Our Learning Moment, a Humanifesto

During the summer of 2020, over 20 faculty, staff, and two administrators gathered to discuss the future of teaching and learning at LCC.  Our conversations happened in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. These public health and justice issues demand that we understand and change our approaches to pedagogy. 

The conversations were open and free flowing, and they started with only two premises, both of which we feel will dramatically change teaching and learning at LCC, all community colleges, and indeed all higher education:

• COVID-19 changes everything. Even after a vaccine might be available, none of us, including students, are going back to the world we knew before. 
• The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has marked a turning point. Previous efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion, focusing on attitudes, awareness, and hiring are necessary but no longer sufficient. We must become anti-racist and eliminate the systemic racism that exists in the higher education system, including LCC. 

Our conversations were driven by these questions:

• What will/should pedagogies and tools look like? 
• What do we (LCC) need to do or learn in order to be teaching and learning leaders in a future that is emerging, not yet clear, but coming rapidly?
• How do we eliminate systemic racism and become anti-racist?
• How do faculty lead in this effort?
• What and how do we have to change at LCC to do these things?

While these conversations initiated by the CTE were happening, other faculty spontaneously began to discuss similar topics on social media.

We feel LCC faces both extraordinary challenges and also extraordinary opportunities. These opportunities require significant change and learning from all of us. The world has changed. We cannot go back to the old world of 2019 and earlier. This document is not a plan. It is an effort to expand and extend the conversations started last summer. We are asking the Academic Senate and leadership of the college to engage, embrace, and extend this conversation centering learning and teaching. We need a conversation that not only models a collaborative and transformative design, but also builds structures and processes that are transparent, honest, and inclusive. We argue that this learning moment is a call for action to not only engage in the conversation, but also to do the work. This moment demands active engagement by the entire college, not just faculty. 

We are called upon to seize this moment and in our role as educators to fight for “good trouble” that creates a more just and humane world for all. We are uniquely situated to engage students in deep and slow thinking and to encourage students to ask questions and seek answers by providing them with the holistic education necessary to become participatory community members.

We must create, invent, improvise, and innovate our way forward. This living document is a call to action to faculty, staff, administration and students to change the future of teaching and learning at LCC.

Pedagogy is the most important process for achieving our goals. Nearly all of our big goals and aspirations — student success, completion, inclusion, equity, enrollment, retention — depend on our pedagogy.

At its most basic level, pedagogy is how we teach. We are using pedagogy to refer to the creative reasoning process — encompassing principles, values, theories, process, practice, and techniques — used to develop classroom teaching in order to effectively and equitably facilitate learning. Pedagogy, therefore, has levels ranging from guiding principles and values to the specific techniques employed in a particular classroom using particular technologies. It is more appropriate to say we have pedagogies. 

And yet despite its importance, our pedagogy (here referring collectively to all our pedagogies at all levels) is the least understood or discussed process on campus. With the exception of a tiny minority of faculty, none of us encountered it in graduate school. We are trained in our field of study: e.g. economist, nurse, welder, philosopher, musician.  Faculty, if they have pedagogical discussions at all, mostly do so within their own programs. Such discussions rarely extend across a division let alone across the campus.

When pedagogy is mentioned, it is often only in reference to the classroom and not in the context of policy, operational, or technology decisions. Indeed, key decisions are often made first, absent discussion of pedagogy, and then presented for reaction rather than discussion. Pedagogy is conspicuous by its absence.  Collaborative and transparent dialogue is missing. 

The college spends little time and resources on developing our collective knowledge of pedagogy (relative to other processes and relative to its importance). Travel to conferences, an important source of faculty learning about pedagogy, has been persistently squeezed and now totally eliminated.  Questions, issues, and discussions of pedagogy, to the extent they are even recognized as legitimate issues, are delegated by administration to CTE, which is given little authority and less budget. 

Many faculty avoid discussion of pedagogy even within the confines of a program meeting. It takes time; time is faculty’s scarcest resource. It can provoke feelings of insecurity and imposter syndrome. These feelings speak to the lack of trust, lack of willingness to be vulnerable in exploring or questioning, and a lack of generosity of spirit to engage with pedagogy at LCC.  Conflicts with colleagues, or apparent conflicts in pedagogical beliefs, values, or techniques may arise and our LCC culture lacks the tools, norms, and expertise for facilitation and conflict resolution.

Many administrators also feel ill equipped or reluctant to discuss pedagogy or facilitate such discussions with the faculty. This may arise from a desire to avoid conflicts, which as mentioned above, we are ill-equipped to handle. Pedagogical discussions are often avoided because they are complex, time-consuming, and can seemingly always be put off for another month. 

Pedagogical discussions are also expensive. Learning about pedagogy requires resources. The faculty who engaged in the conversations that led to this document did so unpaid. Most discussions of pedagogy are unpaid/not recognized as part of our “work”. Budgets reflect values and LCC has no budget for pedagogy.

What we can and should do is: 

• Invest in greater learning and discussion of pedagogy across the college including not just faculty but also all administrators. Learning pedagogy must be seen and tracked as an investment, not a cost to be minimized. 
• We need to establish a set of LCC Pedagogical Principles and Values that can guide professors in developing, choosing, and improving their specific pedagogies. These principles need to be consistent with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning literature and our expressed identity and goals as a community college.
• Pedagogy is our most important tool in addressing issues of equity, inclusion, and injustice. Our pedagogies must reach our most marginalized student populations.
• The pedagogical implications of all proposed policies, processes, facilities, and technologies need to be explicitly considered just as seriously as the financial, security, or compliance implications are considered today. 
• The CTE, under strong independent faculty leadership, is the appropriate vehicle to lead, facilitate, and guide, but not control, these efforts. It must be a collective enterprise of the entire college community.  

These discussions, done well, will be hard and raise difficult issues and choices. They illustrate “wicked problems” which call for us to address the interconnected threads exposed.