Education and pedagogy

Critical Pedagogy

Intro

Starts with wireframing your ideal educational environment

Share our drawings

• Different modalities
  • Reading
  • Drawings
  • Computers
• Ideal group of learners, but also need to get out (in the world/learn from others)
• Self-learning
  • Computers
  • Books
  • Toys
  • Self-reflection
  • Mentors to consult with
  • Learn by doing a project
  • Shadowing
• Focus on things you don't see (the iceberg, not the tip)
• Technical knowledge as well as wisdom
• Learning how to think critically
• Decentralized, non-hierarchical, open
• Fun, engaging
• Starting from a place of ease
• Community
• Knowing what is ahead
• Feeling grounded
• Time for reflection and returning to a happy place
• Action
• Peer learning

Educational materials are not neutral

• Classroom is not the only site of learning

Pedagogy: Skill-building vs. critical thinking piece

• Goal is to be egalitarian
• Philosophy and practice are circular

Discussion of frameworks

• Positioning student as expert with an activity
• pair/share
• Report back
• Reverse engineer

Lesson plan:

• Learning objectives
• Don't necessarily need to be measurable
• Consider nontraditional assessment on things like empathy
• Action
• Self-reflection
  • Not just success or failure of lesson, but how you were feeling that day
  • Implications for learning

• Cultural inequality, peer pressure

• Student-driven curricula

• Like to use paper, books because students are so focused on their phones.

• Ability to adapt, to grab student attention

How to teach tech skills non-traditionally

• Project, no teachers: ask the internet or a mentor
• Foster motivation
• Digital skills vs. digital literacy (computational thinking)
• Find analog, interactive ways to explore something like recursion

Consider marginalized/underrepresented groups in tech

• Race, gender, class, age

Exercise

• Build a robot out of computer parts
• Then talk about all of the parts of the computer and what they do (or reverse?)

Separate process from tools

Teaching programming languages

• Different types, e.g. Python vs. C
• Do the skills/structure translate

Motivation & power dynamics

• US compulsory education
• Threat of arrest/force to go to school
• Public school material disparities
• Gender anti-math socialization
• Individual contexts of teachers and students, e.g., mental health, popularity
• Hierarchy of school status
• Physical structure of schools: bells, lateness
• History of schools: training of labor (Freire's banking model)
• Content policing (teaching to tests?)

Teaching system

• Facilitator as an alternate term/context for instructor
  • Role to build awareness to the the contexts below
  • Culture of reflection
• Participant learner
• Environment (contexts):
  • weather, mood
  • Preparation
  • Financial concerns (like adjunct)
  • Topics that are sensitive (triggering?)

Non-traditional ways of showing than writing a paper or a digital project

• Board games
• Not grading/testing at all
• Emotional
• There is no right answer!
• Tests aren't good indicators of performance.
• Fuck credentials at all (certifications, diplomas, pedigree instead of pedagogy)
• Pursuing a degree, for example, just to get the credential, does not lead to strong motivation for anything other than the degree

Our society is based on soft skills, and yet there is no training for them

• Social ease
• Good manners
• Networking
• Following up
• Establishing trust and accountability

Put trust in the learners/participants