Since most of my teaching is highly collaborative, I’ve learned to embrace unpredictability and adapt strategies to meet the particular needs of each group of students that I work with. While my approach to instruction changes depending on the instructional context and my role in the classroom, the following pedagogical methods serve as guiding principles.
Frame Classroom as Community
Establish a shared lexicon that is reinforced by activities, observations, readings, and discussions. I carefully curate course readings, discussion prompts, activities, and lectures to ensure that students develop a shared understanding of terminology and practices that they will use throughout the semester. I begin all information literacy sessions with a discussion about the terms that students will encounter in the library and often pull out phrases from course assignments like “scholarly sources” or “original research article” to unpack and define collectively.
An emphasis on shared language is also essential in Learning Places where the central themes of the course—performance, public space, social justice—may be understood in different ways by students depending on their previous knowledge and experiences. After reading about and discussing historical and contemporary examples of public performances and tactics used by environmental activists, we conduct a field visit to an environmentally disturbed area (like Newtown Creek) or a public place where historic social interventions have taken place (like Zuccotti Park). Following an initial visit, students conduct research about the place and associated socio-political / environmental issues and then return to the site where we do some kind of active, performance exercises based on student research. Students use formal site report templates to record spatial observations and research findings and then, reflect on how their conception of the place and their relationship to it changed after the performance visit.
Use collective, affective experiences (in and outside of the classroom) as a shared critical lens. This approach works to establish community and also allows students to connect new concepts with what they already know. In an information literacy session, I might ask students if they’ve ever encountered information online that they couldn’t access for free (research articles, streaming movies, etc) in order to invite a critical analysis of the subscription content that students pay for as part of their tuition.
In Learning Places, our site visits serve as shared experiences and come with emotions—anxiety, excitement—that we can unpack later in class and use as touchstones. Through a kind of strategic estrangement, students developed a heightened awareness of place and begin to critically think about their relationship to that place and to each other. I have increasingly focused on our emotional reactions to place as a starting point to talk about spatial experience and socio-political issues.
*See presentation on place based pedagogy and affect co-authored with Prof. Jason Montgomery and presented as part of “Place-Based Pedagogy in NYC: The City as a Classroom.” Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching Lunchtime Seminar. Hunter College, March 2019.
It actually takes a village. I facilitate educational encounters that reinforce the fact that expertise is dispersed. When I’m leading an information literacy session, the instructor and students are the experts on the course content and their own research questions but I bring my own domain expertise and introduce the tools students will need to find and evaluate information.
In Learning Places I invite guest lecturers from a variety of disciplines in to introduce new perspectives on course content and have guests lead some of our field visits. Inviting people with different backgrounds, and educational and professional experiences to contribute gives students a multi-dimensional take on the places, performance tactics, and concepts we study. I believe that a reliance on dispersed expertise reinforces the fact that educational experiences are “real” and can extend beyond the time/space of a semester or a classroom.
Reimagine the Site of the Educational Encounter
Break the fourth wall. In information literacy sessions it is necessary for me to build a rapport with students quickly since I typically only meet with a class one time for 75 minutes. I often reference my own experience as a researcher and teacher to connect with students while also defining concepts related to scholarly publishing. For example, when defining what a peer-reviewed source is and how these sources differ from popular articles, I often tell students that when I’m not teaching students how to do research, I write articles about teaching students how to do research and submit them to academic journals in my field. This example often prompts students to ask questions about how scholarly publishing works and helps students see that academic research is local and connected to their own educational experience.
Incorporate physical ephemera into the classroom. I find students are more open and curious when working with, analyzing, and discussing physical artifacts. In Research and Documentation for the Information Age I often start the semester by bringing in samples of unsolicited informational ephemera that I’ve been given as a pedestrian in NYC the previous month—flyers advertising protests, religious pamphlets, advertisements, magazines—and have students analyze these artifacts. During the activity, I invite students to consider the audience and purpose of each piece of ephemera as well as what the artifacts reveal about how I (as the recipient of each piece) am perceived and what parts of the city I visit. Once students recognize that we all come into contact with and analyze information every day, I use this frame of reference to start conversations about how information dissemination models play a role in what information we have access to, how we analyze sources, and which strategies we need to learn to conduct research in new environments.
*See Evaluating Sources Activity ENG1101
*See Ephemera Analysis Activity
Deconstruct the space of the classroom itself to invite critical reflection. As a proponent of critical pedagogy, I try to provoke discussions about hierarchy and power in educational environments. In the context of Learning Places this conversation takes on a literal dimension as we gain experience examining built environments and the ways they reinforce power structures, reflect social hierarchy, and dictate possible actions and interactions. In the Fall 2019 semester Prof. Swift and I rearranged the physical space of the classroom (which usually has students clustered around small tables) to reinforce concepts introduced in a reading about theater architecture and audience experience. Our rearranged classroom was more open and disrupted the natural hierarchy of the room by placing students in front of the smart board where the instructor is usually situated. We used a writing prompt to connect the classroom space to the reading and then had a dialogue about how the rearrangement changed the students perceptions of the space, disrupted the idea of a “front” and “back,” and could potentially allow for different interactions between students.
Strategically Raise (and Lower) the Stakes
Make projects real. It is common in many disciplines to model assignments off of industry documents and to structure projects to reflect workflows that students would encounter in a real professional setting. I think that raising the stakes of assignments and moving beyond simulation changes how students think about their coursework and disrupts perceived barriers between educational and “real” spaces.
In all of my credit courses I design assignments that require students to create and share information on public platforms. I developed a formal podcasting assignment that several of my colleagues have adapted. Students host their completed group podcasts on Soundcloud, create their own meta-data, and decide on a creative commons license that dictates how others can use (or re-purpose) their podcast. I’ve also had students edit Wikipedia and contribute photographs to the Wikimedia Commons. These assignments help students learn about information ethics, attribution, and language communities and at the same time, students see that their work is valued as more than an ephemeral or transactional assignment.
In the adapted version of Learning Places, which requires students to stage a public performative intervention in response to a socio-political problem that they’ve researched, the coursework becomes real in every sense of the word. The projects happen in real time, for a real live audience, and students must adapt to unpredictable obstacles (weather, police, hecklers). In Fall 2018, a group of students constructed a house out of Amazon boxes to raise awareness about how the construction of new Amazon headquarters in Long Island City would effect housing costs and displace local residents. Another group of students set up a temporary Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) application center in Voorhees Hall and staged a multi-lingual performance to educate their fellow students about the process of applying for DACA. In Summer 2019, students created a wearable high-rise luxury condo with facts about tenant rights and spoke to commuters about housing discrimination outside of Atlantic Terminal in Downtown Brooklyn. Another group of students created a puppet show dramatizing how MTA delays and infrastructure problems impact commuters outside of City Hall in lower Manhattan. During these projects, students need to think on their feet and be fluent enough in their topic to answer questions. During post-assignment reflections, students talk about how a public audience reacted to their project and are often surprised that people think they are activists or part of a formal advocacy organization.
Preface formal research assignments with scaffolded, iterative classroom activities. Iteration and experimentation is the only way to really learn how to do research. In all of my credit courses students develop and refine research questions and gain facility with library research tools through informal activities before they complete graded research assignments. Once students have this foundational knowledge, they can exercise creative control over the content, structure, and genre of formal research assignments like the podcast and performance projects described above. With very flexible assignments, I always supply models, templates, and am very clear about the deliverables that students are required to produce, which reduces ambiguity about expectations and grading criteria.
*See: Reading and Research Activity
*See: Podcast assignment
