A Happy Mess.

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With how messy my head has been lately with acronyms and pedagogies and webinar chatroom comments, you'd think I'd lost what my teaching style IS, but I think all of these Twitter-induced rabbit holes have only reaffirmed what I'm doing in the classroom and why.

Student voice and choice. Yep.
Empathy built in. Yes.
Creativity everywhere. Hells yeah.
Real-world applications. Mm hm.
  • PBL asks students to create their own projects and create their own daily tasks.
  • OEP asks students to write for the open movement, the creative network of the world. It demands: "Get rid of disposable assignments!"
  • TFT asks students to transfer what they are learning in one area to another.
  • Punk theory says, "Give students voice and choice."
  • OWI is all about access and inclusivity.
Some tweet the other day said that we should shy away from recipe assignments (14 slides, 7 sources, 4 transitions, 2 memes) because that's bad, and <insert their pedagogy here> says that we should give them the outcomes instead (I'm butchering the paraphrasing). What I got out of that whole deal was this: Start assigning projects like this CC course assigns projects.

What do I mean? Well, here's a screenshot of a current project of mine (the goal is to argue whether you are a stereotype/birth order or not):


And then here is a CC project description:


Notice the difference? And why shouldn't I just list the minimum pieces that should pop up and let the students determine how many sources and how many words? It sounds very hippie-dippy to me, but it also sounds like less stress on my end. The products that students could create are endless.

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