During Fierce Education’s recent “Higher Education: Helping Faculty Navigate Top Challenges in this New Blended Learning Environment”, Sean Michael Morris, VP, Academics at Course Hero, gave a keynote presentation on “Teaching through the Screen: Engaging Imagination to Engage Students."
Morris, through a heart-felt presentation circling around a personal experience as a middle school student, shared the importance of engaging students whether online or in person. He acknowledged Lois English, the Vice Principal of his middle school at the time, as the positive influence who motivated him to remain engaged as a student.
Morris shared how the influence of a teacher who dared to bend the rules in order to keep him engaged in school made a difference in his life. “She put in place a curricular life preserver that buoyed me up through 7th and 8th grades, so that by the time I reached the 9th grade I had learned to enjoy school again,” Morris recalled.
“Critical pedagogy -or critical digital pedagogy- is a humanizing pedagogy, seeking the human behind the screen, the human behind the bureaucracies of education, the human behind behaviorist technologies,” Morris said. He explains how pushing against convention can lead to more equitable, just, and creative ways to facilitate learning online.
As he himself experienced, a student who is failing can succeed if only he is trusted and given a chance. “Online learning can be intimate and engaging,” he said. “A pandemic does not need to push us to surveillance when it can encourage us to trust.” As the classroom is now found in any physical space, it is good to remember that there is a human on the other side of the screen who receives the message, the lecture, or the grade.
For Morris, imagination serves as a critical function in education. “The imagination’s utility is in seeing the otherwise,” he said. During these past years of pandemic things have not been as they used to be. There was no data to make sense of the world, the academic world, “and yet, we have also not exercised our imagination which might save us,” he concluded.
Morris’ story emphasized that higher education institutions need more educators like English to lead students with trust over surveillance, understanding and a sense of student centricity over rigid rules. Once that is established, academic performance will follow.
The event is now available on-demand. To register and obtain full free access to all sessions, visit this link.
For more articles from the virtual event see:
Higher Education Can Bridge the Learning Gap Sparked by COVID