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“It is urgent we have teachers, it is urgent we employ them, pay them, support them with adequate resources; but it is also urgency which defines the project of teaching.”
~Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy
Our BIG Question:
How might we find more ways to involve students in the design of their own learning, designing with students and not for them?
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues against the banking model of education, “an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.” In place of the banking model, Freire advocates for “problem-posing education,” in which a classroom or learning environment becomes a space for asking questions -- a space of cognition, not information. How can we create the necessary trust for this work to happen? How do we bridge the artificial divide set up between students and teachers? How do we dismantle the hierarchies that keep students from being full agents in their own educations?
The technologies and bureaucracies of schooling attempt to flatten our differences—reducing teachers and students to rows in a spreadsheet and our work to columns. Teachers are meant to imagine that students are interchangeable—that whether they are food insecure, queer, or homeless is of no real consequence to a system (of grades, tests, and credentials) that attempts to rank them tidily against one another.
We need to find more ways to involve students in the design of their own learning, designing with students and not for them. We have to design for the least privileged, most marginalized students, the ones more likely to have felt isolated even before the pandemic: disabled students, chronically ill students, BIPOC students, international students, LGBTQ students, those facing food insecurity, etc. We need to write policies, imagine new ways forward, for students already struggling, already facing exclusion.
At the same time, we need to find ways for institutions to better support educators, many of whom are working precariously. And, where they aren’t being adequately prepared or supported by our institutions, we need to find ways to balance the labor of teaching with the need for self-care.
In this free 45-minute webinar, educator, author, and speaker Jesse Stommel will provide some starting points for thinking about creating powerful communities and cultures of care, both for students and for teachers. Join us!
Why should YOU attend this FREE webinar on "Designing for Care"?
Practical strategies for building relationships of trust with students
Inclusive pedagogies that account for the real and complex circumstances of students
Ways to design flexible approaches that don't increase your own workload
An opportunity to think alongside a network of fellow educators
About Jesse Stommel
Jesse Stommel is a faculty member in the Writing Program at University of Denver, and co-founder of Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy: the journal of critical digital pedagogy. He has a PhD from University of Colorado Boulder. He is co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy.
Jesse is a documentary filmmaker and teaches courses about pedagogy, film, and new media. Jesse experiments relentlessly with learning interfaces, both digital and analog, and his research focuses on higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, and assessment. He’s got a rascal pup, Emily, a clever cat, Loki, and a badass daughter, Hazel. He’s online at jessestommel.com and on Twitter @Jessifer.

FREE WEBINAR REGISTRATION
This 45-minute FREE webinar will help you start thinking deeply about how to co-create learning environments that center care for both students and adults.
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