Flips, Cartwheels, and 360’s? Oh My!

photo credit: ЯL via photo pin cc

My last post really got me thinking about what kind of learning environment I’d like to design for my next hybrid First-Year Composition course, especially after one of my former students responded to the question that I posed at the end of the post:

…do we want to challenge our students or do we want them to challenge themselves?

The answer to this question, according to my student, is that what we should try to achieve is a balance between the two. Sometimes you need someone else pushing and challenging you to challenge yourself and to meet those challenges. I think it’s a valid point. But how do we find that balance? And how do we know at what level we can safely challenge students without overwhelming, frustrating, and alienating them?

These are the questions that I’m grappling with as I begin designing my upcoming Hybrid FYC class.

Yesterday, I happened to read the article “Why Flip the Classroom When We Can Make It Do Cartwheels?” by Cathy Davidson. The article focuses on Duke’s Haiti Lab, an interdisciplinary experience that places students in a global research and learning laboratory in which their work has an impact beyond the classroom. This is exactly the type of challenge that I would like to present to my students. But how do I do so with very limited resources, just myself to make it happen, and a group of freshly-minted high school students, many of whom haven’t decided on a major and have no clue what they are good at or passionate about?

The central focus of the Haiti Lab is a problem. All of the students focus on this problem, just in different ways, using different methods, and while viewing the problem through different disciplinary lenses. So, the Haiti Lab presents the same kind of immersion and autonomy that I managed to establish in my first hybrid FYC class, just on a grander scale and in a way that flattens the classroom walls and makes the world the classroom. I’m not sure that I want to tackle the world just yet, especially on my own. So, I’ve decided to settle for making the university my students’ classroom for now.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m a member of the 21st Century Classroom Initiative committee. We meet once a month and, in between meetings, individual members and specialized groups research issues related to the 21st century classroom and visit other campuses to look at models of 21st century classrooms. We post our research findings to a database and discuss the results and our own university’s progress each month during our face-to-face meetings. It’s an exciting committee to be on and it really has become an interdisciplinary effort. There are representatives from each college, various departments, and administrators and staff who are all focused on turning our university into a 21st century learning environment. The only group not represented on the committee is the students themselves. So, I’ve decided that maybe I should change that.

What if I asked my hybrid FYC students to help design a 21st century university? What if I allowed them to decide, with no financial restrictions, what their ideal university would look and sound like? How would classrooms look? How would classes be taught? What would be going on in the classrooms? What would be going on in other spaces? What other spaces would there be? What would they look like?

What if I asked my students to use their own passions and interests to research and create solutions for an outdated mode of education? Solutions that would impact their own education? What if I asked them to present their findings to the committee that is in charge of deciding which solutions to consider and adopt?

Would my freshman be ready to meet such a challenge? Would they be willing to do it?

At this point, I don’t have any answers to these questions. But I wonder how many questions the designers of the Haiti Lab had when they first began to think about creating an immersive, interdisciplinary, real-world learning experience? And I wonder if they waited until they had answers to all of those questions before they decided to go ahead with their vision?