The new media environment provides new
opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our
students seeking important and meaningful questions. Questions of the
very best kind abound, and we become students again, pursuing
questions we might have never imagined, joyfully learning right along
with the others. In the best case scenario the students will leave
the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more
importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from
their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to
inspire. This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,”
in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but
on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the
types of questions that ask students to
challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own
underlying biases.
The beauty of the current moment is that new media
has thrown all of us as educators into just this kind of
question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment.
There are no easy answers, but we can at least be thankful for the
questions that drive us on.
Nigel Coutts on 02 Sep 18Sometimes, it seems everyone who ever went to school is an expert on education and has a plan to make it better. Actual teaching experience, years of professional learning and formal training are all easily swept aside. The result is an ongoing dialog around what schools should do, what teachers need to do more of or less of and how the academic success of the nation is linked to strategy x or y.
