (p.5) I think that is a good point that need to be address and thought by all the students and teachers in education, especially higher education.

When we come to the phase of higher education, learning sometimes become a machine of routine. We have accomplished our K-12, we go through the exams, we finally come to the stage where we should get higher education. But we often lose the reason and the meaning of learning on our way here. Day after day, we are sitting in classes, accepting the “knowledge” from teachers, and accomplishing assignments before due days. We are doing a mindless learning if we don’t keep think about the big picture. Sometimes life and learning are too hard, we are just too into a piece of it, and forget to seek the significance. However, the danger of mindless learning is that we might realize that we waste too much time on meaningless stuff one day, and it is too late to make up to it. We don’t want that to happen, then we need to conduct mindful learning.

But how to do mindful learning? We need to seek of the meaning of learning and remember that all the time. Going back to the original intention of learning could be a way to remind ourselves the significance of learning. Why human started learning? I think we do it for seeking a better way of living for ourselves and for our society in rude times. So “the value of uncertainly” (Langer, 2000, p. 15) should be an important part in our learning when we try to find a way to the future. Doubts about the learning and knowledge should be valued and encouraged. I think doubts are the root of thinking and creating. When we are trying to do mindful learning, the first thing we need to remember the original intention of learning, thus, we can remind ourselves the significance of learning. The second thing we need to keep in mind is that we need to have doubts and raise questions about learning.

 

Reference

Langer, E. J. (2000). Mindful learning. Current directions in psychological science, 9(6), 220-223.

Wesch, M. (2008). Anti-teaching: Confronting the crisis of significance. Education Canada, 48(2), 4-7.