📑 Open Ed, Digital Pedagogy Lab & the Challenge of Education Conferences

Bookmarked Open Ed, Digital Pedagogy Lab & the Challenge of Education Conferences (Sean Michael Morris)

Sometime before her joint keynote with Chris Gilliard at Digital Pedagogy Lab 2017, Maha Bali wrote to me that, if I wanted to invite marginalized people to take the spotlight, I had to be prepared to let them change the very nature of that spotlight. The stage, the spotlight, the keynote itself, are symbols or approaches to teaching, instruction, performance, leadership that are grounded in a white supremicist, patriarchal, capitalist academic model that doesn’t just eschew the work of education done in non-white, indigenous, queer, and other communities, it is blind to them. The keynote both presumes the hegemony of the expert, and reinforces it. Asking someone who doesn’t benefit from white supremicist, patriarchal, capitalist academe to benefit from exactly that, under the auspices of generosity and representation, is just another way of centering whiteness.

In a reflection on the sudden closure of the Open Ed Conference, Sean Michael Morris explores the place and purpose of the educational conference.

I see educational conferences like Digital Pedagogy Lab (and others: HASTAC, #RealCollege, etc.) as moments in time, gathering spaces for educators and students who, on the daily, are too overwhelmed with their work, their research, the balance of teaching, learning, and personal life, their concerns for the future of education, their ongoing and sometimes relentlessly necessary inquiry into educational technology, justice and equity, that they are unable to stay in touch with the community which, while diverse in its activity and approaches, supports them. For a time, Twitter provided some reprieve and support—on hashtags like #digped and #educolor—but that platform is now too perilous for too many. So, conferences, events, gatherings, these are the places where educators can sit down, take a meal, learn together, connect, re-connect, begin or continue collaborations, and more.

He focuses particularly on aspects such as keynotes and how they perpetuate power and patriarchy. Although we may enourage different voices, unless we also allow for different practices we risk creating another means of ‘centering whiteness’. In closing, he offers some questions to consider in critically examining the notion of the educational conference:

David Wiley is right. We need to critically examine all of our assumptions about conferences. How they are run. Who leads them. What kind of learning should happen there? Why are they convened? What is the gathering meant to accomplish? What is the pedagogy for conferences now, in a landscape where keynotes should be something more than talking heads, where organizers who are white and male need to cede not just the stage but the design of events to make way for new ways of knowing, teaching, and learning? Where expertise does not win the day, but a willingness to ask does?

This all has me rethinking conferences and whether my spark talk from DigiCon16 in which I used voices to define the village simply reinstated my own power and position?

One response on “📑 Open Ed, Digital Pedagogy Lab & the Challenge of Education Conferences”

  1. Philippa Nicoll Antipas explores how we might do a conference for teacher professional learning and development (PLD) differently. She argues that we need to breakaway from “somebody deciding to share what they’re interested in, in the hope that you’ll find it interesting too.” A review of the literature highlighted that too few decide for too many, in response she came up with a different model where teachers design their own conferences based on their own needs. This model came in the format of a board game-like collective activity.

    There are four layers to the d.conference collective activity, known as Plan D. In the first layer, teachers consider what they already believe about effective PLD. In the second layer, teachers consider their professional learning needs, and the learning needs of their students in order to decide what the purpose of their d.conference is. The third layer gets more ‘nuts and bolts’: who will speak at the conference; what the schedule of the event will be; what the learning at the conference will look like. Finally, in the fourth layer, teachers reflect on the decisions they’ve made whilst playing, and commit to sustaining their professional learning beyond their d.conference.
    https://conferenceinference.wordpress.com/2022/04/19/going-rogue-teachers-designing-their-own-conferences-as-a-transgressive-act-philippa-nicoll-antipas/

    The process is as important as product.
    This reminds me of a piece from Sean Michael Morris reflecting on education conferences.

    We need to critically examine all of our assumptions about conferences. How they are run. Who leads them. What kind of learning should happen there? Why are they convened? What is the gathering meant to accomplish? What is the pedagogy for conferences now, in a landscape where keynotes should be something more than talking heads, where organizers who are white and male need to cede not just the stage but the design of events to make way for new ways of knowing, teaching, and learning? Where expertise does not win the day, but a willingness to ask does?
    @slamteacher https://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/open-ed-digital-pedagogy-lab-and-the-challenge-of-education-conferences/

    people make conferences, as well as my wonderings about starting the learning prior to the conference.

    Reply

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