Empathetic Instruction
Whitney Howarth
Summer 2019
BEING SEEN, BEING HEARD, in the WORLD: How Open Changed my FIRST DAY of class
The night before my first open class I could not sleep. One reason was that I was up pretty late trying to figure out WordPress and upload my AMAZING OPEN PEDAGOGY INSPIRED, CRUELTY FREE SYLLABUS to my brand, shiny new DOMAIN OF (MY OWN)?!
Lucky for me, my hubby is in marketing and knows Word Press stuff. Still, we were stumped. Of course, the next day it took the fantabulous Martha Burtis all of two minutes and three clicks to fix it, upload and teach me how it could be done, pain-free, easy peasy.
I really can’t express to you how THRILLED I am to be incorporating OER and Open Pedagogy and a PEDAGOGY OF KINDNESS into my Roots of Current Global Conflict course this semester (2 sections!).
I confess I am tempted to embark on a mad-scientist experiment and use one section as a control group (with CRUEL syllabus, disposable assignments, and zero collaboration or attention to student agency) and take the other section on a cosmic ride through the wonderful world of ACCESS, AGENCY and CONNECTION. Wouldn’t it be FASCINATING to see the difference. But I know, I’ve taught this class for 15 years. Moreover, such an experiment would probably be unethical. I get it. Anyway, who the heck has the time/energy to figure out the IRB process for THAT since I’d be performing experiments on human subjects! I’ll skip it.
Seriously though, I’m so proud of my new syllabus (with heavy borrowing from Matt Cheney’s own IDS model), my courage (I’m not BANNING LAP TOPS OR CELL PHONES!) and my new found appreciation for teaching the full student — not just a toe, a lobe and some parts of the brain center.
Today I experienced the best first day classes ever. I used all 100 minutes (but gave them a 10 minute potty break in honor of their humanness) and it was filled with activities and writing and discussion and a bit of WHY THIS CLASS IS DIFFERENT — WHY I HAVE CHANGED — and why a 3 day ATI conference way back in May (full of inspiring talks by Robin, Jessie, Martha, etc.) CONVERTED ME TO OPEN.
I’ve mentioned before my AHA MOMENT — when I figured out that OPEN was oriented towards justice, to democratizing the classroom, to giving students voice, to honoring students WHOLENESS — and recognizing those obstacles to learning like food insecurity & housing at the holidays for folks unable to “go home” (LGBQT, etc.) — but today in class I found a new and important reason why OPEN matters to me:
I want to hear my students voices and I want them to really hear each other.
In this course, we talk a lot about conflict. About people who were, for various reasons, silenced or made invisible — in their home countries, in the world, in history. We talk about colonialism in Iraq, we talk about ethnic strife in Rwanda, we talk about state terrorism in Iran, we talk about how many people resisted, stood up, spoke out, died to be heard, seen, recognized.
This is th