These past two weeks have been chock full of great stuff, and we’re excited to lead the class in discussion! Following is an outline that we’ll be using:
Wenger Article Debriefing (5 min)
This week we finished off Wenger’s book. We read about (among other things) participation versus non-participation, modes of belonging, learning communities, and education. We’ve bulleted a few questions that we raised while reading and invite the class to add some more that we can discuss later today.
- Why do students not participate?
- Is non-participation different from refusal to participate?
- Is non-participation necessarily a bad thing?
- How can we “anchor imagination into a learning community” and harness students’ engagement into the classroom?
- Why do we do the things we do? What imaginative and alignment purposes guide our actions?
- What is the trade-off between having multiple viewpoints involved in engagement and having a single alignment and purpose?
- What is the relevance of schools in creating communities of learning?
- Does participation require that someone respond to me?
The TLT Symposium (15 min in groups, 20 min as class)
“There is no point going [to the TLT Symposium] unless the new perspectives we gain in the process can find a realization in a new form of engagement upon our return” (Wenger, p. 217).
We have just discussed the symposium as a class, but we want to discuss what we’ve learned this week from Wenger and “remix” that with what we’ve learned from the Symposium. Let’s break into groups, talk about our experiences, and then come back together again as a class to discuss what we’ve learned.
Example: One of the TLT projects involved assigning medical students a project to film patients with chronic illnesses. How did this project enable those students to not only be formed by learning medical knowledge but to be transformed by learning how to engage with members of a community they would ordinarily not engage with? Did this project make them better future doctors? Why or why not?
Implications for CI 597 (20 min)
- How has your being a member of this community classroom changed your identity? Your imagination? If you haven’t changed, have you really learned anything?
- Despite the fact that we are a community of learning, some students still feel disconnected from other students, from the class as a whole, and from the “multi-semester, ongoing conversation.” Why is this?
- We have been divided into teams. How has this impacted our community as a whole? Has it been a good thing? Bad? In what ways?
- Let’s talk a little bit about the first iteration of CI 597 and how we relate to it.
- Who will continue to participate after the course “ends”? Just the techies? Theorists? How will the end of the semester affect our community?
- How can we change our class to enhance learning (the creation of identity through engagement)?