{"id":1341,"date":"2013-10-28T09:00:04","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T14:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/?p=1341"},"modified":"2024-06-20T15:40:19","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T15:40:19","slug":"teaching-and-learning-importance-of-studying-pedagogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/?p=1341","title":{"rendered":"Teaching and Learning: The Importance of Studying and Reflecting on Pedagogy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>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&#8217;re featuring some of their reflections on teaching and learning at IPS.<\/em><\/p>\n<div><span style=\"font-family: Arial\">At IPS, transformative teaching and learning are essential to what we do. We know that our students aren&#8217;t at IPS just to satisfy\u00a0their intellectual curiosities, they come here because\u00a0they\u00a0want to make a difference in their world. In the MA in Social Justice\u00a0and\u00a0Community Development program that I direct, we often remind our students that they&#8217;re not just learners, they&#8217;re also teachers. As social justice and community development practitioners, they don&#8217;t just\u00a0<em>do justice<\/em>, they teach others how to do justice as well.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<div><span style=\"font-family: Arial\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/div>\n<div><span style=\"font-family: Arial\">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\u00a0ground our learning and we spent a lot of time talking\u00a0about\u00a0education 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\u00a0pull back the curtain, so to speak, on my own\u00a0decisions\u00a0about pedagogy. I adopted an open syllabus and invited the\u00a0students\u00a0to 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<div><span style=\"font-family: Arial\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/div>\n<div><span style=\"font-family: Arial\">We&#8217;ve found that when we name\u00a0teaching\u00a0and learning as a subject matter in its own right, then we&#8217;re able open more room to engage the\u00a0the\u00a0transformative possibilities of\u00a0the\u00a0course&#8217;s content. So this week we wanted to pull back the\u00a0curtain\u00a0a 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. \u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/?p=1341\"> read more <span class=\"meta-nav\"><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-justice-community-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1341"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4615,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341\/revisions\/4615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}