Teaching and Learning: The Importance of Studying and Reflecting on Pedagogy
This semester in the IPS Foundations of Social Justice course, students began the semester by thinking about what it means to teach and learn. They were challenged to not only think of themselves as students or learners, but also as teachers who will share the knowledge they learn as they practice social justice in their communities. This week we’re featuring some of their reflections on teaching and learning at IPS.
At IPS, transformative teaching and learning are essential to what we do. We know that our students aren’t at IPS just to satisfy their intellectual curiosities, they come here because they want to make a difference in their world. In the MA in Social Justice and Community Development program that I direct, we often remind our students that they’re not just learners, they’re also teachers. As social justice and community development practitioners, they don’t just do justice, they teach others how to do justice as well.
In our Foundations of Social Justice class this semester we started the course with a two week focus on teaching and learning. We named our own transformative learning experiences as well as the characteristics we like to see in students and teachers. We developed a class covenant to ground our learning and we spent a lot of time talking about education for justice. We read Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Alice Walker and we discussed the conditions for transformative education. As the professor for the course, I attempted to pull back the curtain, so to speak, on my own decisions about pedagogy. I adopted an open syllabus and invited the students to give feedback on the content we would cover during the semester. And each week, students fill out a questionnaire where they name their biggest obstacles and successes in learning that week. We review these as a class the following week as a way of remembering our common task of transformative education and clearing any obstacles that might be in our path.
We’ve found that when we name teaching and learning as a subject matter in its own right, then we’re able open more room to engage the the transformative possibilities of the course’s content. So this week we wanted to pull back the curtain a bit further and share some of our own reflections on teaching and learning. We hope this gives you all a chance to glimpse what it means to practice transformative education at IPS.