Sean Michael Morris | Read Write Collect

Liked Reflections on Teaching through the Screen by

Sean Michael Morris (Sean Michael Morris)

How is that responding and revising done? Well, if I have any “expert” advice to offer, it would be this:

Change the way you teach. Ask what do you want to know about learners from the very start of your relationship? What should they know about you? What barriers might exist that will inhibit your connection to students and from student to student?

Develop a digital literacy that’s an interpersonal one. Always ask: “Who is not in the room who could be?” Allow time in synchronous meetings and collaborations for connecting and relationship-building. Find back-channel and ungraded spaces for communication, like virtual office or “coffee” hours. Perhaps most importantly, develop empathy for one another in virtual or digitally-inflected spaces. But at the same time, don’t assume you understand the challenges students face. Empathy is best developed by listening.

Imagine your own digital pedagogy. Ask yourself: What counts as digital? What is your overall pedagogical approach, and how does that translate or not translate to digital environments? What is the most important part of your pedagogy that you don’t want to lose when you teach online?

The truth is that education didn’t need COVID-19 to make it necessary to ask these kinds of questions. As educators, we are all always already called to develop a critical consciousness about our work. But the pandemic has brought into greater focus that our assumptions—about what’s been happening in classrooms and behind the scenes and online in education—are less informed than we would like to believe. We don’t get to watch the screen and act like normal, because at every turn there’s a drag queen superstar waiting to remind us that things are not normal, and in order for any normal to return, we will have to invent it ourselves.

Liked Technology is not Pedagogy (Sean Michael Morris)

What happens when learning goes online? This is not a question technology can answer. It’s one we need to answer. Teachers, librarians, learning designers, students. Actually good online education comes not from the purchase of another platform, but out of dialogue, out of the will to empower everyone involved in teaching and learning to create together a digital learning that isn’t just instrumental, that isn’t just performative, but that’s authentic, meaningful, and just.

Replied to Pivot to Online: A Student Guide (Sean Michael Morris)

This is a time to work together. In all of the above suggestions where I’ve recommended that you reach out to teachers, that you insist on certain kinds of accommodations, the key is to be kind. Take me at my word here. I’ve worked directly and indirectly with faculty on six continents, and most of them will respond to kindness. If they know you are trying your best, they will also try their best. (Some of them are reading this right now, too.) Remember that faculty are human beings who have been caught just as much by surprise by this pivot to online as you have… only many of them are not as tech- or web-savvy as you are.

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?

Bookmarked After Babel: Designing for Community (Sean Michael Morris)

Access, inclusion, design all have to fall together in favor of community, of dialogue, with content being no more than the field upon which those play. So, a design for community might include:

Interstitial, unfacilitated learning

Agency, meta-cognition, and self-determination

Building skills

Mentorship

In a keynote address for the Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium at Metropolitan State University, Sean Michael Morris unpacks the challenges associated with learning in online communities. This has me thinking of David White’s discussion of coalescent spaces and the idea of a personal social media space.

Liked Education is not a field for mediocre hopes and mediocre dreams (Sean Michael Morris)

More concretely, I don’t think about rubrics, for example, as they relate to teaching, I think about them as they do or do not make a difference in the world, or do or do not support students in making a difference in their world. If I’m asked why I don’t like rubrics, I might answer that rubrics not only provide a false promise of equity and fairness, but they also pinion the relationship between a student and their teacher, and a student and their learning.

But the real trouble with rubrics is that rubrics are a red herring, a symptom but not the underlying problem. Aspirin for our headache. As a way to navigate the system and process of education we’ve adopted culturally, rubrics can be useful. But they placate us into thinking that the model of learning and teaching we enact is: first, successful, and second, the only model.

Liked To Go Far Enough (Sean Michael Morris)

So to be clear: the Instructure DIG initiative would be impossible if students and teachers didn’t show up to class and use the LMS. Likewise, Turnitin’s very expensive database, would eventually become worthless if teachers and institutions stopped asking students to turn-it-in. We—teachers, administrators, instructional designers–make these platforms not only worth their purchase price, but we make these platforms run.

Bookmarked Imagination as a Precision Tool for Change (Sean Michael Morris)

The project of critical pedagogy is not simply the project of improving education, or of learning, but rather the project of becoming more fully human.

Sean Michael Morris discuss the process of critical change and transformation. He unpacks power and agency, suggesting that where we need to start is with imagination.

Instead of looking for another tool besides Turnitin for plagiarism, agency asks us to intervene upon the assumptions, acceptances, and adaptations that surround the agreement we generally hold that plagiarism is both unquestionably a problem and inevitable in every student population. Also, that we are helpless to its cresting wave.

And to look that deeply at our assumptions requires a willingness to believe in monsters washed up on the Chilean shore. We must not only want to see the world as it could be, to be intrigued by its possibilities, but we must be able to see it as it could be otherwise.