Mind over matter

Mind over matter

One of the most important qualities a teacher can have is the ability to create a safe-space in a classroom, where learners will have the freedom to voice their opinions and debate about topics related to the lesson. The teacher must be able to maintain this safe-space and organise the lesson to make effective use of it.

A Safe-space goes hand in hand with classroom management. In an article written by Dr. Linda Dusenbury, she stated that to have a manageable classroom you need to be able to keep the classroom neat, make it easy to supervise your students and also organise the physical space of your classroom.

To create the safe space completely links up to pastoral care and the well-being of your students. This space where the learner will have complete freedom to ask anything or discuss it will strengthen the curriculum and, as said in the video of effective pedagogy, allow your learners to flourish. Interacting with their fellow learners will also create learning outside the classroom.

Making use of the resources that are available to you will create an active and ever changing classroom, where the learning will not get bored by using the same method of learning the whole time. It will also improve communication skills with your classroom, since a lot of questions come with the introduction of something new. Use what is available to you, but use it effectively.

The most important lesson that came out of Abby Wills blog, for me, was that you don’t need to force and control learners to do a certain activity. Use and enrich their minds to apply what you want done in the classroom. Make them think about the topic, about they are doing and how they are doing it. Develop their problem solving skills by proposing a problem that is occurring regularly in class and ask them to work together to help you and them as well to make this class a fun and effective learning environment.

The purpose of this blog is not to tell you about how to manage your class, it is about how you can create a safe-space for your learners to thrive, use all resources effectively but most of all to enrich the minds of your learner by not controlling them, but to make them think about issues concerning the topic and think about it. To make them use their mind to solve certain problems, as said in the title, mind over matter.

Understanding critical digital pedagogy

“There is no such thing as a neutral educational process.”  ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

So in this article, “The standards of critical digital pedagogy”, you must first understand what is meant by the term critical digital pedagogy.  At the OpenEd Conference in Washington, DC, Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel presented on critical digital pedagogy.

This is what they had explained what critical digital pedagogy is ,, Critical Pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning predicated on fostering agency and empowering learners (implicitly and explicitly critiquing oppressive power structures). The word “critical” in Critical Pedagogy functions in several registers as in mission-critical, essential; as in literary criticism and critique, providing definitions and interpretation; as in reflective and nuanced thinking about a subject; as in criticizing institutional, corporate, or societal impediments to learning;
Critical Pedagogy, as a disciplinary approach, which inflects (and is inflected by) each of these other meanings.
Each of these registers distinguishes Critical Pedagogy from pedagogy; however, the current educational climate has made the terms, for me, increasingly coterminous (i.e. an ethical pedagogy must be a critical one). Pedagogy is praxis, insistently perched at the intersection between the philosophy and the practice of teaching. When teachers talk about teaching, we are not necessarily doing pedagogical work, and not every teaching method constitutes a pedagogy. Rather, pedagogy necessarily involves recursive, second-order, meta-level work. Teachers teach; pedagogues teach while also actively investigating teaching and learning. Critical Pedagogy suggests a specific kind of anti-capitalist, liberatory praxis. This is deeply personal and political work, through which pedagogues cannot and do not remain objective. Rather, pedagogy, and particularly Critical Pedagogy, is work to which we must bring our full selves, and work to which every learner must come with full agency.

So if you understand the term, you could apply it to your classroom. Pedagogy doesn’t necessarily need to be technology based but it must empower learning in the class without using the conventional  methods of teaching. It is an integrated source of teaching and learning that you can apply to your lesson and method of presenting the lesson. Thus, improving teacher-student communication and interaction.