reflection after seven (!) weeks of classes

Having not given myself the binding instruction or commitment to do a reflective blog entry every week, I find my blogging unsurprisingly sporadic this semester. On one hand I feel badly about that: I feel like I should be reflecting in this written space more often. On the other hand I don’t feel badly at all: I'm engaged in my usual practice of making notes about each class session after it concludes, but those are notes to myself, and while there’s nothing confidential there, I do worry about the possible effects and consequences of having members of my class read those rough and raw notes while we are still actively engaged in the early stages of the ongoing process of producing our learning community. When I do the mid-semester anonymous surveys in a couple of weeks, those results and my thoughts on them will be public contributions, but that’s a bit different from the in-process notes I regularly take.

That said, what I can and will say here is that the thing that has been most puzzling to me this semester is the class discussion format. 26 people is not a large class in some ways and in some pedagogies, but in and for others it’s quite unwieldy. If I were lecturing, 26 is a fine number, small enough that people can ask questions without feeling “performance anxiety” of the sort that can shut down questions in a much larger lecture setting, but large enough that the lecture form doesn’t break down into conversation all the time. But I don’t lecture, deliberately: I am not interested in any student figuring out what I think, and in my experience that’s what often happens when I or anyone else lectures. I don’t think of my role in the classroom as a presenter of arguments; my job is instead to facilitate encounters, and while that can be done through lectures of a particular sort — the “grand tour” sort of lecture, come here and look at what I have found — I’m usually not comfortable doing that in the classroom. So instead, it’s “here’s a thing, let’s see what we make of it.”

And for that kind of pedagogy, 26 is a large number, particularly in 75-minute class sessions. The common space of the conversation is a scarce piece of real estate, and I am still experimenting with how to create openness and hospitality in that space while still allowing the conversation to find its own way forward. Because that’s the real trick: to give the conversation its own reins, to let it breathe and stretch out in its own directions, not beholden to any one of the participants. “Joint action,” as Shotter (among others) would call it. I haven’t yet found a combination of structure and flexibility that will do that in this group...but I will keep trying alternatives and see what happens. Tomorrow is probably a second fishbowl, and Thursday likely a small group-with-outreporting kind of thing, but we’ll see.

Eventually I want to walk into the room and give the lightsaber to someone else and see what they do with it. Not quite sure we’re there yet, but perhaps soon.