My Teaching Philosophy - Week 10

Contents: Introduction Instructional Context Value Statement Influential Theories and Theorists Personal Analysis Personal Application

Introduction

Part of the course AHE 553, Adult Learning & Development, involved the development of a teaching philosophy statement. As part of the assignment, we were asked to address the following prompts:

• Value Statement: A statement about the importance of having a personal philosophy of adult education
• Influential Theories & Theorists: The traditional, modern, and contemporary theory(ies) and theorists of adult learning you studied this term that you believe/anticipate (will) inform your own learning philosophy and practice.
• Personal Analysis: A description and analysis of the concepts, principles, theories, and/or core beliefs about adult learning that motivate and/or resonate with you as both a learner and potential teacher.
• Personal Application: An explanation for and assessment of how you plan to incorporate and apply these principles and beliefs into your career and life. Include specific strategies from the theories/theorists that you plan to implement to facilitate your own and others’ adult learning.

While I hope that I answered these prompts and address my values as an instructor, I invite you to converse with me about my philosophy and any questions you have!

Instructional Context

In the library world, we are taught early on that the most frequent instructional interaction that we will have with someone is a one-shot session. Be it 15 minutes or an hour, it’s likely that we will only have a single opportunity to interact with someone, respond to their needs, equip them with the skills they need to move forward with their research query, and impress upon them the value of coming back to the library. It’s an exciting challenge, but it also makes it difficult not to fall into the trap of relying on traditional models of teacher-centred instruction that might not make the learning interaction as effective and impactful as it could be.

Value Statement

Having a personal philosophy of adult education that affirms one’s goals as a teacher and outlines the ways in which success in achieving these goals can be evaluated is important because it establishes a form of accountability. Not only does it allow for a level of critical reflection, it also can create opportunities for conversations about instructional styles and invite input from others—instructors and students alike.

I believe that having a personal philosophy demonstrates the care that an instructor is taking as part of their work and their intent to make their instruction a multi-way conversation rather than an unchangeable method. A personal teaching philosophy is no less important in the context of one shot lessons than in the context of a weeks-long course, even if the methods of instruction and evaluation might vary in recognition of the different levels of connections, interaction, and relationship-building that is possible.

Influential Theories and Theorists

I find that behaviorist instructional practices have their place in adult education and particularly in library education because of their focus on creating a structured learning environment. Skinner (1971) is noted for believing that “arranging the environment to bring about desired behavior” can bring about effective educational results (as cited in Merriam & Bierema, 2013, p. 26), and I do think that creating a clear outline of the expectations, potential outcomes, and goals for the course represent an important way in which a teacher can help a student to understand what their understanding of the educational interaction is and can also invite feedback regarding the interaction with regards to whether these goals were achieved.

However, behaviorism tends to reject the value of discussions of internal processes (Merriam & Bierema, 2013, p. 26), something that I think is incredibly important for library instruction. A cognitivist approach, particularly one rooted in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and the concept of schema, is something that I believe is central to the success of an instructional interaction in the library.

Yilmaz (2011) identifies an application of schema theory to instruction as: “Mak[ing] instructional material meaningful by identifying the learner's mental model and providing conceptual models invented by teachers, designers, scientists, or engineers to help make some target system understandable” (p. 206). This strategy is central to the typical reference interaction, in which a librarian often works with a student to unpick the rather tangled and rigid structures that are the information systems that we are expected to utilize and understand the process of how to interact with them by relating them to something that is perhaps more familiar.

If this strategy of meaning-making is employed with a critical slant that emphasizes creating opportunities for interaction, interrogation, and questioning, it offers the opportunity for an instructor to frame learning to navigate these searching processes as unnatural and worthy of critique, demonstrating that they are not always intuitive and perhaps should not be viewed as what we should accept as normative. I think that this is critical to how librarians should approach instruction given the hegemonic nature of knowledge organization practices.

Personal Analysis

In many information retrieval situations, we are expected to be able to understand how to problem solve using existing tools and knowledge structures, but at the same time we are confronted with the fact that these structures reproduce ways of knowing that marginalize Indigenous, racialized, crip, queer, and feminine/feminized experiences (and the intersections of any of these categories and beyond).

Creating spaces that allow for the discussion of why what we are teaching may be problematic, that open opportunity for critique and the embrace of alternative approaches, and that elevate and center previously marginalized perspectives so that they can be included and incorporated respectfully into these traditional frameworks if they wish to be are all things that I hope to prioritize in my work. This is difficult in the aforementioned 15 minute reference interaction, and yet I think that there are opportunities for opening up the possibility of future conversation and reflection even in these short instructional moments.

Personal Application

Approaching even the smallest unit of instruction with the goal of employing poststructural feminist peda/andragogy is a goal of mine. Tisdell characterizes this approach as incorporating four key themes: “how knowledge is constructed, the development of voice, the authority of the teacher and students, and dealing with differences” (as cited in Merriam & Baumgartner, 2020, p. 312).

This to me can look like centring the agency, identity and experiences of the student(s), allowing them to help set the goals that reflect what they come to the table hoping to achieve for the session, and attempting to bridge levels of understanding by avoiding the use of jargon while at the same time responding to what the student does know rather than treating them as ignorant. When possible, I also hope to emphasize opportunities for building community and for students to learn from one another (while also not placing undue burden on them to assume the role of ‘teacher’).

Lastly, in addition to creating theoretically diverse and critical spaces, I also hope to challenge myself to expand my conception of how instructional activities can be designed and delivered. Understanding how learning can occur physically and mentally and how different individuals can benefit from these different ways of learning in different ways, I think that an area that I hope to become more knowledgeable in moving forward is different lecturing styles and strategies that encourage engagement and that conceptualize engagement in a diverse manner.

I look forward to challenging myself to learn more about how to encourage others to think critically; to communicate and discover how they best learn and to advocate for instruction that incorporates strategies that are responsive to their needs; and ultimately to have instructional interactions that make them feel confident in their own ability to learn, to successfully apply acquired skills, and challenge the elements of what has been deemed ‘required’ for success that don’t align with their experiences.