Dispatches from Portugal and the Philippines: Notes on Student Pandemic Life (original) (raw)
Related papers
Technology in the University and the Death of Socrates
Literature Compass, 2012
Although technology has its place in the academic world, for both the classroom and collaborative scholarship, an over-reliance on technology and injudicious application to the classroom environment, especially to overcome financial strain at the university level, replaces the Socratic model while not always offering a viable alternative. The anonymity of the online classroom, moreover, threatens the students' ability to build mentoring relationships and career networks, and does not always prepare them for real-world expectations. Hybrid online courses that balance classroom instruction with independent, out-of-classroom activities may prove more educationally valuable in the long run. The academy, however, runs the risk of stifling individuality among students as a result of dependence upon the virtual classroom. While I live and am able to continue, I shall never give up philosophy or stop exhorting you and pointing out the truth to any one of you whom I may meet, saying in my accustomed way:
A Brief History of the Lecture: A Multi-Media Analysis
MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung, 2014
The lecture has been much maligned as a pedagogical form. It has been denigrated as a «hot medium» that has long been «superseded» by the cooler dialogical and televisual forms. Yet the lecture persists and even flourishes today in the form of the podcast, the TED Talk, Kahn Academy and the «smart» lecture hall (outfitted with audio, video and student feedback technologies). This persistence should lead us to re-evaluate both the lecture and the role of the media that have been related to it over time. This paper examines the lecture as a site of intersecting media, as «a site where differences between media are negotiated» as these media evolve (Franzel 2010). This study shows the lecture as bridging oral communication with writing and newer media technologies, rather than as being superseded by newer electronic and digital forms. The result is a remarkably adaptable and robust form that combines textual record and ephemeral event. It is that is capable of addressing a range of different demands and circumstances, both in terms of classroom pragmatics and more abstractly, of the circulation of knowledge itself. The Web, which brings multiple media together with new and established forms and genres, presents fertile grounds for the continuation and revitalization of the lecture as a dominant pedagogical form.
In response to the lecture format coming under ‘attack’ and being replaced by online materials and smaller tutorials, this paper attempts to offer not only a defence but also to assert that the potential value of the lecture is difficult to replicate through other learning formats. Some of the criticisms against lectures will be challenged, in particular that they are monological and promote a banking concept to learning. To make this argument, Freire’s ‘banking concept’ and Vygotsky’s notion of ‘inner speech’ shall be referenced and it shall be claimed that listening is a virtue. There is a review of some of the unique features of lectures and it shall be argued that the sort of thinking, appropriate for higher education, can be encouraged by the lecturer as ‘expert thinking aloud’, embodying what it means to know, to think and to action one’s academic freedom as a curriculum worker.
Unprepared humanities: A pedagogy (forced) online
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2021
Abstract The forcing online of higher education classes should have constituted a major reckoning of pedagogical practices in universities, particularly in the humanities. Such a reckoning seems to have been muted by a focus on logistical concerns and by what might be called a false sense of preparedness within university departments. This study attempts to counter that general trend by taking seriously the cognitive and emotional demands of the online transition through a philosophical lens. This essay presents a phenomenological study of the abrupt transition from physical to online classes during the COVID‐19 lockdown of universities. Reworking two central theses of Marshall McLuhan's (1994) study of media, the author proposes two dispositions as necessary to encountering the role of new media in the teaching of the humanities: a state of wilful unpreparedness and a state of artistic creativity. These in turn pose educational dilemmas that require changes to the relationship between teachers, students and the learning environment, wherein these relationships become subjects of conscious study by the participants. The article draws on a range of classroom experiences in which the instructor and students attempted such a study. In encountering the shock of the new media, a series of concepts emerge that can help promote an artistic approach towards the medium itself.
A critical reflection on education is needed, the work in the current pandemic period of COVID-19, which involves a search for means of distance education, which reinvents itself to mitigate the damage caused by the pandemic in education. The use of technological tools in education appears as a way to promote interaction between students and teachers. The role of the teacher is being highlighted because, more than ever, the proximity between teacher and students is necessary to overcome this important context full of challenges. The moment is to rethink pedagogical practices and reconnect with what really makes sense in the teaching-learning process, dialogue. Educators began to have greater contact with the technological apparatus, and the relationships between teacher and student began to gain new meanings and meanings in a more symbolic way as face-to-face contact was replaced by the digital medium. Access to digital platforms can provide knowledge, but they must address the question of what the future of education will look like in a world shaken by coronavirus. Use the new communication technologies and distance education to face the scale of the challenge that presents itself. The school environment is one of the favorable contexts for better communication between students, increased creativity, solidarity, commitment, among other skills. The Tutor Laboratory project (Technology, University, Work and Guidance), linked to the Federal Technological University of Paraná (UTFPR), also went through the process of reinventing itself as a laboratory whose objective is to foster the relationship between professors and students. It offers students new opportunities to shape their career choices and careers. Being an extension project that before the pandemic, traveled to schools and interacted and experienced the school space in connection with the university. Currently, it uses technological tools to give different directions and paths, but sharing knowledge of different current themes and relevant historical contexts to discuss and reflect, they were carried out with a speaker, group members and the general public through lives, lectures, meetings whether on Instagram, Facebook, Google Meet, Zoom, among other digital media. The changes serve to build collective knowledge, the union of skills and abilities, and efforts are needed. The construction of these new challenges needs to be collective, to analyze which tool is most suitable for digital media, which methods and methodologies, considering the real needs and resources of each discipline.The teacher's health, which made their work an intense routine, their family environment was confused with the work environment, more hours in front of technologies, increased speed of information, pressure and greater demands on teaching-learning relationships. The need to think about expanding care for the educator and its limits must be respected. Allow giving voice to educators, in an attempt to understand their view on the dimensions of access to education and the conditions of their experiences so that a post-pandemic world can be reconstructed with everyone's voice.
The Lecture as a Transmedial Pedagogical Form: A Historical Analysis
The lecture has been much maligned as a pedagogical form, yet it persists and even flourishes today in the form of the podcast, the TED talk, and the “smart” lecture hall. This article examines the lecture as a pedagogical genre, as “a site where differences between media are negotiated” (Franzel) as these media coevolve. This examination shows the lecture as bridging oral communication with writing and newer media technologies, rather than as being superseded by newer electronic and digital forms. The result is a remarkably adaptable and robust genre that combines textual record and ephemeral event, and that is capable of addressing a range of different demands and circumstances, both practical and epistemological.
Editors' Introduction to Forces of Education
Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy, 2023
The pleasure of teaching is an act of resistance. " bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress I It is no coincidence that we propose considering the German Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin a seminal thinker of pedagogy at the precise moment when our pedagogical institutions seem radically put to the test. If Benjamin's eighth thesis "On the Concept of History" holds "that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule, " this historical diagnosis must be fathomed to include the educational circumstance. 1 Given the countless calamities pedagogical institutions are facing two decades into the twenty-first century, the statement that education is "in crisis" reads less like a proposition of true diagnostic value than the citation of an analytic cliché whose appearance within a critical discussion of the state of pedagogy is simply expected if not prescribed. Looking back at its recent history, we observe not only that the university has undergone grave transformations in terms of its self-understanding and institutional structure, but also that it appears as a site of active ruination and perpetuated calamity. 2 Reminding the reader of the birth of the modern university through Wilhelm von Humboldt's humanist visions seems like a tasteless joke if we consider the neoliberal agenda that the university, first and foremost in Anglo-American countries, has come to fulfill. Humboldt saw universities as Freistätte, that is, places of freedom, whose task it was to host nothing but the spiritual life of humanity. 3 An affirmation of such freedom and its profession-in the declarative sense of to professcan be discerned in Jacques Derrida's 1999 prospect of a université sans condition. 4 The rather triste reality of our current situation, however, makes these conceptions seem like increasingly distant fantasies. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the global educational landscape in unprecedented ways, the university had lost touch with its ideal. While the European Union instituted the so-called "Bologna