Principles

This is a note that includes the key teaching principles as a sketch for the teaching manifesto or a teaching philosophy.

Relates to the notes on:

Why

Overcome the environmental crisis
Benefit from the richness of the whole world, not only human cultures
Support wellbeing and thriving for all
Strive to understand the world as it is

What

Study life in all its expressions, beneficial or harmful, human-like or weird, familiar or hidden
Study abiotic as well as living systems along with their patterns, histories, and relationships

How

Ensure the culture of truthfulness, or 'life in truth' and 'truth in life'
Support critical debate, disagreement and contest are the healthy condition for the truth community
Resist exclusion (cf. ableism, colonialism, epistemicide, speciesism, racism, etc.) and insure the practical mechanisms of inclusion
Support moral imagination, use speculative narrative, lived examples, critical designs
Use methods that can support many forms of knowledge, including non-linguistic, tacit, distributed, etc.
Expect slow learning and gradual accumulation of knowledge, expertise and wisdom over years
Engage with mathematical and data-driven approaches,1 use evidence, use measuring
Use the precautionary principle to frame innovation, consider novelty and innovation with scepticism
Introduce explicit constraints and checks to confine individual human creativity, treat creativity with the same scepticism as innovation
Do not hide knowledge where it is available
Accept that knowledge can be dangerous and supply it with how-to-use manuals
Support forgetting and unlearning as well as learning
Treat traditions, especially human traditions, with the same scepticism and suspicion as innovations
Treat human knowledge and capabilities with humility, understand that they are not unique and that their goodness is in question
Preference localism and bioregionalism but resist idealisation of historical systems
Practice what you teach
Learn while teaching. Teach yourself as well as others
Offer a promise (a future-oriented manifesto, risk-taking and release, an interval and an opening)2
Seek support from alternative sources of knowledge and practice
Seek support from organisations that aim to resist hegemonic injustice (cf. unions, grass-roots organisations, etc.)
Rely on learner-oriented approaches
Commit to evidence-based approaches to education
Integrate diversity as a core principle, taking it beyond human-only diversity

Where and When

Ensure that learning is lifelong, culture-long, species-long, etc.
Extend beyond local responsibilities when considering damage
Go deep and consider local regions and stakeholders when seeking to produce benefits
Support intergenerational and interspecies knowledge
Support local and regional knowledges

Who

Do not suspend the ethical/moral considerations to fit the local circumstances
Support the disempowered and treat the dominant powers with suspicion
Reach for and use the knowledge on nonhuman lifeforms wherever possible
Deploy forms of positive discriminations to correct power misbalances

Things to Resist

Resist the knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.” (cf. Umberto Eco)
Resist oppression and injustice, for example:
- Employability is exploitability, teach the dark side of employability, exploitation and alienation of work in capitalist systems, etc.3

Notes on the Teaching Ethics

Towards a manifesto or a declaration.

Formulate key challenges, commitments and responses of the degree. Share it with tutors and students.

Main objective of the discipline:

The objective for the discipline is to support shared habitation (that is - life) on Earth (that is not to build, etc., this falls under methods and is optional).

The key objective of teaching:

To support humans and others to learn to live together.

The key commitment:

We shall declare why we teach what we teach (this is to resist essentialism and the dominance of the status quo)

Topics:

justice: human and nonhuman (de-colonialism, ecocentric justice, alternative economic and habitation systems as supported by design)
- we shall give voice to all who have knowledge, wisdom, history and all who can teach: land, birds, humans, machines, etc.
resilience: understand the harms: climate change, biodiversity, etc. understand possible responses and limitations
innovation: approaches, methods, tools and opportunities
- social/cultural innovation, de-growth, voluntary simplicity, inclusion (more-than-human cultures)
- conceptual innovation: shall show best ideas from the past, the current practice and possible futures
- technical innovation: we shall provide an opportunity to learn the best of current and emerging technologies
constraints and cautions to temper innovation

Implications:

Teach to design holistically, teach to undesign, repair, etc.
Support ideas with evidence and teach ways to generate this (numerically)
Etc.

Development and Preparation

To prepare a Teaching Philosophy document, ask: "according to you, how do students learn best?"

Teaching Portfolio

A personal teaching portfolio reveals beliefs about student learning and what ‘good’ or ‘effective’ teaching is.

A useful step in building a case for teaching excellence:

a brief overview of the teaching approach (philosophy) & history
a careful selection of materials that:
- shows aspects of the teaching practice and experience;
- demonstrates approaches to teaching and understanding of good teaching; and
- provides examples that demonstrate facilitations of student learning.

Examples of frameworks

It is a good idea to use a framework to structure the teaching philosophy.

Lenses

Brookfield’s Four Lenses as a framework for critical reflection:

Theoretical lens: theory and research on university teaching & learning
Autobiographical (self) lens: our histories/experiences as students and teachers
Peer lens: view of colleagues
Student lens: students perspective and experiences of our teaching

Brookfield, Stephen. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. 2nd ed. 1995. Reprint, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.

The Melbourne Way

The Melbourne Way, apparently is to be expanded into seven rows as advised at the end of 2023.

Learning to Teach

Interest and explanation
Concern and respect for students and student learning
Appropriate assessment and feedback
Clear goals and intellectual challenge
Independence, control and engagement
Learning from students

Ramsden, Paul. Learning to Teach in Higher Education. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003.

What the Best Teachers Do

Create a ‘natural critical learning environment’
Get students’ attention and keep it
Start with the students rather than the discipline
Seek commitments
Help students learn outside of class
Engage students in disciplinary thinking
Create diverse learning experiences

Bain, Ken. What the Best College Teachers Do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

The Case for Teaching Effectiveness

Personal teaching for student engagement. Approaches to teaching, teaching activity, support and feedback. Leadership. Of teaching teams, programs/courses, course accreditation, mentoring.

References

Barnett, Ronald, and Søren Smedegaard Bengtsen. Knowledge and the University: Reclaiming Life. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.

Bennett, Karen. ‘Epistemicide!’ The Translator 13, no. 2 (2007): 151–69. https://doi.org/10/gj7wzr.

Brookfield, Stephen. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. 2nd ed. 1995. Reprint, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.

Hall, Richard. ‘The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of History’. Postdigital Science and Education 2, no. 3 (2020): 830–48. https://doi.org/10/gqbwt2.

Hooley, Tristram, Ronald G. Sultana, and Rie Thomsen, eds. Career Guidance for Emancipation: Reclaiming Justice for the Multitude. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Hooley, Tristram, Ronald G. Sultana, and Rie Thomsen, eds. Career Guidance for Social Justice: Contesting Neoliberalism. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Vandendriessche, Eric, and Rik Pinxten, eds. Indigenous Knowledge and Ethnomathematics. Cham: Springer, 2022.

Footnotes

Chronaki, Anna, and Eirini Lazaridou. ‘Subverting Epistemicide Through “the Commons”: Mathematics as Re/Making Space and Time for Learning’. In Indigenous Knowledge and Ethnomathematics, edited by Eric Vandendriessche and Rik Pinxten, 161–79. Cham: Springer, 2022.˄
Áine Mahon, “The Gift of the Interval? Revisiting the Promises of Higher Education,” in The Promise of the University: Reclaiming Humanity, Humility, and Hope, ed. Áine Mahon (Singapore: Springer, 2021), 1–13.˄
Maïa Pal, “Employability as Exploitability: A Marxist Critical Pedagogy,” in Thinking Beyond Neoliberalism: Alternative Societies, Transition, and Resistance, ed. Neal Harris and Onur Acaroğlu (Cham: Springer, 2022), 197–219.˄