Above all else, I am guided by three main principles in my teaching: trust in students, learning as a communal activity, and transparency about every aspect of the journey of learning and teaching.
Students must be trusted to learn. To seek to learn is an act of courage - one is essentially signing up to be continually confronted with lack of knowledge and understanding. I believe we need to trust our students when they say, by way of enrolling in our courses, that they want to learn. Further, I want my students to be genuinely inspired to learn - that is to be intrinsically motivated to explore their subject matter, of course, but also to learn about themselves as people. Trusting students to do this means creating programs of learning that favour holistic assessment over narrow learning outcomes. Rather than simply meeting a learning criterion, trust means giving students opportunities to safely demonstrate their actual learning about a subject.
Learning safely is best done with others as a communal activity. The trust I seek in learning demands connection, not just with me but with the class as a whole. We work with the learning material together; we learn together. It is thus no coincidence that we talk about ‘cohorts’ in learning. ‘Cohort’ is a word that is closely related to gardening (think ‘horticulture’) and connotes a sense of being with others (the word is also used to mean ‘associates’ or ‘accomplices’). I value connectedness with learners and seek to help them create a sense of belonging within the learning space with our colleagues. Seeing how others learn, and how teachers learn, embeds learning as part of the process of being and working with others.
A communal orientation and commitment to learning means teaching aims and practices should be transparent. I try to make learning with me an experience that is without nasty surprises or tricks. I want learning to be open and fun and doable. Where there are requirements - such as for accreditation or policy - openness about them helps contextualise learning activities for students. Similarly, expectations about learning should be clearly stated. For myself, I also want to help students understand the value of learning not simply as a way of increasing qualification, but as a mechanism of self-understanding and growth. As a teacher, I want my students to leave a class, a course, or a degree eager to learn more and better equipped to do so than when they started. Transparency helps students understand my motives, the institution’s motives and requirements, and helps generally to emphasise the understanding of learning as a process and a mindset.
My intentions are to help students develop their learning mindset and their skills and abilities to be teachers themselves. In doing this, I want my students to feel they are valued colleagues and that they belong together, with me and my teaching colleagues, in the classroom. I want my teaching to be a context in which I help set the conditions in which my students can learn about themselves, the world, and each other.