social pedagogy

What is social pedagogy?

This question first arose for me a few years ago when I started implementing e-portfolios in some of my courses and published an article on its efficacy to promote student learning outcomes. Back then there were a few articles (see below) that seemed to suggest to me that social pedagogy simply involves having students make their learning public. I found this dis-satisfying because it didn't explain to me how one makes this a requirement or how one grades it. It seems to me that it involves inviting students to publicize their learning, but then how does one assess that? My 27 years of teaching experience has taught me that unless instructors assess something, students will not attend to it. In teaching and learning, assessment is what produces value for students. If instructors do not assess it, students are being sent the message that the instructor does not value it. A bit black and white I know, but that is my sense of the interaction between students, instructors, and student learning. Granted, when students become independent learners, assessment is done by the students themselves. But that only happens after students have developed some expertise in learning and understand the value of self-assessment and how to go about engaging in the constructive criticism of their own abilities and learning.

After a short perusal of the web, it appears that some (see resources below) use social pedagogy to define a way of being in community and caring for each others' learning. I guess that could encompass e-portfolio practice. But it seems that those practitioners are advocating for living in community. Would this include e-portfolio practice? I don't understand how advocates of e-portfolio practice are invoking social pedagogy in this context.

So, back to my question: what is social pedagogy? Pedagogy involves an understanding of how teaching and learning are practised. The articles on social pedagogy in an e-portfolio context advocate for students to make their own learning public and to publically respond to the feedback they receive in the public forum. But I am having difficulty understanding how we, as instructors, support students' forays into publicizing their learning, and more importantly how we support our students' response to their peers publicized learning. The closest understanding I have is the peer review in which students provide their fellow students with constructive criticism of their peers' term papers, presentations, participation, etc. But I don't think this is really what those who have successfully implemented e-portfolios are meaning when they advocate for social pedagogy. Or rather, it is more than simply peer review, because peer review can be a private transaction between only two students. In contrast, e-portfolios are intended to make student learning public; i.e. beyond the classroom. How does this get assessed and supported?

The reason this is an issue for me is that I understand how making my learning public provokes me to really consider my thinking. Hence, why I keep this blog. But this does take courage to make public our own misunderstandings and the possibility of being found to have a mistake in our thinking - in a public forum. One has to have the courage to make learning public. So, many of my students are very reticent to open their e-portfolios to the public and encourage responses from the public. As instructors do we simply tell students to get over it and grow up? That seems a little harsh to me. What practices do instructors use to help students understand the value of making their learning public? How do we assess our students' participation in social pedagogy on both the giving and receiving end? Is it a matter of simply indicating in our e-portfolio rubric that it is a requirement for e-portfolios to be public and to not do so elicits a failing grade? That doesn't make sense to me. Rather, there must be some approach that enables students to see the value in publicizing their learning. How do we do that beyond simply assigning some marks for the number of comments they give or receive on their e-portfolios?

How do we assess students' publication of their learning in the midst of their learning? This is different from simply publishing their final paper - that is summative assessment. I want to know how to provide students with a formative assessment of their social learning.

What is social pedagogy in higher education?

Resources

Bhika, R., Francis, A., & Miller, D. (2013). Faculty professional development: Advancing integrative social pedagogy using ePortfolio. International Journal of ePortfolio, 3(2), 117–133.

Editors. (2011 May 3). What is Social Pedagogy? The Therapeutic Care Journal.

Eynon, B., & Gambino, L. M. (2017). High-impact ePortfolio practice: A catalyst of student, faculty, and institutional learning. Sterling,VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Eynon, B., Gambino, L. M., & Török, J. (2014). Completion, quality, and change: The difference e-portfolios make. Peer Review, 16(1).

Eynon, B., Gambino, L. M., & Török, J. (2014). What difference can eportfolio make? A field report from the connect to learning project. International Journal of ePortfolio, 4(1), 95–114.

Five Rivers Child Care Center. 2017. The application of social pedagogy at Five Rivers: What is social pedagogy?

Gambino, L. M. (2014). Putting e-portfolios at the center of our learning. Peer Review, 16(1).

Jensen, N. R. (2013). Social pedagogy in modern times. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 21(43), 1–16.

Rafeldt, L. A., Bader, H. J., Lesnick Czarzasty, N., Freeman, E., Ouellet, E., & Snayd, J. M. (2014). Reflection builds twenty-first-century professionals. Peer Review, 16(1).

Storø, J. (2013). Practical social pedagogy: Theories, values and tools for working with children and young people. Policy Press. University of Bristol.

can/should instructors force students to be metacognitive about their learning?

One of the things that I have learned about using e-portfolios as a teaching & learning strategy is that when it is a large assignment, it is unnecessary to have students complete both the e-portfolio and write the final exam. For the last couple of years, I have given students the choice between writing the final exam and preparing an e-portfolio in Augustana's fourth-year biology capstone course because there is a good correlation between what students achieve on the final exam and the final e-portfolio. This is what I found a couple of years ago when I was still requiring students to complete both the final exam and e-portfolio:


As you can see there is a significant correlation between the exam and e-portfolio marks: I only need to use one or the other to determine whether or not students have learned the material. This only works in this capstone course because the e-portfolio includes a writing dossier in which students must synthesize and digest the course readings. What I have learned is that instructors cannot force students to be metacognitive. The year that the data for the above correlation was collected, some students thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated completing the e-portfolio but there were some who felt it was a heinous assignment. I don't think learning occurs when a learner has such a visceral reaction to an assignment. I don't really understand why some students reacted so strongly against the e-portfolio when simultaneously other students gave it very high praise.

It is apparent to me from the personal comments from some alumni of the course and also from the comments I read on the anonymous Student Evaluations of Teaching that some students resented being forced to complete the e-portfolio because the assignment felt like make-work - they didn't understand the point of the e-portfolio. It is interesting that the alumni understand the objective of the assignment now a couple of years post-graduation. But the alumni thought that this sort of metacognitive ability needs to be developed over many years and to require it of students during the last term of their last year is the wrong time to do it - it is too late.

Interestingly an Augustana colleague of mine explained it to me in terms of many students in the last term of their last year have already checked out. They are either depleted or are already looking forward to the next phase of their lives. These graduating students are no longer focused on completing their degree. My colleague has observed this happen with his students when they are wrapping up their senior thesis. So, again, an argument that having students reflect on their education for the first time just before they graduate is the wrong time to do it. The whole point of students reflecting on their own learning is to have them think about how and why they learn with the goal that they will realize that there are better and poorer ways to learn and that thinking about this early in their education may produce the benefit of developing better learners. It is too late to do this in the term before students graduate. On the other hand, if students have an understanding of what it means to be a life-long learner, then it won't matter when they are asked to be metacognitive about their learning: earlier is better, but later is better than never.

One of my alumni suggested that making the e-portfolio optional is critical because not all students will be ready or willing to consider how and why they learn. Particularly in their last term of their degree. Their reasoning was that the assignment requires students to take a critical look at how and why they learn, and thus places them in a vulnerable place. It may be unsettling to critically reflect at the end of your program and realize that you have been going about learning using the wrong approach for the last four years. No wonder some students might become angry at me for forcing that realization on them. Doing this early in their learning career, however, allows them to make choices about how and why they learn - there is time for corrective action or at least a considered reason for not taking action. Just before they graduate is too late.

I had never thought how the assignment might place students in a vulnerable place. But of course, if I think about it carefully, that is the intention of such an assignment. To invite students to be vulnerable/open to reconsidering why and how they learn. At the end of a degree may be the wrong time to do that.

It requires more investigation on my part but I think the bottom line is that you cannot force students to be metacognitive. What I need to determine as a mature instructor still learning how to teach is how to enable students to realize that metacognition powerfully impacts their ability to deeply learn. And I think it involves supporting students earlier in their learning careers to be reflective about their learning as some of my past students have suggested to me. This is what I am currently attempting to do with the learning philosophy assignment which I have implemented across all year levels of the courses I teach. So far the results are promising. But, I don't force students to complete a learning philosophy - that is something they can choose to do as an optional assignment. Thus, students can be reflective about their learning when they are ready.

Can (should) instructors force students to be metacognitive about their learning? I think, as with teaching in general, all we can do is present students with the educational opportunity and then it is up to them whether or not to engage with the learning process.

Resources

Girash, J. (2014). Metacognition and instruction. In V. A. Benassi, C. E. Overson, & C. M. Hakala (Eds.), Applying Science of Learning in Education: Infusing Psychological Science into the Curriculum (pp. 152–168). Society for the Teaching of Psychology. 

Haave, N. (2016). E-portfolios rescue biology students from a poorer final exam result: Promoting student metacognition. Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching, 42(1), 8–15.

learning is impacted by how we mentally organize our knowledge

Last week our SoTL Teaching Circle met to discuss the 2nd chapter of How Learning Works. This chapter discusses the impact of how the way students organize their knowledge impacts their learning. Basically, this chapter considers the differences between how experts organize their knowledge vs how novices organize their knowledge. The bottom line is that expertise is accompanied by a greater network of mental connections among their nodes of knowledge. In contrast novices at best will have a linear connection that links their different points of knowing. Most students, however, will have islands of knowledge for which there are no connections between their different courses even when those courses are within the same major.

A few years ago Kimberly Tanner was the keynote speaker for a series of workshops at the UofA for the AIBA annual conference. The title of the conference was Mind the Gap which was meant to highlight the difference between thinking like an expert versus a novice. She explained that one of the issues that make it difficult for experts to teach novices is that much of our expertise is unarticulated to ourselves. Experts (e.g. holders of PhDs) are unaware of how they organize their knowledge that makes them an expert. Thus, it makes it difficult to help novices to transition to expert thinking because the experts do not know what the novice needs to change in order to become an expert. I know I have this difficulty when teaching many of my courses. Something that is obvious to me and thus not worth mentioning to my students ends up being critical for students to be made aware of in order to progress in the discipline. This is particularly true for those of us who suffer from academic fraud syndrome - that thinking that really, I am not that smart and someone is going to realize their mistake and revoke my PhD. Thus, university and college instructors may tend to keep some aspects of their expert thinking to themselves because to articulate that may reveal that what the expert thinks is worth teaching is actually common knowledge and inappropriate for discussion in the classrooms of higher education.

But like we tell many of our students, if you have a question, it is likely that many in the classroom have the same question. This is what makes teaching difficult - being courageous to be intellectually humble in the midst of both our peers and students.

On the other hand, the work that is being done to identify threshold concepts in different disciplines, I think is a good step toward understanding those key points that we ourselves grasped on our way to developing expertise. As instructors in higher education, we need to understand what those stumbling blocks were for us and our colleagues when developing our expertise. Once identified, we can then ensure that our own students know where to concentrate their attention in order to understand the depth and breadth of the discipline. And I think this can be readily facilitated by helping students make links within their own knowledge structure so that their mental models of our world becomes robust.

This is one of the reasons why I advocate for students to develop an e-portfolio that provides a platform for them to reflect on their education that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and even the boundaries between the courses within their major. Students need to understand that knowledge is a whole rather than a series of separate islands. We want our students to understand the world not just what is currently in front of their nose.

Resources

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How does the way students organize knowledge affect their learning? In How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (pp. 40–65). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Haave, N. (2016). E-portfolios rescue biology students from a poorer final exam result: Promoting student metacognition. Bioscene: J College Biol Teaching, 42(1), 8–15.

Krieter, F. E., Julius, R. W., Tanner, K. D., Bush, S. D., & Scott, G. E. (2016). Thinking like a chemist: Development of a chemistry card-sorting task to probe conceptual expertise. J Chem Ed, 93(5), 811–820.

Loertscher, J., Green, D., Lewis, J. E., Lin, S., & Minderhout, V. (2014). Identification of threshold concepts for biochemistry. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 13(3), 516–528.

Smith, J. I., Combs, E. D., Nagami, P. H., Alto, V. M., Goh, H. G., Gourdet, M. A. A., … Tanner, K. D. (2013). Development of the biology card sorting task to measure conceptual expertise in biology. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 12(4), 628–644.