Transcription

An Interview with Juli Lynch

(“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “Juli” refers to Juli Lynch)

Inter:	I am speaking with Juli Lynch who is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education. She is teaching a unit called Computers Across the Curriculum. Welcome Juli. How would you describe your philosophy of teaching and learning and how have your views on this been shaped?
Juli:	Okay my philosophy of teaching and learning. I think, the role of teacher is one that is multi faceted and often particularly historically, includes aspects of being an expert and being an authority, and they're roles that I'm not particularly comfortable with to be honest, and I find that when I position myself as an expert in a classroom that often I walk away from that experience with a sense of dissatisfaction, and a sense of not really having connected with the students or given the students much space. And I think that if as a teacher, that's the only role that you play, then you, sort of you're failing to respond to sort of fundamental changes that have taken place over the last X decades in regard to what it is to be a student and how we approach knowledge and what learning is all about. So in terms of a teaching philosophy I suppose I have a core value and this has developed over the years in my thinking about my teaching, that is really the basis of my own criticism of myself when I reflect back on what I do in particular sessions and how I set up learning environment s and that core value is humility. I think humility is a really useful lens to... if you're going to look critically at teaching practice and I think that if you are going to build an environment that is going to support your students to think critically, then it needs to be an open supportive environment and there are times when I come away from tutorials and I feel uncomfortable with my performance and it's usually because I've been impatient or I've been arrogant, or I've been disrespectful in some way or I've just taken up too much space in that session, and I usually come away kicking myself thinking oh no I've done it again. When I reflect back on a two hour or a three hour session and I think you know, who had the space, who had the voice, who took up all the room, well it was mostly me, and that's why over the years I've started thinking about humility and how If I could just sort of step back and open up the space for other voices that you end up with a more productive environment where the students can actually bring their own knowledge to bear. You can take advantage of that and you end up with a more sort of critical discourse in the session. The sorts of things in my thinking about what a humble approach to teaching might be, if I sort of operationalise that, the sorts of things that I try to do, in classroom situations and I also try to do online, is: acknowledging and valuing what students already know and bring to the classroom, trying to be tolerant and patient in my interactions with my students, which is not always easy when you've got large numbers and you've got students making demands of you and you've got a whole lot of different needs and different circumstances. I also, because I use a lot of small group and whole class discussion in my teaching, I always try to make sure that I identify impatience and intolerance that is sort of happening in the classroom between students as well. That is something that I did find and shut down or at least talked about. I think it is particularly important in my teaching because most of the students are being prepared to become educators or teachers themselves.
Inter:	So you have to be a model?
Juli:	Yes, yes and I think I am a model but I think if you are going to model something there is no point in just modeling it, you actually need to be explicit and say to the students. I am actually modeling this, or you know, let's stop and look at what we've just been doing. We've just spent twenty minutes on this activity. Why do you think we did that, do you think it worked, sort of raise that and bring the students into the conversations about some of the pedagogy and some of the design that goes on. So it does take some thinking about to be able to do that, and a bit of confidence and also a bit of trust in your students as well, to be able to open up those sorts of dialogue, those sorts of conversations. And something that I continually try to tell myself is that students can bring knowledge and insight that I can't, and it's easy to come away and complain about students and all the first year students this, or students that or they are not interested in X or Y and I think it's easy to fall into the trap of having those discussions that sort of talk about what students lack. But I think it's important to recognize that you know the students are a good generation younger than me. Theythen there's a whole lot of knowledge there and that if you just make the space for it, then they can bring insights and they can actually impact on each other's learning in ways that I might not have anticipated and couldn't have done myself.
Inter:	Having regard to that approach Juli, what are the components of the learning environment for this unit, and what factors did you consider when deciding which unit elements to provide online and which unit elements to provide face to face?
Juli:	Um, I probably should give you a bit of background about the unit first just to provide context. This is quite a small unit, it's an elective unit that our fourth year students can choose to do, they're fourth year students that in the main are trying to be secondary teachers, although some of them are in different programs. So I usually end up with about 30 students in the group. So we are not talking about a large classroom and although some of the students come to the unit thinking they're going to learn how to use computers or learn how to use educational software, and we do a bit of that, the main focus of the unit is on developing students' critical awareness of issues and practices related to the use of computers by teachers and students in schools and in different curriculum areas. So, the unit involves the students in enquiries and discussions about how computers are used and whether they should be used and asking a lot of questions about current practices and policies. I will go into the online and the face to face components, but I think an important component and a very important consideration for all the units I teach are the assessment tasks and I really see... the way I treat assessment tasks is that they are the main vehicle for the learning. I mean we have discussions and we have other activities and we have readings, but they are all intended to support the students in the completion of their assessment tasks. We've got three assessment tasks: the first one has two options and one option is a fairly standard report. It's an individual report, it draws on the teaching experience so they have been out on placement for 3 weeks. Shortly after they get back they are asked to provide a report about the policy and practice in terms of computers in the school that they were in. So, they collect data, they collect actual artifacts, policy documents, they also talk to teachers and students about practices in their school and in their particular curriculum area. So, if they're training to be a history teacher then they find out what goes on with computers in history in that school. I provide a second option for that assignment which is not as conventional and I say that because they get to choose to submit it in a digital format. They can build a web page or they can build a power point slide or power point presentation and it's actually got a completely different focus as well as the content of it, so that they get quite a bit of choice in the first one in terms of the format they choose and also the sort of questions that they're asking. So that's the first assignment. The second assignment all the students are required to submit it in a digital format and they get to choose what that format is, and some of them might choose to submit a word document and I say well that's okay, but quite a few of them say, ok, I'm doing computers across the curriculum I've had these opportunities in the tutorials to learn how to make web pages and to learn how to use Power point and how to use Inspiration and what have you, I'm going to use that format and the range of files submitted and a small number of word processed reports. But I think what's particularly interesting about that assignment is that the students get to develop the criteria that the assignments will be assessed on.
Inter:	So that's negotiated is it?
Juli:	It's something that we work out as a class, so that by the end of those negotiations we have a set of criteria that everyone will be assessed on.
Inter:	And they have a stake in that?
Juli:	They have a stake in that. It takes a full... probably across two weeks, it takes about two hours to work out what those criteria are and I see it as one of the more valuable learning experiences in this unit because they have a real stake in it, they want to have a say in what these criteria are, and we go through a process of them having looked at the requirements of the assessment task, what an HD would actually look like, what some of its qualities would be and they talk about that in groups. I provide them with a number of handouts and websites about developing assessment rubrics and its something that they are familiar with, as they are in a fourth year of a teaching program and we have really rich discussions about whether or not there should be a criterion that is based on the presentation and the appropriateness of the use of the digital format, because some of them say, well, I only learnt last week how to make a web page, I don't really want to be judged on the quality of my web page. And then others say but you know, if we put a lot of effort into designing something... so we have quite rich discussions about whether or not that criterion should be included and what the weighting should be for it.
Inter:	So do you expect students to reach a consensus or are there always some who might be not happy with the criteria?
Juli:	I expect them to come up with something we can all live with and it is quite an intensive discussion and what we do... I'm just thinking the last time I did this, they had some time individually to reflect and note down what a good one would look like, what the characteristics of this HD assignment would be, then we put that up onto an overhead, and then we did some categorising of all the various dot points that we had. So we worked out we had about six different sort of features, and then in groups - I had six groups - and they each took a feature and then, we had a grid and I asked them okay, looking at this feature, what would it look like as a pass, a bare pass, what would it look like as a HD and I brought in Bloom's taxonomy and talked about how that might be transposed on the grading system for pass through to HD and we talked about different ways that you might differentiate between grade levels in terms of substance, in terms of quantity, those sorts of things. And each group then came up with indicators for pass, credit, distinction and a HD with their particular characteristic. The last time I did this, I then got a representative of the group to email me their grid and I went through the grid and there was overlap here and there and I sorted of highlighted bits where I thought it was problematic or I thought we needed to discuss it further, and in the following week we continued to talk about it and we looked at some of the possible problems, some of the possible overlaps. We cut the six down to four and we ended up with I think four criteria, it could have been five, I 've got them here somewhere, and people could live with that, we had that conversation and presentation was included. They were happy with that as long as it wasn't something that was evaluating their technical skills. What I was evaluating was the appropriateness of their use of the format.
Inter:	Okay so that work by and large was carried on in face-to-face classes?
Juli:	Yes, Yes that went on face to face. The students did email me, like, each group emailed me with the grid some of them finished sort of after hours and then, the final version of the criteria I posted on DSO and also announced in the workshop. We do do quite a lot of discussion with this unit online, but where decisions have to be made, and there are a lot of people involved, I think that would be very hard to do online using the tools of DSO. It's difficult to take a vote when you're doing anywhere, anytime teaching and learning, and it's difficult to get a feel for who might be disgruntled or who might have an objection but hasn't voiced it and I would have had to be more authoritarian in the decision making had we done it that way I think.
Inter:	Okay so can you outline the different components?
Juli:	In terms of face to face components as I mentioned there are ten 3 hour tutorials and its quite a technologically rich environment, with all the PC notebooks and usually a machine hooked up to a data show as well, in case I or someone else wants to show something to the class, and some sessions are run partly as workshops with demonstrations and students actually building products in there on the computers, or going into DSO while they're actually in the classroom. Others include small group activities, whole class discussions, student presentations, guest speakers that sort of thing. And then as I said. early in the semester the students have a school experience round which is something... another opportunity to sort of bring in more resources and take advantage of that learning that goes on out in the schools. Then online, we've got... Last time I did this, I used three discussion areas. One was just the unit admin and questions area where I told them what was going on week to week and gave them reminders and told them what their homework was and those sorts of things. Then there was a unit discussions area, where I set up discussion topics and in the main I facilitated those, although sometimes the students were given responsibilities to set up discussion topics and put in the questions and to moderate and respond to their peers. And then, I also had a third discussion area, which was entitled assignment questions and discussions, where we could talk about the assignments and I could post information about the assignments including the criteria and that sort of thing. So we had discussions, we had e-readings, I say e-readings, they were provided in various formats, some were links into the library into databases to particular journal articles. Others were PDFs that I provided within the DSO environment and they were sort of core readings that supported the discussions. So for each discussion, there was some sort of stimulus. It was either a reading or perhaps I had a case study or a handout of some sort and a lot of that was provided online. Then I had another area for other electronic resources, that were non core readings, non core handouts, things that I gave out in class I often put them into that folder in DSO in case some students hadn't been there, or they might have missed out, or they lose them and they can kind of go in there, so there was sort of a bag of things that grew over the semester. Another online component was... there was some email exchange between myself and the students - I think that happens in all units these days - around various things particularly there were groups of people submitting work to me via email, as well as by DSO. I used online assignment submission, but that was optional. I encouraged it, particularly for the assignments where it was obviously a digital file they were submitting, but I didn't make it compulsory that they use that. I hadn't used the tool before in DSO, so I didn't want it all to fall in a heap. And the other sort of online component that I think is worth noting is that we did have one wholly online tutorial, where we didn't have the three hour face to face tutorial. Instead, the week prior, the students developed some online activities, they were online discussion activities, they were responsible in groups, for putting up those activities and then they had to go in and respond to each other's activities as well. So, I think we had four discussion areas running in that week, the students didn't have to come in.
Inter:	So this is the wholly online week, and um how did the students feel about this? What were their overall experiences?
Juli:	I put it to them as... this is an experiment, this is a way... this is actually a learning experience for us, so we are going to have this wholly online week and that it may not run as smoothly as we might like within the constraints that we've got, but we'll come back and we'll talk about this, because again, it relates directly to the subject matter for this unit. I did, in the following week, have the students engage in discussion about what they had actually done, what they had learnt, and their thoughts on it. There were quite a few comments on reading online and how difficult it was to read online and how time consuming. Many said that they had printed out the readings because they liked to annotate them, they liked to highlight them, they liked to read them on the tram or whatever. There was one student that commented that she would have liked to have printed the readings, but it seemed to be too expensive so she sat there and she read through them and found that quite arduous to do as you might imagine. There were also comments about the threaded discussion, and I think partially this related to how it was setup. At the time I didn't know how to - or I didn't know it existed - to use the discussion topics in DSO so the discussions that the students set up were set up as threads or parallel threads and the students found, or reported that they found, that it was sometimes difficult to navigate that, that it was actually quite cumbersome and time consuming, particularly if they came in and there were a lot of messages. And there was quite a lot of frustration around that, particularly if they were working from home and it was slow and some of the students said, oh, I was multitasking, I was making the dinner and I was reading my email or I was waiting for DSO discussions to come up and commented on the structure of that. And also that it was a bit confusing, particularly because their peers had been given roles as moderators. They thought it wasn't easy to work out who was the teacher and who was the student, and looking through the threads and the postings they weren't sure. Sometimes a new message would come in and they'd be thinking, well is this from the student who's running this session, or I don't quite remember. So it wasn't an ideal environment for those roles to be clear. The students obviously felt that those roles needed to be clear so they knew who they ought to be responding to. There was some people who commented quite positively on threaded discussion. One woman said that she got quite addicted to reading other people's messages that she actually didn't send in a message of her own. I thought…
Inter:	That's an interesting take.
Juli:	It is an interesting take, she said that at first she saw them all and she wasn't going to go through them all systematically, but she found that she actually enjoyed reading them and wanted to go through them. So she did systematically go through the 30 odd messages in each of these threads, but then didn't actually...yeah, she felt that she'd learned a lot by then and didn't feel like she needed to post one herself. Which was interesting.
Inter:	Did she feel that what she might have had to say had already been said?
Juli:	She didn't actually say that, but other students did. In fact there were a couple of students who said that once they'd read and seen that other people had covered the points that they were going to put in, that their motivation for posting similar points really dropped and they were not really sure about how they would take the discussion further or how they ought to contribute, given that what they were going to say in response to the reading or in response to the question had already been said.
Inter:	How did you deal with that?
Juli:	Well I actually, I didn't participate in that week because I had put it over to them. So this was feedback that came in both electronically and in the discussions that we had about online learning in the face to face workshop in the following week. But, um, thinking of other units that I've taught and I'm teaching in at the moment, I usually say quite explicitly early on in a discussion and in my scaffolding of a discussion, that, if you come in and there are already seven or eight people who have responded to a question that's been put and you feel like the points have been covered, then think about how you might respond to those posts that have come in from your peers. Can you think of a counter example, does their response... is it similar to the response that you were going to put in, or is it different? Are there subtleties and try and get them to …
Inter:	Tease out the finer points.
Juli:	Yes, so that you do get something that's a bit closer to a classroom discussion that diverges and converges, rather than just having all these parallel posts which gets extremely tedious to read and I sympathise with the students. And what I do as a teacher, when I go in and I see that there are ten responses to a question that I've put, if I get through reading those ten responses and I'm getting a bit bored myself, then I usually send in a response that says, 'we've had some great issues raised XY and Z' and I might refer back to a particular student, or to a number of students, a sort of a summary and then I ask the next question.
Inter:	A leading question from that?
Juli:	Yes, that's going to take them that bit further, or that's going to provide a critique of what has been provided by those seven or eight students. I think in the main, the students did take that in the spirit I intended it, in that it was... Although the discussion topics that were set up by their peers were related to computers across the curriculum and to readings that I'd chosen or stimulus that I'd chosen, that they saw that week as a sort of learning experience themselves that they could experience themselves that they could then look at.
Inter:	Experiential so to speak?
Juli:	So they could critique that and then they could talk about what they might do in a classroom or whether that would be appropriate, or what sort of things, in the future, technological developments might help them to do things in effective ways online.
Inter:	How effective do you think the online experience has been in developing students’ learning about the critical elements associated with technology use?
Juli:	I introduce a framework early on in this unit, which I find very useful and it’s a framework that many of the students are familiar with. It comes from literacy, and by this point, they’ve done a unit in literacy across the curriculum. And it’s a framework – it’s a three dimensional look at literacy that includes operational, cultural and critical elements and I usually bring in a reading. There’s one fairly recent by Alana Snyder that’s on digital literacies, so it’s taken its framework from literacy and applied it to the use of technologies, where the operational is learning how to actually use the machine, so how to use powerpoint, how to save to the disc or whatever: the cultural is, I suppose, using the technology so that you’re actually creating something that is a culturally sensible artifact, so considerations of audience and purpose, rather than making a Powerpoint presentation using a whole lot of small font and gory colours etc, actually being able to ask questions about what is appropriate and what is culturally useful: and then the critical dimension which is asking the ‘why’ questions, and the ‘what if’ questions. So, I find that in terms of operational learning, the online environment is quite a difficult environment to work with. Unless I was to set up Flash animations with talkovers and step-by-step tutorials through how to do this, how to do that, I wouldn’t find attractive at all. I think it’d bore the students stupid… I think the best way to actually have the students learn how to make web pages is to do that in a room full of students with the computers at hand where I can give a couple of demos or a student can give a demonstration, and then the students can set to work on making what it is they want to make and I and others who know how can circulate and troubleshoot. So online operational: I think there are certain things where it’s good to actually see someone, have someone there face-to-face.

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