Move to the Center 1

I was tempted to title this reflection, "Does the word 'duh' mean anything to you?" – my favorite "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" movie quote – but I opted instead to simply characterize it as one of my pedagogical realizations from the Sharing Cultures Project. The following is a brief summary of my conversion process, a conversion that I never imagined that I needed to go through (you know, considering myself an enlightened teacher an all), but it turned out that I did.

I entered the Sharing Cultures Project as a teacher for the first time in February 2004 after having served as part of the planning team since 2001. Amidst tremendous political/institutional pressures at both NMMU and CCC during the first two years of the project, the teaching teams had together hammered out a shared syllabus for students, which centered on a series of shared print readings, responses to those readings in the Blackboard discussion space or in e-mail pairs, and then production of written essays for the courses. This had worked admirably, but we were still working within a framework that kept the on line discussion between students in a peripheral role in the experience. This may be partly because we imagined that there was always "time" for asynchronous discussion, unlike synchronous connections which demanded specific dedicated time frames. But I also think it was also fear, the fear of letting the board be the main part of the course, the fear of not teaching "what we were supposed to be teaching," the fear of lack of "coverage."