“In the digital world, we have a myriad of opportunities to invite students to develop these skills if the instructor has the courage and tenacity to relinquish some authority and level the playing field” (Barber et al., 2015).
Years of teaching have taught me to be open and embrace theories, pedagogies, classroom applications and new technologies. Before I got to the city colleges in 2006, I had an opportunity to visit the studio classrooms at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. My former institution received an HSI grant with Truman College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. Technology was just beginning to infiltrate classrooms, and applied linguists were at the forefront of embracing this technology. That opportunity and grant with the City Colleges helped me move to Harold Washington College (another city college) in 2006.
I have been of two minds over these years regarding integrating technology into my classroom - leader and cynic. I have led numerous workshops on group work, blogs, wikis, voice recording, project-based learning, student-centered and active learning and have seen my colleagues across disciplines at my college be at the forefront of their career same However, there are brilliant professors who are still teaching mostly the same way as they were two decades ago.
Right before I got to Harold Washington College, the administration had done a major overhaul of the classrooms. To the chagrin of my colleagues who have always been on the forefront of their teaching pedagogy, they bolted the desks together in rows. This meant they tables could no longer be moved around to create more user-friendly teaching environments. In the first faculty development week that I remember, my colleagues led a workshop called Unbolted in protest of these plastic pieces that held the tables together. A few weeks later, we came to work with screwdrivers to remove the plastic pieces and tossed them. To be honest, they tossed them because I did not have tenure yet. In other words, these bolts prevented desks from being put into pods or a big square or any other way except for boring rows that are not conducive to project-based, student-centered and active learning.
I give this background because when I reflect on my years of technology integration, sometimes I feel like we still preach to the choir. Students tend to go along with what teachers do if they are effective, and teachers who lecture can also be effective. In fact, I haven't encountered this problem, but I know people who have where they encounter students that question the student-centered room because it makes them act and produce instead of sitting back and pretending to take notes. Nevertheless, I don't give up. Here I am in the last of my courses for my master’s plus 60 graduate credits, and I chose this one. I can also get lazy, but this course is making me work hard!
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