Contemporary Pedagogy

2020 has been a unique year in terms of a rough transition to online spaces and how we use online technologies. All of us had to adapt to the online teaching and learning environment, which is traditionally not seen as effective as the in-person environments. On the other hand, some educators observed improved performance, better use of resources, and high engagement. This 100% online experience has been a very didactic experience for both educators and students.

However, this online experience will not last forever—at some point, we will be back to classrooms, labs, and offices. Bill Gates estimates that by the end of Spring 2021, we will get back to normal. However, what is the “new normal” in terms of teaching? What did we learn from the pandemic? And how will it change our future teaching/learning practices? These questions are yet to be answered.

One potential answer for future teaching practices is hybrid flexible learning, aka HyFlex. Hyflex is a multi-channel approach that aims to maximize student engagement. It is developed at San Francisco State University. HyFlex utilizes three channels to maximize the learning experience and ensure the learning objectives: face to face (F2F), online synchronous, and online asynchronous.

In HyFlex, the meeting session takes place in both face to face and online environment (synchronously and asynchronously), and students choose the modality to participate. It also includes effective use of the online affordances additional to the F2F experience, such as video materials, discussion forums, and collaboration platforms. It accommodates all students who learn in different ways. This creates an inclusive learning environment in which individuals can tailor their learning experience using the tools provided. Another advantage of HyFlex is the flexibility to adapt to different circumstances. For example, in case of a natural disaster, epidemic, pandemic, or any extraordinary condition which would disrupt the learning experience, the modality switch can be seamlessly made because the online environment is already actively used.

HyFlex has some downsides, such as infrastructure requirements and faculty preparation. First, to do synchronous meetings where students can join both in-person and online, there is a need for well-equipped classrooms in terms of video and audio. The classrooms need to have microphones that pick up students’ discussions additional to the teacher; this is necessary to have an inclusive setting. Another need is at least one big screen dedicated to online participants and a high-quality camera that shoots the entire classroom and the teacher at wide-angle. Another requirement is a tremendous amount of faculty preparation. In the traditional setting where the teacher holds lectures and delivers all the content in class, only one preparation is needed, which is the lecture. However, in the case of using three channels, it is necessary to prepare content for all. This requires more content preparation because especially self-paced synchronous learning mode needs specially prepared content. Additionally, the teacher needs to make a special effort to keep in touch with all the students when the online environment comes into play. She needs to make sure that everyone is still on track which is possible with constant communication.

In my opinion, HyFlex is a system that will become popular after a pandemic. It requires more technology use, content preparation, and classroom technologies. However, considering that it provides an inclusive and flexible research environment in which students can choose among modalities based on their learning methods, I think it is definitely worth the extra effort.

When I first started studying Information Systems (IS), as a former Industrial Engineer, the first thing I did was to figure out what IS scholars study. Roughly speaking, the field is mainly focusing on technology and how humans and technology interact. It blew my mind when I saw various papers about various uses of technology. However, there were two studies that changed my paradigm of thinking (you may find the citations below). These papers were about ICT (Information Communication Technology) and its use for education. Venkatesh et al., after working on the project for a decade, was able to educate women in Rural India and reduce maternal mortality rates. Young analyzed how technology can help to raise awareness of the Klamath Tribes of Oregon and help them gain their cultural identity back. After reading this week’s articles, I connected them with these two studies that I read and reflected on how education can change the world. And change starts with the individuals.

I came from a very competitive environment in which everyone was trying to be the best because that was the only way to survive. Not getting into the best 5 colleges in the country would mean that I would be at a disadvantage. Being aware of this fact, my parents and teachers always challenged me, they sought perfection and put big pressure on me. It was tough but I knew that they had good intentions. Later I realized that this was the case because not being from a country with a strong economy means that I am at a disadvantage. They assigned two missions to me and all the youth of the country: empower yourself with education and empower your country with the knowledge so that you leave a legacy to the future generations. That was a very big cause that all of us had in our hearts. When I was reading Darder’s piece Teaching as an Act of Love, his references to Pedagogy of the Oppressed reminded me of all my teachers back in my country. When he argued that the teachers of the minority people had a more special cause, and they understand that teaching is an act of love and compassion. Because those teachers know that they are the ones who can save those disadvantaged groups. They are the ones to make a real difference. They don’t just make a living with teaching, they help the empowerment of disadvantaged people, and this makes a significant difference in their teaching style. They genuinely care about each and every student. They challenge them, and they support them when needed. Their passion to empower students is fueled by one premise: change starts with the individuals.

Venkatesh, V., Sykes, T. A., & Zhang, X. (2020). ICT for development in rural india: a longitudinal study of women’s health outcomes. MIS Quarterly, 44(2).

Young, A. G. (2018). Using ICT for social good: Cultural identity restoration through emancipatory pedagogy. Information Systems Journal, 28(2), 340-358.

Online courses sound like a very recent phenomenon due to the pandemic, and it really is – even the most anti-online professors had to transition to the online context. I bet it would be very difficult for a professor who teaches the same material for the last 20 years with minimal virtualization. However, as Todd Tauber states, online education has been around for quite some time thanks to platforms such as Coursera, Edx, and Udemy. However, these platforms are not proven to be effective yet. Tauber states these platforms are not fulfilling its goal of building a “massively better-skilled workforce”. In other words, MOOCs are massive in quantity, but not quality.

I think this is a critic that we should make as the community of educators. However, this should not mean that online teaching cannot be effective. The big mistake here is the recontextualization. If we take the same teaching practices that are working in a traditional environment and transfer it to an LMS as videos and scanned pdf files, this is not enough. This is like moving a plant from the soil to water. The fact that a plant lives in the soil does not mean that it can live in water. Oftentimes plants die if they stay inside water for too long. Similarly, if in-person teaching practices are directly transferred to the online environment in the form of videos of in-person lectures, it is not going to work, which is the case of MOOCs. The reason for this is that the students will not engage in the same way when they are online. Therefore, educators need to make significant changes in their course design. This is what separates digital pedagogy from online teaching. Digital pedagogy covers the optimal use of all the affordances of digital platforms to make the learning effective for all students. Below I discuss three important aspects.

This is online, but you are not alone. I think it is very important that the teacher is always accessible. Social interaction is still an important part of the learning regardless of the context. The students need to know that someone is always there to help and guide them. This is an advantage that comes with the online environment. Also, horizontal learning should still be encouraged with discussion forums, group projects, and collaborations.

Lectures don’t work anymore. 1-hour long lecture recordings are not applicable in an online context. Bite-size content with concision is the key to engage the students in the content.

Don’t be a lecturer, be a leader. Once, a wise and very successful online teacher I know said that “I don’t teach students, I lead them.”. It sounded very strange to me, I asked: “How can I lead If I don’t teach?”, and he replied: “They don’t need me to learn, they need to go through the content.”. After a while, when I saw a quote, I recalled his words:

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Problem-Based Learning is at a very important position, especially in Engineering programs. In this blog, I am going to talk about a Senior Project course at my former department (Industrial Engineering) to draw the importance of factors that are impacting the success of the course. I was on the committee of that course for three years; therefore, I had the opportunity to monitor the students’ learning experience throughout the course. In a way, I will perform a Problem-Based Discussion on Problem-Based Learning.

Students of the department are required to take a senior project course which spans two semesters and get a minimum grade of C from the class to graduate. They form teams of five students, and in the summer before the start of the semester, teams are matched with the projects. The projects are ideated by faculty members of the course committee based on the problems which are brought to the department by companies (these companies vary from Mercedes-Benz and Renault to Loreal and Unilever). During the semester, student teams are required to build solutions while getting advisement from two faculty members and two collaborators from the company. In the surveys that the department conduct after graduation in accordance with the ABET accreditation requirements, students mostly state that they highly benefit from this course. They also acknowledge that this is a very challenging experience in three aspects.

Who should the students satisfy? These projects have very high practical relevance, because roughly 50% of the time, the solutions the student team builds are implemented in the company. Therefore, the team should work closely together with the collaborators to (1) understand their needs, (2) understand real underlying issues of the problem, (3) ensure the feasibility of the solution in real life. However, there is substantial academic relevance as well because the performance of the course determines students’ graduation. To ensure good academic progress, students need to deliver reports and presentations and work closely together with their faculty advisors to ensure that their approach has academic rigor. However, the students frequently report that the gap between academic relevance and practical relevance causes conflicts because it is very difficult (sometimes impossible) to satisfy both the faculty advisors and the collaborators. Collaborators just want their problem to be resolved in minimal time while faculty advisors want the students to question the problems and have a complete understanding before building a solution. Therefore, this conflict causes students to go back and forth between these two actors which is counterproductive.

How to move forward as a team? The students in the program start working on course deliverables as teams of three in the freshman year. Therefore, they get used to working together over the course of the first three years of the program. However, these groups are rather flexible, open to change, and not mandatory. However, in this project, teams are very strictly formed as 5 students to minimize the number of teams (because of the limited resource of faculty advising) and it is very unlikely to change the teams because each project is unique and requires a completely different setup. Therefore, it is very crucial to “make it work”. Usually, ad Murzi et. al. (2020) mentioned in their paper, we advise students to distribute roles clearly and keep each other accountable. However, there is always uncertainty and things do not work out as expected. In those cases, conflict resolution and communication skills come into play. If a team is formed just because the students are good friends but their working style is completely different, the team starts getting into big fights which is also very counterproductive. In fact, I observed that randomly formed teams yield better harmony in the teams than teams formed due to preference based on friendship.

What are the prerequisites of the course? The committee was not aware of the importance of this fact until there is a curriculum change. To provide flexibility to students who studied abroad, a change in the curriculum was made and one prerequisite course was transformed into corequisite. This might sound like a small change at the first look; however, the course was a one-of-a-kind course that teaches student thinking conceptually and holistically. It turned out that this class is very vital for the senior project class. Earlier, the students needed to pass the course in a semester before the start of the senior project. However, with the corequisite rule, they started taking the course while doing the senior project. Few students benefitted the situation by immediately implementing the fresh knowledge to their project, but most students had difficulty in implementation because they did not have time to completely digest the material before applying it to their project. Therefore, some projects suffered from quality. Some groups had more conflicts because they had more difficulty which caused lower productivity and less progress. This problem was expected to a certain extent when making this curriculum change to a certain extent but the consequences were definitely underestimated.

In short, despite the challenges, at the end of the semester, the majority of the students, faculty advisors, and collaborators were satisfied with the output, and students still think that the class is very beneficial because it prepares them for the industry. However, there is still room for improvement and things to consider to make the process more beneficial. I believe that team size and the method to create teams is an important thing to consider. Also, The conflicts between two parties is also a challenge, and in a case like that, if there are multiple parties involved, it is important to manage the process in a way to compromise. The committee should also work with the collaborators to inform them regarding the academic requirements that the students need to meet. Third, the curriculum design should be carefully considered because any curriculum change might affect students’ prior knowledge and impact the entire experience tremendously. Therefore, the requirements of the project should be designed in accordance with curriculum changes. I posit that careful consideration of these three aspects would help both the students’ and the program’s success.

While I was reading the article of Ladson-Billings about culturally responsive teaching, the reaction of teachers to her advice made me think: what is good teaching? Culturally responsible teaching is good teaching, but is it “just good teaching”? Is good teaching equivalent to culturally relevant teaching? Does culturally relevant teaching require more than “just good teaching”?

Characteristics of good teaching – Why good teaching does not mean culturally relevant teaching?

Dr. Richard Leblanc lists the top 10 requirements of teaching (click for the source). Here, I will discuss three of these which I selected. One of the requirements for good teaching is passion. Most of us probably encountered the teacher who sees her job just as a chore and performs it in a dehumanized way. In several types of performance, whether it is singing, acting or another artistic performance, the emotions of the performer passes to the audience. Similarly, in a classroom environment, the teacher’s feelings pass to the students. Therefore, when we encountered that teacher, we promptly notice it if not immediately. Therefore, the number one rule of good teaching is being passionate about teaching.

Being aware of the fact that each student is different is another requirement he lists. Every person is unique; therefore, everyone has different needs. The first step to understand a student’s needs is listening. Listening and really trying to understand the student helps teachers see the situation from the students’ eyes. It will also enable us to ask the right questions and take action accordingly.

One of my favorites in this list is that “good teaching is about caring, nurturing and developing minds and talents”. Unfortunately, caring about each and every student in the classroom is not something every teacher does. Sometimes teachers just ignore the students that they perceive inferior to give all their time and attention to the decent and high performers instead of nurturing each student and encouraging everyone to make progress at their own pace. This helps teachers to have very successful students in the class; however, according to my personal experience, teachers who try to help every student are the ones who are making a real impact.

So far, these practices might seem very similar to the ones discussed as culturally relevant teaching; in theory, it is similar. However, there is a big difference in practice: cultural lens. Even the greatest teacher who is very passionate, trying to understand and respond to every student’s needs, and nurture students, usually do these in their own way. In a classroom with students from different ethnic groups, this causes a problem because the teacher usually is familiar with her own culture and naturally has that culture’s lens. In that situation, the teacher is sometimes unable to respond to the needs of certain students although she tries to do so. For example, a teacher who has a collectivist cultural lens might be perceived as offensive by a student who has an individualistic cultural lens. Conversely, a teacher who has an individualistic cultural lens might be perceived as unempathetic by a student who has a collectivist cultural lens. In either case, it is obvious that the help attempt of the teacher is not helpful—maybe even harmful. That’s why good teaching does not necessarily mean culturally relevant teaching.

Why culturally relevant teaching is good teaching?

My discussion so far is to say that good teaching might still be limited in considering cultural factors in teaching practices. What we see as culturally relevant teaching is not very different than good teaching—it is good teaching with the awareness of cultural differences. It is important for a teacher to gather information about students’ backgrounds in the class, be aware of the limitations of her teaching practices across different cultural lenses, and extend her repertoire of teaching so that teaching practice is meaningful across different cultures. By considering the cultural context, a teacher can satisfy three aforementioned requirements and practice good teaching that is good across different cultures.

In summary, I believe that making a distinction between good teaching and culturally relevant teaching is important. Culturally relevant teaching is good teaching, but it is more than “just good teaching”. It is good teaching with the awareness of cultural differences. Culturally relevant teaching requires multiple lenses, empathy, and background about the students. In a diverse classroom, in order to practice good teaching with its fullest, we should strive for more culturally aware practices and be open to different approaches in our pedagogy.

I remember the first day I was called “Hoca” by a student in 2014 (Hoca (or Hodja) is the way students call teachers, instructors, and professors in Turkey) when I was an undergraduate TA. I felt myself in a very important position, on a very important mission. As a teacher’s daughter who had been referred to as “Figen Hoca’s daughter” in the past, I was called “Ipek Hoca”. “I am finally doing something important”, I said to myself. It was one of those turning moments that happen and change peoples’ lives. I became “Ipek Hoca”.

That moment had a large influence on my decision to get a master’s degree and apply for an assistantship. I had two objectives in my life: continuous learning and making an impact. Both research and teaching were perfect fields to realize my purpose. When I started my assistantship, it was very similar to starting a brand-new game from level 1. At first, I found it very straightforward. I would study for the class material, do one-hour recitations, hold office hours to answer questions, prepare, proctor, and grade the quizzes. After a month, when I had students questioning my justification on a report grade for half an hour, I realized that I leveled up in the game. After doing some thinking, I realized that my instructions for the report were not clear enough nor was my rubric clear enough for the students. I worked on my mistakes and tried to correct them over time. After a few months, I leveled up again when I resolved a conflict in the classroom. That conflict made me realized that inconsistencies in the instructions of different TAs of the same class and even different homework assignments may cause unexpected confusion. While students are performing a confrontational action, I calmly explained the inconsistency and told that I will resolve the problem. After I resolved the problem, I made sure that consistency is maintained throughout each class that I taught (or TAd). Another takeaway is that the Hoca should always take control of these situations. In fact, Hoca should be the one to control when she has the control and when she does not.

While I was experiencing various events, gaining experience points, and leveling up in the game, I constantly tried to learn and revise my style to become a better teacher. I tried to be the approachable teacher while maintaining a level of authority, keep overall fairness while responding to the needs of the individuals, and challenge students to learn while not making the learning experience overly difficult. After 5 years of experience, what I realized is that teaching experience is nothing but the learning and continuous adjustment to keep the delicate balance in these three aspects: attitude, fairness, and difficulty. This requires the continuous monitoring of the students and the course, reflecting on the past and learning from it, and being open to continuous improvement.

“One moment”, I said to my teaching self, while I was reflecting on my past. “I am not the teacher, I am the learner”. I’m the researcher and the teacher; and just like what Michelangelo said at 87, learning is the most important part of this journey. That’s why the primary goal of my teaching self is to learn and improve continuously and make a difference. And that’s why learning self is the new teaching self.

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