Hybrid Learning Plans

Reading through some blogs and articles for a focus group on Blended/Hybrid Learning at my school, and I realized I better put down some thoughts before I lose track! I've noticed a few common themes so far, here's the first:

Involve Students! 

This one seemed obvious to me at first, but it's more complicated than it seems. Depending on how you're looking at it, "involving the students" can take on different meanings. My first inclination was to think of this as a design problem (a big part of what I teach is design thinking). So I started looking around IDEO for resources on Human Centered Design and remembered this video on empathy. I think this is a fine starting point, after all we are designing structures and practices for humans, right? This is pretty open ended though, a good jumping off point but in need of some more specific direction. So then I looked to Jesse Stommel on Twitter because I know he has written a lot about "digital pedagogy". That lead me to a resource that he started along with a few other educators called The Journal of Hybrid Pedagogy. In there, I found a few rabbit holes to go down, but one article in particular caught my eye because right in the title it refers to ethical online learning and social justice. In it, Lora Taub makes a case for including students in a way that I wasn't considering. Here's a snippet from her in that post:

Lora Taub via Hybrid Pedagogy

This one had me like "woah! this is it!". First, the phrase "participants, agents, and partners" made me realize that I wasn't even thinking about bringing students in as part of a conversation. I was thinking of including student voices as in like taking a few surveys and using the results to inform decisions. That is also a good thing to do, but it is not enough! Students can and should be partners in the design process, all the way from defining the problem(s) to testing the solutions and reporting results. 

So why haven't we done this before? It could be simply because including partners is just harder. This work is already hard enough and collaboration just makes it even more complicated. But I think that Dr Taub has a good point when she refers to "unreflected upon social and cultural assumptions" about students. It is super easy to fall into a line of thinking that says students are uninformed or indecisive. I mean even looking at it though a Human Centered Design lens, it's true that people don't always know what's best for them (and even when they do, they can't always accurately explain it to you). But just recently I attended a student led march to protest racial bias at my school. It was a big deal. Not only did these students recognize problems, they also organized. They planned. They chose great speakers and stayed on topic. They kept everyone safe. It was amazing to see! I really should write a whole other post about it. But for now I bring it up because for me it blew up 💥 any notion I had that our students aren't capable of "discern[ing], analys[ing], and engag[ing], wide awake to their social world". 

So if we start with a goal of involving students, we should remember to think of them as partners and agents of their own learning - not as "users" or consumers of our teaching. Dr Taub refers to this as "collegial pedagogy" and this quote sums it up I think: 

Lora Taub via Hybrid Pedagogy

Yes. This please. Can we all do this? (I'm gonna try at least.) 😀