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Teaching PhilosophyCommunity and Collaboration My attention to assessment as a process also means that community building and a collaborative emphasis is important to most of what we do. Because students construct rubrics and assess in my classes, I continually attempt to build a healthy community by getting students to think, articulate to their colleagues, and rethink their ideas and assumptions. I use small group activities, but also carefully structure class discussions in stages and the written products of those interactions. For example, an activity might begin with some individual pre-work at home, an assessment of a colleague's essay, which is brought to class. The day's session would begin with small group activities using this pre-work to build a collaborative document that rethinks and shapes the pre-work. We would then move to a larger class discussion that presents findings and conclusions. Finally, I often ask students to debrief by reflecting on the day's activities in writing for their colleagues' benefit (e.g. they might consider: What lessons might we take from today's activity?).My job in all this is to facilitate equitable and fair exchanges, which can be difficult at times. Additionally, over a semester's time, my hope is to get my students to a point where they aren't dependent on me to validate their ideas or conversations. Knowledge and insight aren't given to them by me, but constructed by the dialectics of the course. While this too is very difficult given how our courses are institutionally and socially situated, and how my position is also constructed and its authority vested, it's important that students think critically on their own, and see how they are being "critical," and even construct what "critical" means. This often becomes a reoccurring theme or topic in my classes. In this pedagogical model, collaboration isn't about finding consensus, or just coming to an agreement (although this has to happen often), it's about engaging in discussions self-consciously, understanding how the validity of knowledge and various positions is constructed and maintained, articulating and questioning individual and communal biases, dispositions, commonsense, logics, and values, but it's also about finding ways to work with each other and for each other, ways that refigure the "sacrifice" of ideas and positions (especially in discourse) as humility, generosity, and the development of an atmosphere for learning in the classroom/community. Select another link to read more about my teaching:
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