Teaching Statement

Dan Steward
March 2017

There is an important trope in the world of online teaching. We distanced, digitized teachers often self-identify as "the guide on the side" rather than "the sage on the stage" (King 1993, Morrison 2014). This meme can appear trite, but it can also serve as a powerful pedagogical touchstone. I try to serve the learning of my students as a teacher/student who loves lifelong learning himself, a designer of virtual learning spaces that welcome students to take more control over their own educations, and a host of courses and cohorts exploring interesting sociological themes and literatures. But my overarching role is that of a guide, a guide through a field of tensions.

We face many tensions in the contemporary academy, both as teachers and students. Some of these reflect permanent tensions in the social world in which our academy is embedded (e.g., the tension between work and play). Other tensions arise from the public mission of (higher) education in a democratic society (e.g., the tension between the liberal arts and vocational training). My pedagogy navigates such tensions constructively, but let me begin with the tension between online learning and face-to-face education.

Online/Face-to-Face: Students and faculty alike often treat these as radical alternatives, but I see them as complementary. Pedagogically, the distinction is very complex, and we would do well to consider the "blended" or "hybrid" course the norm. I venture to guess that the number of courses that are completely offline has long since approached zero, and I have not taught any in this millennium. The number of classes that are completely online, however, has grown practically countless. Scandals among for-profit online programs have made many of us skeptical about the online technology as well as the for-profit business model. I share concern for the land-grant mission, and believe we must expand affordable public education, but I do not share this technological skepticism.

Video conferencing technology improves each year, and the time is not far off when distance learning will be virtually face-to-face—if that is pedagogically appropriate and student-teacher ratios permit. Already I am holding some sessions in which most students are physically co-present and some participate from many thousands of miles away. I fully expect that the balance might flip for some courses/activities in the not too distant future, with most students participating from off-campus. The pedagogical question is whether synchronous class meetings are best for a particular learning activity, and whether that activity literally requires a "hands-on" presence. Sometimes this will prove best, but a student-centered learning model also takes advantage of asynchronous activities: Online courses not only support distance learning, they also support flextime learning. This is already very important to students with highly-constrained schedules, whether because of work or extra-curricular activities, but I look forward to the day when we can include many more non-traditional students in our courses, and flexibility is likely to prove essential to such students. In my experience, non-traditional students can be powerful role models for the younger students coming to college straight from high school and their parents' homes.

Most of my teaching work is online and asynchronous, and I welcome the opportunity to guide students through activities using wikis and similar tools (see, e.g., Steward 2015 [LASTA], Steward 2015 [FSI]). Often this can be done asynchronously, but sometimes nothing works as well as synchronous, face-to-face dialogue (whether co-present or mediated). I encourage on-campus students to visit me in my office, and I keep office hours both in cyberspace and "meatspace." Even my officially "online" courses are blended this way, at least for students who are on campus and willing to take advantage of my availability. I work against expectations to approach a balanced, blended mode of instruction whether I am formally assigned to an "online" or "lecture" format.

In my Technology and Society course, for example, I have organized most of the course around asynchronous online activities (readings, discussion forums, wiki pages, quizzes), but also meet with small groups of students throughout the semester in "book clubs" (see Steward 2016 [IPRH]). I prefer to do this face-to-face, over coffee and snacks, but I have occasionally connected a student through a video-conference. In the summer of 2017, I will be experimenting with a version of this course in which most students will probably be participating at a distance.

Liberal Arts/Vocational: There is one sense in which this may actually be something of a stark choice. The "liberal arts," the artes liberales, are the skills and practices of a free person, whereas a "vocation" is a calling or a mission, a pursuit to which one submits oneself—or a hail one is powerless to resist. Ironically, one would need something of a liberal arts education to understand and appreciate this distinction, but probably will not have such an education unless one (or one's family or friends) has already known a vocation.

As a practical matter, there is tension here rather than mutual exclusion. While the ancients knew a freedom peculiar to an elite class in a slave-based political economy, we moderns have struggled with a more universal freedom incompatible with such an institution (peculiar or not). A modern (or post-modern) freedom does not stand above or outside of political economy, but within it (see generally Habermas 1989 [1962]). Finding a role for oneself in a complex society, learning to contribute to the "organic solidarity" (Durkheim 1984 [1893]), depends upon vocational training. The appreciation of "cultural capital" (Bourdieu 1984 [1979]) in higher education can then be converted into economic capital across the lifecourse, and some of this can be re-invested in education to further extend social and cultural capital (within the individual, family, or social group).

A vicious circle is not inevitable, nor is a virtuous spiral impossible. The terms and conditions under which various capitals transform, under which investment or consumption is appropriate, under which such investment/consumption is public or private, these (the terms and conditions of social life) are subject to negotiation in a democratic society. A liberal arts education prepares our students for such negotiations. They must study many different subjects if they are to be well-prepared, and they must cultivate a "sociological imagination" (Mills 2000 [1959]) to understand their positions and potentials in the social structures and historical forces that constitute their world.

In my Introduction to Sociology, students read "The Promise" in The Sociological Imagination, and free-write journal entries addressing questions like: what institutions does Mills identify, and what social problems (or "public issues")? are these the same today as they were when Mills was writing? what brings about changes in institutions and issues? how do "private troubles" become "public issues"? where am I located in the important institutions of my society? how am I connected to the social problems we face? Such journal entries are relatively private, shared between teacher and individual student, but personal introspection gives way to collective inspection as students address similar questions in small group discussion forums and class-wide wiki pages grounded in published representations of public issues and institutional dynamics. Such publications include both fiction (e.g., feature films) and non-fiction (e.g., news articles), and students are invited to explore the validity of these representations using an "emphatic" criticism. (That is to say, a criticism that attends to the phatics of the argument, avoiding flame-wars and final moves.)

Throughout such exercises, there is also a vocational training. True, I am not typically training students to become sociologists, not in the same way that a software engineer may be engineering new software engineers. But even in quintessentially liberal arts courses, we may be guiding our students toward vocational success. One way in which I do this is to emphasize hypermedia literacy. They start with free-writing in safe harbors, to get their creative juices flowing, but they progress into more formal writing as they communicate with peers and (potentially) with strangers. Beyond this, however, I teach students to craft texts that are both hypermedia (incorporating links and making connections to the world-wide web) and hypermedia (incorporating images and embedding audio and video content). I encourage them to reflect upon wiki technology as a metaphor for the cultivation of knowledge more generally. Whether Wikipedia might serve as such a metaphor is a question we explore in my Technology and Society class, but in all of my classes I advocate the wiki as a waystation towards the web dreamt by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. This was to be, by default, both editable and browsable (Berners-Lee 2000). As a robustly cumulative, connective, collaborative, and ever-corrected repository of information, its navigation and editing are a benchmark against which to measure the literacy of any professional or white-collar worker in the 21st-century.

Work/Play: Whether in the call from the liberal arts for critical work, or in that of the vocational schools for technical work, students are coping with a tremendous amount of work these days. And beyond their classwork and homework, more and more of our students are working multiple jobs to afford a college education. They work hard, and they should play hard: The work of learning is very much about play. Play and organized gaming are at the very heart of learning, socialization, and personality development (see, e.g., Mead 2015 [1934]). Games and "gamification" (see, e.g., Chou 2017) are becoming a vital part of online learning, and I welcome this, but one of my favorite course-related games is "Sociopoly" (Jessup 2001), a board game typically played face-to-face.

"Sociopoly" uses the familiar game of "Monopoly" to teach about social inequality. A class full of students is divided into groups to simultaneously play multiple instances of the game, and each game involves four teams of players in competition. But each team is playing by slightly different rules, varying (among other ways) in their respective wealth (money distributed at the beginning of the game) and income (earnings for passing Go). Play continues for a fixed time (or until one team is left standing), and as each team is bankrupted they have a sidebar to critique (and revise) the rules. Spoiler alert: The kicker at the end is that the rules for each team situate them in representative demographic positions: whites, Hispanics, African Americans, and female-householders with no husband present. Social mobility, the American Dream, survives in this game as a possibility, but important variations in opportunity become apparent as game iterations grow.

Beyond the play, I encourage students to consider work as something more than mere labor (or travail). C. Wright Mills advocates a craft ethic in the appendix to The Sociological Imagination: "the intellectual workman forms his own self as he works toward the perfection of his craft" (2000 [1959]:196). As students find their vocations, they should also be finding themselves.

These are not the only tensions that constitute the field of higher learning in America or the world. We teachers must also guide our students through many other conflicting demands upon their time and energy. During their academic years, they will need help dealing with the pulls of the "two cultures" (Snow 1998 [1959]), and some appreciation for social science/study as yet a third culture with which they must reckon (see, e.g., Kagan 2009). Throughout their lives, they will need help with tensions we cannot even foresee. But we can guide them now to respect the complexity of these tensions, and to resist false dichotomies, to research and experiment with their practices and relations, and to resist dogmatic truths, to embrace lifelong learning, and to resist the hatred and despair of contemporary culture wars. There are many paths through the field of tensions that is the academy, or the broader culture, and so perhaps the most important lesson I try to share with my students is a simple Wisdom of Perl: the Way of Tim Towtdi ("There Is More Than One Way To Do It").