Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone’s knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
-John Dewey
I have found myself slowly transforming from a teacher to an anti-teacher, developing methods that subvert the traditional lecture format and trying to create a learning environment more conducive to asking good questions. I eventually came to the conclusion that “teaching” is a hindrance to learning. The word, “teacher” in itself suggests that learning requires teaching. In fact, the best learning almost always occurs in the absence of a teacher, for it is then that students are free to pursue with great passion the questions that are meaningful and relevant to their own lives.
-Michael Wesch
Other than a single instance as a guest lecturer for a graduate education course while I was in law school, I came to the professoriate with no prior teaching experience. In my first semester as a professor, I was the guy who spoke to PowerPoint slides riddled with bullet points and who mixed in the occasional discussion and small-group activity. I was guided and incredibly inspired by great educational thinkers and writers in the progressivist tradition, beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, and more recently by the likes of Alfie Kohn. The first quote above really resonated with me as an overriding objective for my teaching.
Since then, I have grown dramatically as a teacher. I still believe in Dewey’s words, but I have become more of what Dr. Michael Wesch calls the “anti-teacher.” That is, I try not to let my teaching get in the way of learning; I simply try to create the best possible environment (both face-to-face and online) for learning.
I believe anti-teaching stance is easily reconciled with my growing understanding of the nature of knowledge and learning.
A range of critiques can be brought to bear on a system of schooling (P-20) that assumes learning as individualized and that punishes and rewards students for their ability to construct knowledge on their own. One such critique is the contention that advances in technology render obsolete any theory of learning that involves the individual construction of knowledge. Specifically, “[u]biquitous learning is a new educational paradigm made possible in part by the affordances of digital media” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2007, p. 1). Furthermore, contemporary forms of computer-mediated communications and related networking technologies change the nature of learning by enabling social constructions of knowledge.
Imagine two people editing and reediting a Wikipedia article, articulating their differences on the article’s discussion page. They edge toward an article acceptable to both of them through a public negotiation of knowledge and come to a resolution. Yet the page they’ve negotiated may not represent either person’s point of view precisely. The knowing happened not in either one’s brain but in their conversation. The knowledge exists between the contributors. It is knowledge that has no knower. Social knowing changes who does the knowing and how, more than it changes the what of knowledge (Weinberger, 2007, p.134).
Weinberger’s example of Wikipedia is the ultimate representation of this collision of technology-enabled networked learning; i.e. Wikipedia represents an instance of social knowledge (i.e. it is an attempt to capture, as public knowledge, what can be observed via the interactions of numerous instances of private knowledge) facilitated by a simple technology (the wiki).
Cormier (2008) takes this a step further in the form of rhizomatic education. The rhizome is offered as a metaphor for knowledge.
the…rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat. In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises (Cormier, 2008, para. 3).
Thus, with the nature of knowledge changing from individually to socially constructed, and with the emergence of social media technologies, a new theory of learning must be enacted. Siemens (2005) offers “connectivism” as a learning theory that moves away from objective-based learning and that accounts for the networked learning opportunities afforded by the digital age. Undergirding connectivism is a view of learning as “a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual.”
Thus, my teaching is increasingly focused on the following question: What if, as professors of education, we embraced networking technologies and considered our students as semi-independent nodes?