A Teaching Philosophy Statement for a Critical Digital Pedagogy
This post is intended for a general audience, but also aims to fulfill an assessment task in my postgraduate professional development studies at Charles Sturt University. For info on the task, see here.
As a general philosophy, I aim to anchor my teaching practice in the field of critical digital pedagogy. I draw this philosophy primarily from the well-clicked (as opposed to well-thumbed) pages of the open peer-review journal Hybrid Pedagogy. There, Jesse Stommel writes that:
Critical digital pedagogy
- centers its practice on community and collaboration;
- must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication and collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries;
- will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather together a cacophony of voices;
- must have use and application outside traditional institutions of education.
Hybrid Pedagogy is an unusual journal in many ways. The journal itself sets an example of what critical digital pedagogy can be. It does this through fluid and unceasing conversation between and within articles, reviewers, contributors, and those beyond the academy. It has created an unconventional but functional referencing style that “forego[es] traditional citation methods in favor of more dynamic digital media citation practices”. Those citation practices rely primarily on hypertext — a digital-native (though not digital-original) innovation that Belinda Barnet has described as “Written or pictorial material interconnected in an associative fashion, consisting of units of information retrieved by automated links, best read at a screen.”
At this point, you may ask why I am writing about hypertext in a statement on teaching philosophy. I answer: critical digital pedagogy demands that we forego our existing biases and practices, even when to do so may be politically risky. I have done so here, by producing and placing this article on the web and adopting the web’s preferred model of citation (not to mention that of Hybrid Pedagogy). This flies in the face of an instruction given to me that “Referencing should conform to any standard referencing style, for example… APA”.
Here, then, is an example of what critical digital pedagogy can be, in practice in my teaching philosophy. It should not be hidden away for rarified audiences. It should live and (potentially) be exposed to those for whom it exists (students). It should practice what it professes, and demonstrate that practice openly for those whom it is meant to benefit. Teaching by example is a pedagogy in its own right, and it is one to which I aspire when teaching students in my specialty area of digital media.
It is all well to make these statements, but how do I live up to them? Poorly, at this stage, and in the shadow of those prominent at Hybrid Pedagogy and elsewhere.
These are ways in which I pursue what I would regard to be examples of critical digital pedagogy:
- I absolutely draw the line at turning my students over to turnitin and I spread arguments against doing so to colleagues who use the tool. To use it would be highly hypocritical, and against several well-reasoned arguments throughout Hybrid Pedagogy.
- Within my teaching practice, I do attempt to build community and collaboration in a distributed way (ie, beyond the classroom). I intend a ‘teach in public’ philosophy, by which I mean extensive activity in non-restricted spaces such as on social media sites. However, in the most recent iteration of a subject I designed and taught (COM112 Digital Media), I removed this requirement due in part to the garbage fire that Twitter has become. This approach meets Stommel’s call for collaboration and community and application outside of the bounds of the institution, but only when instituted consistently and well.
- I emphasise the work of marginalised writers — and allow their work to extensively speak for itself — in my teaching. I do this by quoting from them and setting their work as texts regularly (although, I admit, not as often as I should).
- An example of my bent for demonstration is a Facebook Live broadcast conducted by a colleague and I — using our School’s Facebook page — to demonstrate the practice for our students as they prepared for a similar assessment task.
I have previously suggested that “teaching in my field is a mix of playful experimentation with ideas and tools while talking through my processes and thinking for students”. This is a digital-first approach that emphasises collaborative development and learning, and iterative design and development processes common in media and technology fields. The image below gives a sense of how this process might play out. This is a view to which I hold perhaps even more strongly after having examined it repeatedly in the last few months.
Like all academics, I evaluate the success of my approach through the standard instrument of the student evaluation survey. However, I give more heed to the voices of students with whom I have worked in the months and years after they’ve moved on. I value their connection on Twitter and other platforms and admire their work in those spaces as people who conduct civil dialogues (or uncivil if the need arises), share generously and openly, value and support others, and contribute to the strength of the community around them. This is not a formal evaluative process but nonetheless is my way to assess whether I’ve done them any good. These are the things that I aim to help students learn, so their implementation beyond my classes is what matters.
However, since commencing the class that has eventually lead to the production of this teaching philosophy statement and post, I have developed a renewed appreciation for more carefully developed evaluative and reflective systems. For example:
- Grouping evaluation of teaching and learning under Brookfield’s four lenses (autobiographical; student; colleagues; and literature) helps to structure inquiry into pedagogical practice.
- Deploying classroom assessment techniques in a planned way, rather than on an ad hoc basis, will likely assist my goal of rapidly iterating content and course design during lessons and across the course of a teaching session.
- John Biggs and Catherine Tang remind us of the need for teaching to focus on “what the student does” rather than what the teacher does, an approach that can be applied even in traditional lecture environments.
- At a more specific level, my current role as Course Director is primarily about whole-of-degree curriculum design. This, perhaps even moreso than classroom teaching, relies on careful constructive alignment between intended learning outcomes, teaching strategies, and assessment. This too closely relates to Biggs and Tang’s work.
