Digital Exposure: what do educators have to teach about learning today?

Description

This presentation comes from a research project, using autoethnographic methodologies, in which I attempted to investigate a collaborative digital learning space, that I believed would give me valuable insight into the contemporary practices I encourage students to employ. However, in line with elements of my literature review (eg. Markham, 1994), realisations of self-vulnerability stalled me at the initial point of entry. Being forced to contend with anxiety akin to that of the students I teach, and experiencing interplay between the traditional and the current, has given me insights beyond those I expected, and which are potentially of wider benefit.

Takeaway

Reflecting on personal senses of inadequacy and overcoming is uncomfortable, but potentially inspiring. If as teachers we allow ourselves opportunity to feel the heightened emotional states of studentship, we may be able to reconsider communication with those we teach. Participants will hear a ‘confessional tale’ (Van Maanen, 2011) and various student response, as prologue to considerations of individual agency. Whilst the ‘discussion’ may be an internal one, prompts that provide a suggested framework for this will be made available. The intention is that all present can realise what else they may bring to encourage others.

Abstract

This discussion is intended to encourage notions of ourselves as potential learners: what we fear; appreciate; and have benefited from. My contention is that the bringing of self into the pedagogic equation can be a powerful catalyst for communication; and that collaborative digital spaces offer potential for exploration of identity through experimentation, reflection, storytelling and profiling. Yet such self-exposure arguably renders us vulnerable; and this dichotomy of the desire to share alongside the fear of opening ourselves up to scrutiny, contributes to making contemporary learning in a webbed world engagingly unknowable.

The presentation draws upon the findings of my MA dissertation (2015), which questioned the particular affordances of an online creative learning environment. As student / researcher, I experienced the anxiety of preparing to enter an unknown domain, heightened by particular realisations of the requirements of presenting my self, both in this space and in the subsequent report. This became the story of my processes of discovery, the appreciation of the difficulty of choice and the necessity of sense of security to balance the risk of learning.

In my teaching positions, on two very different and heterogeneous courses, instances of anxiety – whether directly expressed – are palpable. Regardless of diversity, the requirement of digital exposure appears one of the greatest factors of challenge within each: for example, as student participants are obliged to come to terms with the semi-public reflection of blogging, or accessing of course material through the VLE. My personal experiences and research findings can thus be triangulated by those of others, at various points of a learning spectrum, as they struggle with how to be a student. So I suggest that we might ask ourselves: what do educators have to teach about learning today?