Open and Accessibile Education
Laura Tilghman
Summer 2019
Introduction
This summer and coming academic year I am very lucky to be a part of the Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community (CPLC) at Plymouth State University. This is a large (70+!) group of faculty and staff at my small-ish university coming together to learn, think, discuss, and enact different ideas about learning and teaching. Or as someone more eloquent than me explained, the CPLC is “ a dynamic and emergent initiative designed to support current pedagogy-related university projects, align campus efforts to innovate around curriculum and instruction, and refocus institutional efforts on teaching and learning.”
(Why “cluster” in the title of this group? This links to an initiative to reorganize my university administratively and academically into interdisciplinary clusters, which began in Fall 2015. This also happened to be my first year at PSU, so in practice I have no experience teaching fulltime at a university that is not undergoing massive change. I am sure there is something to be written about how that has shaped my views of teaching and higher ed!)
In practice, there are 3 tracks of the CPLC: one for faculty who are just generally interested in rethinking teaching and learning, one for faculty working with first-semester students to tackle Wicked Problems in a project-based learning format, and one for faculty focused on open education in all its guises. I am part of the third group, and because of that got to participate in the USNH Academic Technology Institute in May 2019. In practice, there is actually a lot of overlap between these three groups, and over the summer we met all together to share and learn from each other.
This post is my attempt to think through how I came to be involved in the CPLC, what I have learned so far from my experiences, and what I hope to do in the coming academic year.
Stumbling and Fumbling – where I am coming from
I got a PhD in Anthropology primarily so that I could be a college professor. I had TA-ed as an undergraduate student, leading discussion sections for a large lecture course, and loved the experience.
But although you need a PhD to teach college students, the dirty secret is that most PhD programs don’t actually formally train you how to do that. Sure, you might TA for someone and learn on the job, but the main focus of my program – and most anthropology programs in the US – was training me to be a researcher. (Since I love doing qualitative research, this was not entirely bad, though led to a mismatch between the focus of my graduate training and the reality of my career goals.)
During my PhD, I took courses in research design, methods, and analysis … but no courses in course design, teaching methods, student assessment. Furthermore, teaching was openly viewed as a distraction from graduate coursework and dissertation completion. When I won fellowships that relieved me from TA duties, this was applauded and never seen as a detriment