Navigating Different Learning and Teaching Styles

Questions:

1. How should we combine or emphasize different modes of teaching/learning?
2. What does bel hooks suggest as important teaching techniques?
3. What is engaged pedagogy, and what are its strengths and limits?
4. What is disengaged pedagogy, and what are its strengths and limits? Authorities with analyses: telling learners how to think
5. How is learning like having a conversation?
6. How is teaching storytelling?

An important identity difference within the educational system is the powerful identity of the teacher and the sometimes-infantilized identity of the student. Blythe McVicker Clinchy uses the term “connected knowing,” where people connect by affirming their experienced commonalities, and also validate their experienced differences. Connected knowing is contrasted with disconnected knowing, where knowledge is abstracted from experience, rather than imbedded within experience. Disconnected knowing is practiced when the teacher imparts knowledge to the student, rather than creating a connected experience in the classroom.

bel hooks has helped us develop an “engaged pedagogy” in her writing, “Teaching to Transgress.” If we engage each other as equals in the classroom, where each student and each teacher can share their unique experiences, in the way that they inform the academic content of the course, then we can overcome the power inequity that undermines the potential for collaborative education. Furthermore, teaching does not need to focus on lectures and note-taking. In can often be more productive, as well as interesting, if it stimulates conversations and storytelling.

In mainstream Euro-American societies, teaching has often been reduced to teachers telling students how to think about the subject matter of the course. In courses where memorization and mechanical relationships are being explained, this authority-centered approach may be appropriate. However, in courses that touch on subjects, where student have lived experiences (which include most of the liberal arts and sciences), an authority-centered approach will often deny the validity of at least some of students’ experiences. This is unnecessarily oppressive and coercive. Differing student experiences must be embraced, otherwise, the domination of “marginal” student experiences will continue, and valid difference and conflict will be denied and made invisible within academic culture.