Tag Archives: heutagogy

From Crisis to Opportunity: Yu Li’s Reflection on M4

Week 4 Discussion, , , ,

This week’s readings resulted in a shift of mentality for me and led me to make two major changes to the course/syllabus.

The first is to make it one of the course objectives for students “to exercise and increase autonomy in pursuing self-determined learning in the online environment” (quoted from the revised syllabus). As you have probably heard me saying, I have been struggling with formulating measurable outcomes to include in the syllabus. After reading up on assessment and learning outcomes and watching the JIT video, I do have a better understanding of how to do this – the ABCD method is especially helpful in a concrete way – and can imagine writing a long list of very specific outcomes for each lesson of the course. I have decided, however, not to do that; instead, I will have students reflect on their own learning outcomes throughout the course as a way to cultivate their ability to pursue self-determined learning. More specifically, they will write three reflections, two at the beginning of the course and one anytime before the course ends, to respond to questions that require them to articulate their learning outcomes and examine the effectiveness of their personal learning approach based on their experiences during the previous week. They will post these reflections for their peers to comment on. I will set aside time in the synchronous session to highlight the main themes and discuss them with the students. By doing this, my hope is that students would become more aware of the learning process and will be more willing and able to take charge of pursuing their own learning goals. Do you think this would work, to a certain degree?

A second change I’ve been thinking about as a result of this week’s reading is to make it a “flipped” class. I originally had the idea that synchronous sessions should be devoted mostly to lecturers and organized discussions. Now I wonder – now that students are expected to be more autonomous, if I should enable them to learn on their own before the synchronous sessions via prerecorded VoiceThread lectures, and then when we meet, I will give them questions and tasks to work on. This idea also made me wonder if I should change the format of the course to meeting once a week for 3 hours, so that we would have more time to work together. For this I would need to do more thinking. Maybe this can be addressed as part of the course design assignment.

In any case, I feel that this week’s reading got me to see the challenges posed by the online environment more as an opportunity than a crisis. It was quite inspiring to read about heutagogy, or self-determined learning, and how its approach could be particularly suitable in the e-learning context. The syllabus or course design is still work in progress for me, as I may also adopt assignments that require learner-generated content and learner-defined assessment, but I haven’t quite figured out what to do on those yet.

M4 (Don) Emulation is the Mother of Invention or: What the Medievals can us about “heautagogy.”

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This week’s readings have been challenging, voluminous, and mostly quite worthwhile. The truth is that calling this a class in online teaching is a misnomer, because it has turned into a very provocative class on teaching, period. I wish I had encountered some of this material earlier, not necessarily because I would teach any differently today, but because I would have made more intentional decisions about assessment, design and instructional method. The two most important takeaways I have from this week are that “assessment drives learning,” (when I repeated this to my wife, who works in the field of primary education, her response was something like “duh,” though it seemed really cutting edge to me) and that we are learning strategies we can use in all our classes, not just the online ones. So thanks Leah, and thanks to all of you.

That said, I do not think Marshall is being merely cantankerous when he asks (it is a beautiful question) “can a self teach itself something it does not already know?” This is of course a real philosophical question whose answer I do not take for granted. I tried thinking about “heautagogy” in terms of my own teaching/learning practice and realized two things. The first is that of course the best learning is self-driven and self-motivated. That is what I spend most of my own time doing when I have the option (currently I am engaged in a crash course on the medieval sociologist Ibn Khaldun), and it is certainly a goal of my pedagogy (sorry, I use that term in the old fashioned way) in the sense that i want students to become independent learners and ultimately to be independent of me (certainly on the doctoral level).  But this is not always a realistic objective, in my view, and even when it is, it requires a lot more careful thinking about issues of authority, habituation and graduated aptitudes of learners than I found in the assigned reading.

For the past few years I have been collecting notes for an eventual article on the medieval philosopher/rabbi Moses Maimonides’ theory of education, which is indebted not just to the classical rabbinic tradition but to Aristotle, Plato and Arabic writers like Alfarabi and Ibn Rushd. Without going into too much detail here, the fundamental problem facing all of these thinkers is the need to modulate learning through habituation, which is by nature a conservative, socially reproductive process grounded in authority, and the development of critical faculties that can overturn accepted norms, generate new insights and even generate new habituative regimes.

One of the reasons I find the medieval discussion (Maimonides is not alone here) so much more illuminating than some of the contemporary material is that rather than portray the need for fully independent, student driven learning as some sort of new discovery that needs to replace existing modes (wow, we even have a cool new word for it!) they understood that there is no escape. Beings such as ourselves will continue to need habituation even once we become independent learners, though some of that habituation can be self-directed.

There is a life-course dimension to this that is very relevant to modern higher education. For the medievals, one begins life subject to the authority of parents and teachers, whose responsibility it is to ensure habituation to appropriate norms that will not only allow for good citizenship but also make room for future learning! At some point this shades into a learner’s desire to emulate those who s/he respects, including their scholarly persona. One studies and thinks under a tutor and begins to internalize values, take responsibility for them, even decide what kinds of further habituation one needs  as an individual . To take just one example, a person whose self-evaluation in light of advanced learning leads them to understand that they have departed from the mean (by being miserly, for example) takes upon themselves to distribute charity in a deliberate and graduate way until that trait becomes second nature to them. If they come to understand that some aspect of their society is corrupt they may need to opt for revolutionary change, but even in so doing they must also realize that they will have no choice but to create new habituative practices if they seek to establish any kind of a stable way of life or platform for ongoing learning.

My own tendency in college teaching has been to assume too much independent motivation and skill among students at various stages. To give one example, a favorite assignment of mine (which I learned from my own advisor) is to ask one student each week to come to class with a precis of that week’s readings and to lead the first part of class discussion based on their own questions or critical observations. The few times I tried this with Emory undergraduates, it was an abject failure and I dropped it. Students did not yet, in my estimation, have the critical skills needed to carry out the activity successfully and other students were (in my view justifiably) annoyed that they had to spend their class time on this rather than hear from me–which does not just mean receiving a lecture but engaging in a structured conversation.

Now, I could have made this assignment work better if I had been willing or able to spend much more time on it–working with the individual students before class, making sure that their precis were always distributed in advance , and if I devoted a fair amount of class time to teaching those particular skills. But given the economy of my own time, that was energy I needed to spend on research and writing; the students were not clamoring for more independence; and the honest truth is that it is I think it is OK for undergraduates to rely more heavily on the instructor, particularly as they are experimenting in a variety of fields. They need to develop the habits that can allow them to be more independent and that occurs over time and over many classes– I did not view it as essential to make the delivery of content secondary to that goal. It actually feels like my responsibility to make sure a certain amount and kind of content is covered in the course, and that is something I do not want to disparage.

I expect more of course of graduate students, but here too I have found that more independent learning simply takes much more instructional time and energy. First year doctoral students are not the same as advanced doctoral students, etc.

My point is not that we should not strive– the various assessment techniques we are discussing can help us to set an appropriate level. But we need to accept that habituation, emulation and authority are not enemies of independent learning but segues to it; that students need to be met where they are at rather than where we imagine them and that we also need to have realistic expectations of ourselves and where our time can be spent given the assessment regime to which WE are numbingly subject.

ALL THE BEST!!!

 

M4-Duke–Can a self teach itself something it does not know?

heutagogy, Week 4 Discussion, ,

I have long been troubled by the notion of being self-taught which is expressed  in terms like autodidacticism and, more recently,  heutagogy (which was new to me and I never would have or could have taught it to myself, wherein lies essence of one of my concerns about heutagogy, itself.)  While I can’t retrieve the source from memory, I recall hearing a critic of self taught artists being quoted as saying, “Self-taught painters learn to paint from a person who does not know how to paint.”  This represents for me a quiet, gnawing worry that we have come to believe that self-determination of learning is a good thing–an apotheosis of a dimension that begins with pedagogy (teaching children) and passes through androgogy (adult learning which is less passive and more autodidactic) on the way to the ultimate goal of self-determination in heutagogy.  My worry here is this: if learners are to learn what they  must in order to deal with the exigencies and vicissitudes of life, even if these cannot be anticipated with specificity, there must be someone who has already learned something about doing this who can guide them in developing the capability to do so.  Had Leah not provided us with a reading on heutagogy, it would have remained far off my radar for..well..forever.  Yet, now that she has directed us toward it, we can think about it and decide, as in my case, that I am not so comfy with it!

So what is my sense of learner self-determination in my online course?  I am very much OK with directing students to topics that I feel they must master and having them teach themselves in any way or at any pace they choose so long as they fulfill the assessment rubrics that I develop for them.  I am not OK with their deciding what is important or not for them to know.  There will, I believe, always be a need for someone to be, at minimum, a “guide on the side” but a guide there must be.  As I think about how the notions of self-directed learning can be blended with traditional F2F classes, I do see great potential.  As I consider things now with admittedly a small amount of online knowledge and experience, I can see how my own way of thinking about education can be reconciled with modern approaches to distance learning.

I have always felt that the good teacher does not have to know what he or she knows in order to teach, but the good teacher must know what students know or do not know.  This allows for the overlay of an invisible rubric over the entire class (as well as individuals in it ) which represents where the learners are at the beginning and where the teacher hopes they will be at the end.  All of the activities in the course are then directed at transporting learners  (in rubric-ese) from level 1 achievement to level 4.

In my online course, I believe I will still need to get a sense of where the students are at the start and I will want to define clearly for them where they need to be at the end (course goals).   I will also want to include formative and summative assessments so I can monitor and evaluate their progress.  However, the BIG difference is that I will be widening the range of ways in which they travel to the goals which I as the teacher (ped-agogically) have set. If they wish to heutagogically travel outside of the content set forth and explore ideas in a more self-determined way, I am sure that they will gain much from their experience.  In fact, I will want to encourage and reward in some way such “expeditions.”

 

What would a blended course in abnormal psychology look like?  At this point, I feel that it would need to be text-book based since there is much to learn in terms of history, language, theory, and modes of treatment.  While many students will just be “stopping in” for the semester, others will ultimately become professionals whose goal it will be to help people.  There are  many things that these people who may become clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers simply must know!  There is no place for pure heutagogy or self-determination here.   A self-taught potter’s off-round, leaking coffee cup might be cute in its own primitive way, but would any of us agree to a procedure performed by a “self-taught” cardiovascular surgeon?  I use hyperbole here to heighten the contrast, but at a less extreme level, I think what I am saying is that within each online course, there needs to be a all three sorts of learning–pedagogic, androgogic and heutogogic.  The traditional classroom, admittedly,  leans much too heavily on the first of these and, I believe, creates students who are passive and does not help them grow confident in their own capabilities.  The heutagogic extreme, while good for some, would create highly confident people who are dangerously unaware of what they don’t know. (Is there a presidential candidate out there who might fit this description?)  The balance among all three would seem to me an ideal place to aim for in online learning.

From the assessment perspective, I will need to include rubrics and assessment methods that address all three modes of learning.  Traditional quizzes and exams will help with the specific content that I consider critical to know.  This is early in Bloom’s hierarchy.  I would also want to provide assignments that would require application and integration such as studying case histories or looking at and analyzing films or literary works.  This would also afford opportunities for writing which we know is the one major activity that makes people smarter overall.   Finally, I would add an assignment which would be the greatest challenge and which would require autodidacticism and, yes, heutagogic behavior.  This would be a project in which, individually or as teams, students attempt to create an entirely new method of classifying abnormal behavior,  This is possible because, as a discipline, we are still not sure whether our current approach is adequate.  This is reflected in the continuing revisions of our diagnostic system (six since 1952) and in a recent decision by insurance companies to move away from the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic system and move toward use of the ICD-10, which is an international classification system for various diseases and disorders.  (I know that most of my class-mates may not be familiar with all this and I apologize for placing it here, but we are all androgogic!)