Tag: university teaching

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Teaching: Intensive but Rewarding

Joanna

I don’t know what’s about September, but it’s always so intense in terms of all possible work tasks. One year this is about founding application, the other year it’s about conferencing, and then yet another one is about teaching. This year it started already on September 1st, with a session on “What is… visual research?” collaboratively organized with Dr. Mélodine Sommier at the Methods Festival at the University of Jyväskylä.

Following, I was teaching an intensive doctoral course on Visual Research Methods and Methodologies at the same university. This was a new course, which I wanted to introduce already a while ago as I noticed a clear need for it over the years I worked at this university. We had four very intensive Tuesdays (20 teaching hours in total), during which we discussed our ways of seeing and interpreting visual imagery, methods to analyze found images, and participatory visual techniques. As always, I was worried if it was “enough” and how well it helped and guided participants toward their future endeavours with visual research. I was worried to the extend that I did not ask for the course feedback. And here it came, some wonderful comments from the participants, spontaneously sent to me by the participants:

Thank you again for the course – what an absolute delight it was! My mind is buzzing with ideas for future research.

I must thank you for the inspiring, clear, intellectual building blocks giving course of research. The group and the lecturer (i.e. you) empowered me enormously.

And I’m also continuing my Friday teaching trips to Tampere University to teach a course on Visual Cultures and Technologies. This year, in addition to challenges of the hybrid format, I’m also having a larger group of 34 students in the course. I’m still trying to devote as much as possible time for questions, discussions and group activities, and I’m so much looking forward to students’ visual case studies they will introduce in the second part of the course.

So, yes, September… or, well, it’s October already!

#ONL211, Topic 2: Open Learning – sharing and openness

A relationship of sharing

Joanna

How to think about openness and open resources in education? Am I able to, as a teacher who spends hours preparing the teaching materials, stop screaming “mine!” like a child?

Education is a relationship of sharing. We share our knowledge and experience with students while their share their ideas with us. The exchange of thoughts works only in an open environment that provides room for reflection on the learning process. Thus, education is per se about sharing and openness. However, those of us who are working in academia, know how vulnerable our work is toward the sharing practices — the constant fear of when to share and with whom my research ideas, plans, preliminary results that they will not be stolen. Is this the same case with the educational material that we produce? Or can they be shared to inspire others?

I am now thinking about my learning and growing process as a teacher. Many of the ideas I have implemented in the classroom were inspired by the work of others. And I am still searching for the new ideas, activities and learning materials that I can adapt for my teaching. Education is about sharing, which does not mean to give away. Each student group will react differently to the same material, and each teacher will apply the same activity in a slightly different way. Thus, by sharing our educational practices and materials as teachers, we do not need to worry that we give them away. They are staying we us, we can still use them. However, and what is more important, there are other teachers and learners who can benefit from our work and enjoy the learning process in a novel ways.

In this place, I want to mention a great initiative, supported by the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA), of open educational resources (OER) in the area of visual literacy — a place where teachers across disciplines and levels of education can find lesson plans and share teaching ideas related to visual literacy. This is a recent initiative, but extremely important, and I think it is the time that I am going to contribute to it as well. You can find more about it here.

  • In teaching and learning we should keep all windows open for the new refreshing wind to come in.