Values, expectations, positions and actions

First, I wish to set some values and expectations, these are presented in the form of priorities for teaching and learning experiences in all kinds of pedagogic form they may take.

Value the process of skill development and by every means possible provide active encouragement;
Make the learning experiences student-directed, not in a vapid acknowledgement of what learner says, but in an active project-based inquiry process;
Use every effort to ensure that students have access to multi-modal, robust and timely scaffolding, support and reflection tools that enable them, regardless of background, to situate themselves in the learning;
Learn together on a pathway with explicit and referenced direction, with all roads leading to critical scholarship in the learning and teaching space; and
Situate practice in a matrix of possibility rather than a sole outcome [✓] where the matrix supports a just, ethical and brighter educational future for the student and their students.

These values inform my own position in the learning, as well as informing practical (accountable) measures of success in my teaching and learning praxis. Next, I wish to situate 'me' through commitment to the values above. I pledge to be a committed pragmatic radical, in the sense originally described by Garth Boomer. I will do this in:

acting as a toughened fighter for students from a range of backgrounds who may not be able to 'speak out';
through knowing when to act, what is possible, understanding benefits and risks, and by building community and connection;
in taking effective, empirical, action, not dreaming of utopia, or dwelling in failures;
by endeavouring to understand learners, through their situated position in the classroom and society; and
in re-theorising educational context, negotiating expectations with learners, establishing an actionable, realistic, and meaningful pathway forward drawing on the values established above.

To take this in to practical learning and teaching, then, requires statements embedded in the inevitable reality in which I work – the higher education context – that are actionable and reasonable to expect:

Situating the expected learning outcomes and aims in the context of the lived reality of students and the context of understanding our 'democratic' structures;
Involving the learners on a journey towards what is constantly a new: teaching and learning structure and content, a set of expectations and the (meta)physical layout of teaching spaces;
Presenting learning in models that provide enough structure and guidance to enable effective exploration;
By enabling students to design and deliver authentic projects as assessment; and
Rooting the learning in exemplars of real practice through robust research.

Ultimately these values are to be cemented in expectations:

If expectations are not made clear, if the frames of teaching and learning, for the learner, remain unchanged, there will often be some resistance. By taking small steps towards crafting a teacher-student partnership - indeed a learner-learner partnership, where teacher and student play both roles of learner and teacher - many potential pitfalls may be overcome. Without such a partnership students may, drawing from their experience of learning ‘so far’, use their best powers of resistance to retain what they know of learning and the comfort they have from building a picture of the 'rules' - in light of the experiences they have had in the classroom already.

It is my goal to impress the importance of dually working as negotiator (in partnership with the students) for the design of the classroom, curriculum, and learning within the teaching/learning context, and with those parties that may resist, and in equal part on negotiating with students on the expectations and requirements for learning. After all, even disengaged students will have, perhaps after some encouragement, voices to share. Beginning the conversation is a way to engage all learners - negating the risk of “strike action”.

Then for the teacher, as pragmatic radical who is, or is becoming, an expert negotiator of classroom, curriculum, culture, and society (within its bounds) – and indeed negotiator of expectations within each of these circumstances – may be able to, in some way, avoid becoming a victim of circumstance, or a docile bystander and acceptor unproblematically of new decontextualised regimes. In this way, perhaps it will be possible to harness the contradictions of policies and testing, the constraints, and to employ our agency to make a real difference for our learners.

We must not watch as possibilities to learn, facilitate, coach and engage, indeed improve our learning and teaching theories, pass us by. We must seize every opportunity to use the contradictions and frames that are set up before us, traps to the uninitiated, as a vehicle for good teaching and learning in our systems.

Teaching Philosophy | Aidan Cornelius-Bell This page is part of the collection 'I teach who I am - but who am I? A collection of personal philosophies of teaching from Flinders University staff'.

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