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 08 Jul 18As we make plans for how we will engage our students in their learning the decisions we make become fundamental to how they will grow to understand the purposes of learning. How our learners approach the curriculum and the disciplines is fundamental to the outcomes we may achieve for them. One path will set them up to view learning as the acquisition of information the other to see it as a process of asking and exploring questions of significance through the many unique lenses.
