What Is a Deliverable? What Have We Delivered?
This is a project, generously funded by the Ministry of Colleges and Universities of Ontario and carried out through eCampusOntario’s Virtual Learning Strategies grant program.
In the grant we stated:
The multi-institutional team will co-design four “living modules” that consider the many nested and entangled functions of the academic ecosystem. Each module will provide learning experiences and supports intended for relevant roles and functions in the academic structure — from students, to educators, services, administration, funders, policymakers, and the larger community.
Below you will find the four “living modules” and rich references, further reading, and more. You will also find artifacts that were created over the past year on the project. And you will also find musings about the process of creating a community that collectively did this work. In many ways, the team working on this project feels that the process was the deliverable. Time and again we marveled at how deeply the process had impacted us all. We want to capture some of that here, but please know that you cannot bottle this work up and reproduce it entirely. It does not scale — nor should it. What we can share are suggestions, stories, and experiences for how to do this work. We will also pepper the modules with what we learned along the way and areas we know need more work by us all. This is the journey that defies “completion.”
One team member asked, “Do we actually think that humanizing education will happen with four modules?” No, humanizing education will not be accomplished with four modules; the ways that humanizing education will happen is up to each of us and our interactions. Humanizing is fundamentally about relationships, interactions, and experiences with others. Humanizing education is fundamentally relational.
A word of warning: we built a community of practice supporting each other in doing this work. We are connected deeply and expect to remain connected beyond the timeline of this work. Humanizing work has this tendency; it brings people together to support, encourage, and challenge each other.
One last word of warning: this group has one hell of a sense of humour — perhaps it’s also an essential ingredient to this work. Surround yourself with real people who can laugh at themselves, and then extend that to everyone else.
4 Modules (that will not, in and of themselves, humanize learning)
Module 1: Unlearning and Unsettling
Questioning and Reflecting
Figure 1: Photo by Lukas Juhas on Unsplash
Among the domains to be examined are research, evidence, metrics, innovation, ways of knowing and expressing knowledge, value systems, work, intelligence, economics, decision-making, notions of quality, rigour, integrity, efficiency, winning, and trust as they relate to learning. To move forward we must interrogate how we practice now and why. Some of this is the uncomfortable work of unlearning and unsettling. We do this work