Course Design: Teaching As Learning

For graduate students with an interest in
developing their own courses/curricula in an
experimental laboratory context for a possible
career or side-hustle in education. This course
takes an expansive view toward adaptive and
innovative learning environments as realms of
creative exploration and experimentation.

Students will have an opportunity to develop and
test their own and their peers' course ideas, as
well as more broad integrative curriculum ideas in
a supportive laboratory environment. This course
could serve a variety of goals: academic job talk
prep (an added plus for a candidate with a well
formed class), Post Graduate Teaching Fellowship
proposals, Winter Session course proposals, as
well as seeds to develop truly innovative
curricula in what may very well be a radically
different academic landscape post COVID19. This is
not a course in how to teach courses that already
exist in a curriculum. Our goal will be to
develop personal and unique learning situations
that embrace a diversity of teaching and learning
modes as we integrate a broad range of active
tools available to teachers and learners in 2021
and beyond.


The best courses are active experiments in
discovery and growth around a particular idea or a
cluster of ideas. The challenge then, is in
designing curricula that stay flexible and alive
while maintaining its intended trajectory. What is
the balance between anarchy and control -- both
being necessary in the right balance to create the
richest learning situations. Many of the
educational structures we have existed in tend to
induce prejudice toward what "can and cannot be
done," and what "should and should not be done" in
a course. We must disrupt our conditioned ways of
learning as we discuss strategies to become
effective peer leaders in the classroom; in other
words, understanding and valuing ourselves in the
role of teachers as co-learners.

There are always administrative/institutional
pressures that come to bear on any course. I will
lead discussions on the complexities and
potentials of these administrative structures and
how they rarely, if one knows how to understand
them, prevent the implementation of innovation and
non-standard teaching practices. Productive
transgression is often a good thing. Explaining
that to administrators is a skill to learn. This
means we will discuss how to work within the
realities of existing structures and also how to
be a part of the innovation needed to bring these
institutions toward a more productive flexibility.