In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students’ experiences in several leaders... more In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students’ experiences in several leadership programs at Bryn Mawr College. Through a collaborative action research study, we identified three interrelated sets of practices in which student participants engage: discerning differences and bringing those differences into dialogue; revising their sense of themselves and becoming more serious students; and revising leadership relationships and creating community. We offer this study as an illustration of and commentary on Baxter Magolda’s theory of self-authorship and students’ development as leaders for social change — an illustration that highlights the close connection between self-development and leadership development
In this presentation, Prof. Alice Lesnick and her student collaborators will share what they lear... more In this presentation, Prof. Alice Lesnick and her student collaborators will share what they learned about growth, teaching, and learning through immersion in the popular online game Minecraft as part of a Fall 2013 course on Education, Technology and Society. Minecraft is an open-ended adventure game, which does not require players to follow a set script but rewards them for achievements in figuring out how to gather and use resources. If played in survival mode, night-time attacks by hostile creatures provide both the impetus for learning and a means of measuring success, in other modes, players can focus on the creative aspects of building or on solving particular challenges. In multiplayer instances of the game, such as the one set up for this course, players can interact with one another as well as with their environment. Educators have noted that open-ended, exploratory learning in Minecraft and other games mirrors the way humans naturally learn and could provide a model for pedagogical reform. For this course, students learned to play the game with support from an expert player (one of the presenters) and played as a class community as well as solo, reflecting critically on their experience and pedagogical literature touching on Minecraft in writing and classroom discussions
Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 2013
In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students' experiences in several leaders... more In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students' experiences in several leadership programs at Bryn Mawr College. Through a collaborative action research study, we identified three interrelated sets of practices in which student participants engage: discerning differences and bringing those differences into dialogue; revising their sense of themselves and becoming more serious students; and revising leadership relationships and creating community. We offer this study as an illustration of and commentary on Baxter Magolda's theory of selfauthorship and students' development as leaders for social change -an illustration that highlights the close connection between self-development and leadership development. Students as Leaders and Learners -p. 2
This article compares two neo-liberal education reform activities that are not often studied in t... more This article compares two neo-liberal education reform activities that are not often studied in tandem: alternative teacher certification in the USA, as explored through Teach for America, and the growing international service learning movement. Guided by the Movement for Black Lives’ call for a world where those “most impacted in our communities control the laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us,” the authors explore the ways in which programs’ neo-liberal justifications obscure the authority, history, and agency of the communities they purport to serve, while convincing people outside of the community that those within are benefitted. The comparisons drawn highlight the ways in which deficit orientations permeate different local and global contexts to perpetuate and normalize privatization and the wresting of control from local communities. In making this comparison, the authors aim to better understand what these programs have in common: a white supremacist w...
Through a discussion of three pedagogical instances--based on classroom discourse, student writin... more Through a discussion of three pedagogical instances--based on classroom discourse, student writing, and program development--the authors examine education as an academic field, arguing that its disciplinary practices and perspectives invite interdisciplinarity and extra-disciplinarity to bridge from the academy to issues, problems, and strengths beyond it. Interdisciplinarity--understood as temporary “groundlessness”--emerges as a means to apprehend and respond to problems that in the context of past frustrations and failures may seem insurmountable; the willingness to not-know inspires new paradigms, experiences, and relationships. Extra-disciplinarity highlights the many chords running between academe and the rest of the world. Using this framework, we discuss the featured pedagogical instances as small-scale models for changing the power structures that have historically silenced some perspectives and knowledges, thus opening these structures to new inputs and connections. We con...
This paper discusses the development of a U.S.-based undergraduate senior seminar toward a confli... more This paper discusses the development of a U.S.-based undergraduate senior seminar toward a conflict-centered perspective of change in education. As practitioner researchers informed by Black, feminist and postcolonial studies, we analyze student writing from the course in order to elucidate the concepts of change, both explicit and tacit, that students draw on to make sense of the complexities inherent in educational work. Some student writing demonstrates a discourse of control, and thus a conception of agency, that both oversimplifies and promotes despair about the challenges at stake. By contrast, some student writing evinces an orientation towards struggle, rather than hope, which emerges as a more generative stance towards recognizing and responding to the structural violence in which education work is fully implicated. This perspective opens the analysis and the education course to understandings that situate power relationships more broadly and more historically than order-ce...
ABSTRACT This study explores the ethical significance of students' literacy practices in ... more ABSTRACT This study explores the ethical significance of students' literacy practices in two secondary English classrooms--an eighth grade, inclusive Language Arts/Social Studies class in an urban public middle school and a twelfth grade English class in a suburban private girls' school. In contrast to traditional interpretations of the ethical domain which take the individual as the primary unit of analysis, this study argues for an exploration of the constellation of relationships through which students participate in literacy practices. Such an expanded view of the ethical domain challenges the image of the classroom as solely an assembly of individuals acting autonomously and establishes literature as more than a source of role models or moral precepts. Using the literatures on critical and feminist educational praxis, classroom-based literacy research, and narrative and aesthetic experiences and drawing on ethnographic methods (including participant observation, interviews, and review of student writing), this study is a hybrid of the ethnographic and grounded theory approaches within qualitative research. Both of these research traditions support the two dimensions of the study's focus: the ethical sense students made through relationships with texts, one another, and people (actual and fictional) represented by texts (others' and their own); and the sense I as a researcher made of the ethical import of these relationships. Students positioned and recognized themselves and others, and they enacted responsibilities and possibilities, within the context of relationships created through the following forms of engagement: evaluating, distancing, empathizing, affiliating, disclosing, and resisting. These findings indicate that constructing meaning through literacy practices entails the negotiation and re-negotiation of relationships that contribute to students' and teachers' recognition of and participation in the ethical domain. One of the salient conclusions of the study is that the ways in which students envision and enact such relationships vary with the participant structures dominant within classrooms.
This paper offers descriptive analyses of two staff-student educational partnership programs of t... more This paper offers descriptive analyses of two staff-student educational partnership programs of the Teaching and Learning Initiative (TLI) at Bryn Mawr College. The focal programs partner college employees with undergraduate students in unique, reciprocal learning partnerships and student-mentored introductory staff computing courses. While community engagement traditionally focuses attention beyond the campus and identifies off-campus community members as beneficiaries of college students’ efforts, these programs focus on students’ relationships with people whose labor sustains the campus in egalitarian, collaborative, educational experiences. In focusing this argument on the educational benefits of such experiences to students, I explore the connections to liberal education. I also argue that intra-campus community engagement enhances students’ understandings and capacities to challenge limiting hierarchies and divisions. I further argue that this kind of engagement enables studen...
Collaborations: A Journal of Community-Based Research and Practice
As U.S.-based colleges and universities seek to globalize education with experiential learning, t... more As U.S.-based colleges and universities seek to globalize education with experiential learning, the risk of reinforcing assumptions about Western superiority, white supremacy and the "neediness" of "developing" countries increases. This essay discusses the rationale for a program that wrestles with questions of power, communication, and creativity by engaging students from the two U.S. liberal arts colleges (a consortium) and a Ghanaian university in a summer action research project. The program takes place in part on campus in the U.S. and in part in a village in Northern Ghana in partnership with three grassroots educational organizations: a community radio station, an Internet training center, and a non-governmental organization focused on early education. Tracking key words in two languages central to the programs a way to make the different histories in play visible, I argue that the purpose of the work is "lagim tehi tuma"-Dagbani for "thinking together," to develop not people, countries, or cultures, but knowledge, questions, and relationships. Drawing on Apusigah's discussion of "tullum," an indigenous, gendered approach to development, I advance a conception of collaboration that accepts limitation, impermanence, and risk as part of sustainability.
Schooling often rests uneasily on presumed dichotomies between coverage and inquiry, skill develo... more Schooling often rests uneasily on presumed dichotomies between coverage and inquiry, skill development, and creativity. By drawing on the often underrecognized parallels between biological evolution and human learning, this essay argues that formal education needs and ought not to forego the unconscious exploratory processes of informal learning. Rather than posit as natural the cultural story that formal schooling must prepare students to integrate with given cultures and foreknowable futures, the evolutionary perspective shows that education is better thought of as preparing students to create cultures and to change, and foster change, in relation to unknown futures. The properties that distinguish formal from informal learning-conscious reflection and a degree of collective consensus about what constitutes knowledge at any given time-are, we argue, useful not as ends in themselves, but as tools for maximizing, sharing, and extending unconscious, evolutionary learning. Working with them as such offers a way out of some of education's persistent problems. Two autobiographical case studies provide examples of these evolutionary changes and indicate pathways of inquiry by which to pursue them.
Unlike current assessment protocols, which emphasize prediction and control—often at the expense ... more Unlike current assessment protocols, which emphasize prediction and control—often at the expense of engagement with the unknown, emergent, and new—we explore here our experiences as professors opening to surprise, in pedagogical interactions that have unpredictable outcomes. We imagine and advocate for institutional structures that, rather than predetermining goals and measuring how well we have achieved them, necessitate surprise and strengthen us to respond creatively and liberally to it. Without room for surprise, we argue, education is denied, and distorted by the loss of, one of its central energies: the circulation of the gifts of chance and serendipity.
In Education, Schon’s (1987) model of the reflective practitioner has been enriched by the call f... more In Education, Schon’s (1987) model of the reflective practitioner has been enriched by the call for a more contextual approach. Yet even the revised conception of the reflective practitioner needs renewal in order to meet the persistent demands of teaching and of learning to teach in diverse, difficult settings. Using postmodern identity theory, this paper examines two illustrative cases of student reflection in a field work seminar led by the author in order to analyse the ways in which students and instructor carried out reflective practice from a range of subject positions in response to complex, sometimes chaotic contexts. This analysis invites the construction of more dynamic metaphors (Cook‐Sather, 2003b) for reflective practice. While such metaphors are necessarily only partially successful in representing the dynamic, unfinished processes of and under reflection, they are better suited to the challenging contexts of teaching.
In this article we explore the definition and development of civic capacity at a liberal arts col... more In this article we explore the definition and development of civic capacity at a liberal arts college through a specific teaching and learning initiative. This initiative encourages faculty, staff, and students to share the roles of teacher, learner, and colleague as they gain educational opportunities and foster these for others. Through a description of two programs and analysis of participants’ reflections, we identify four stages of change that foster civic capacity. We suggest that this initiative invites a re-interpretation of the institution as a site of educational opportunities and raises questions about how to broaden access to these opportunities.
This interpretive study proposes a framework with which to explore the ethical significance of cl... more This interpretive study proposes a framework with which to explore the ethical significance of classroom-based literacy practices. Overly narrow views of literature as a source of role models or moral precepts take insufficient account of the complexity of text and experience. Through analyses of telling examples from student writing and discussion in response to literature, the occurrence and interaction of six forms of ethical engagement are documented: judging, distancing, empathizing, affiliating, disclosing and resisting. The study concludes that ethical matters are interwoven with the socially accomplished, situated work of engaging with literature and with specific pedagogical structures.
In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students’ experiences in several leaders... more In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students’ experiences in several leadership programs at Bryn Mawr College. Through a collaborative action research study, we identified three interrelated sets of practices in which student participants engage: discerning differences and bringing those differences into dialogue; revising their sense of themselves and becoming more serious students; and revising leadership relationships and creating community. We offer this study as an illustration of and commentary on Baxter Magolda’s theory of self-authorship and students’ development as leaders for social change — an illustration that highlights the close connection between self-development and leadership development
In this presentation, Prof. Alice Lesnick and her student collaborators will share what they lear... more In this presentation, Prof. Alice Lesnick and her student collaborators will share what they learned about growth, teaching, and learning through immersion in the popular online game Minecraft as part of a Fall 2013 course on Education, Technology and Society. Minecraft is an open-ended adventure game, which does not require players to follow a set script but rewards them for achievements in figuring out how to gather and use resources. If played in survival mode, night-time attacks by hostile creatures provide both the impetus for learning and a means of measuring success, in other modes, players can focus on the creative aspects of building or on solving particular challenges. In multiplayer instances of the game, such as the one set up for this course, players can interact with one another as well as with their environment. Educators have noted that open-ended, exploratory learning in Minecraft and other games mirrors the way humans naturally learn and could provide a model for pedagogical reform. For this course, students learned to play the game with support from an expert player (one of the presenters) and played as a class community as well as solo, reflecting critically on their experience and pedagogical literature touching on Minecraft in writing and classroom discussions
Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 2013
In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students' experiences in several leaders... more In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students' experiences in several leadership programs at Bryn Mawr College. Through a collaborative action research study, we identified three interrelated sets of practices in which student participants engage: discerning differences and bringing those differences into dialogue; revising their sense of themselves and becoming more serious students; and revising leadership relationships and creating community. We offer this study as an illustration of and commentary on Baxter Magolda's theory of selfauthorship and students' development as leaders for social change -an illustration that highlights the close connection between self-development and leadership development. Students as Leaders and Learners -p. 2
This article compares two neo-liberal education reform activities that are not often studied in t... more This article compares two neo-liberal education reform activities that are not often studied in tandem: alternative teacher certification in the USA, as explored through Teach for America, and the growing international service learning movement. Guided by the Movement for Black Lives’ call for a world where those “most impacted in our communities control the laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us,” the authors explore the ways in which programs’ neo-liberal justifications obscure the authority, history, and agency of the communities they purport to serve, while convincing people outside of the community that those within are benefitted. The comparisons drawn highlight the ways in which deficit orientations permeate different local and global contexts to perpetuate and normalize privatization and the wresting of control from local communities. In making this comparison, the authors aim to better understand what these programs have in common: a white supremacist w...
Through a discussion of three pedagogical instances--based on classroom discourse, student writin... more Through a discussion of three pedagogical instances--based on classroom discourse, student writing, and program development--the authors examine education as an academic field, arguing that its disciplinary practices and perspectives invite interdisciplinarity and extra-disciplinarity to bridge from the academy to issues, problems, and strengths beyond it. Interdisciplinarity--understood as temporary “groundlessness”--emerges as a means to apprehend and respond to problems that in the context of past frustrations and failures may seem insurmountable; the willingness to not-know inspires new paradigms, experiences, and relationships. Extra-disciplinarity highlights the many chords running between academe and the rest of the world. Using this framework, we discuss the featured pedagogical instances as small-scale models for changing the power structures that have historically silenced some perspectives and knowledges, thus opening these structures to new inputs and connections. We con...
This paper discusses the development of a U.S.-based undergraduate senior seminar toward a confli... more This paper discusses the development of a U.S.-based undergraduate senior seminar toward a conflict-centered perspective of change in education. As practitioner researchers informed by Black, feminist and postcolonial studies, we analyze student writing from the course in order to elucidate the concepts of change, both explicit and tacit, that students draw on to make sense of the complexities inherent in educational work. Some student writing demonstrates a discourse of control, and thus a conception of agency, that both oversimplifies and promotes despair about the challenges at stake. By contrast, some student writing evinces an orientation towards struggle, rather than hope, which emerges as a more generative stance towards recognizing and responding to the structural violence in which education work is fully implicated. This perspective opens the analysis and the education course to understandings that situate power relationships more broadly and more historically than order-ce...
ABSTRACT This study explores the ethical significance of students' literacy practices in ... more ABSTRACT This study explores the ethical significance of students' literacy practices in two secondary English classrooms--an eighth grade, inclusive Language Arts/Social Studies class in an urban public middle school and a twelfth grade English class in a suburban private girls' school. In contrast to traditional interpretations of the ethical domain which take the individual as the primary unit of analysis, this study argues for an exploration of the constellation of relationships through which students participate in literacy practices. Such an expanded view of the ethical domain challenges the image of the classroom as solely an assembly of individuals acting autonomously and establishes literature as more than a source of role models or moral precepts. Using the literatures on critical and feminist educational praxis, classroom-based literacy research, and narrative and aesthetic experiences and drawing on ethnographic methods (including participant observation, interviews, and review of student writing), this study is a hybrid of the ethnographic and grounded theory approaches within qualitative research. Both of these research traditions support the two dimensions of the study's focus: the ethical sense students made through relationships with texts, one another, and people (actual and fictional) represented by texts (others' and their own); and the sense I as a researcher made of the ethical import of these relationships. Students positioned and recognized themselves and others, and they enacted responsibilities and possibilities, within the context of relationships created through the following forms of engagement: evaluating, distancing, empathizing, affiliating, disclosing, and resisting. These findings indicate that constructing meaning through literacy practices entails the negotiation and re-negotiation of relationships that contribute to students' and teachers' recognition of and participation in the ethical domain. One of the salient conclusions of the study is that the ways in which students envision and enact such relationships vary with the participant structures dominant within classrooms.
This paper offers descriptive analyses of two staff-student educational partnership programs of t... more This paper offers descriptive analyses of two staff-student educational partnership programs of the Teaching and Learning Initiative (TLI) at Bryn Mawr College. The focal programs partner college employees with undergraduate students in unique, reciprocal learning partnerships and student-mentored introductory staff computing courses. While community engagement traditionally focuses attention beyond the campus and identifies off-campus community members as beneficiaries of college students’ efforts, these programs focus on students’ relationships with people whose labor sustains the campus in egalitarian, collaborative, educational experiences. In focusing this argument on the educational benefits of such experiences to students, I explore the connections to liberal education. I also argue that intra-campus community engagement enhances students’ understandings and capacities to challenge limiting hierarchies and divisions. I further argue that this kind of engagement enables studen...
Collaborations: A Journal of Community-Based Research and Practice
As U.S.-based colleges and universities seek to globalize education with experiential learning, t... more As U.S.-based colleges and universities seek to globalize education with experiential learning, the risk of reinforcing assumptions about Western superiority, white supremacy and the "neediness" of "developing" countries increases. This essay discusses the rationale for a program that wrestles with questions of power, communication, and creativity by engaging students from the two U.S. liberal arts colleges (a consortium) and a Ghanaian university in a summer action research project. The program takes place in part on campus in the U.S. and in part in a village in Northern Ghana in partnership with three grassroots educational organizations: a community radio station, an Internet training center, and a non-governmental organization focused on early education. Tracking key words in two languages central to the programs a way to make the different histories in play visible, I argue that the purpose of the work is "lagim tehi tuma"-Dagbani for "thinking together," to develop not people, countries, or cultures, but knowledge, questions, and relationships. Drawing on Apusigah's discussion of "tullum," an indigenous, gendered approach to development, I advance a conception of collaboration that accepts limitation, impermanence, and risk as part of sustainability.
Schooling often rests uneasily on presumed dichotomies between coverage and inquiry, skill develo... more Schooling often rests uneasily on presumed dichotomies between coverage and inquiry, skill development, and creativity. By drawing on the often underrecognized parallels between biological evolution and human learning, this essay argues that formal education needs and ought not to forego the unconscious exploratory processes of informal learning. Rather than posit as natural the cultural story that formal schooling must prepare students to integrate with given cultures and foreknowable futures, the evolutionary perspective shows that education is better thought of as preparing students to create cultures and to change, and foster change, in relation to unknown futures. The properties that distinguish formal from informal learning-conscious reflection and a degree of collective consensus about what constitutes knowledge at any given time-are, we argue, useful not as ends in themselves, but as tools for maximizing, sharing, and extending unconscious, evolutionary learning. Working with them as such offers a way out of some of education's persistent problems. Two autobiographical case studies provide examples of these evolutionary changes and indicate pathways of inquiry by which to pursue them.
Unlike current assessment protocols, which emphasize prediction and control—often at the expense ... more Unlike current assessment protocols, which emphasize prediction and control—often at the expense of engagement with the unknown, emergent, and new—we explore here our experiences as professors opening to surprise, in pedagogical interactions that have unpredictable outcomes. We imagine and advocate for institutional structures that, rather than predetermining goals and measuring how well we have achieved them, necessitate surprise and strengthen us to respond creatively and liberally to it. Without room for surprise, we argue, education is denied, and distorted by the loss of, one of its central energies: the circulation of the gifts of chance and serendipity.
In Education, Schon’s (1987) model of the reflective practitioner has been enriched by the call f... more In Education, Schon’s (1987) model of the reflective practitioner has been enriched by the call for a more contextual approach. Yet even the revised conception of the reflective practitioner needs renewal in order to meet the persistent demands of teaching and of learning to teach in diverse, difficult settings. Using postmodern identity theory, this paper examines two illustrative cases of student reflection in a field work seminar led by the author in order to analyse the ways in which students and instructor carried out reflective practice from a range of subject positions in response to complex, sometimes chaotic contexts. This analysis invites the construction of more dynamic metaphors (Cook‐Sather, 2003b) for reflective practice. While such metaphors are necessarily only partially successful in representing the dynamic, unfinished processes of and under reflection, they are better suited to the challenging contexts of teaching.
In this article we explore the definition and development of civic capacity at a liberal arts col... more In this article we explore the definition and development of civic capacity at a liberal arts college through a specific teaching and learning initiative. This initiative encourages faculty, staff, and students to share the roles of teacher, learner, and colleague as they gain educational opportunities and foster these for others. Through a description of two programs and analysis of participants’ reflections, we identify four stages of change that foster civic capacity. We suggest that this initiative invites a re-interpretation of the institution as a site of educational opportunities and raises questions about how to broaden access to these opportunities.
This interpretive study proposes a framework with which to explore the ethical significance of cl... more This interpretive study proposes a framework with which to explore the ethical significance of classroom-based literacy practices. Overly narrow views of literature as a source of role models or moral precepts take insufficient account of the complexity of text and experience. Through analyses of telling examples from student writing and discussion in response to literature, the occurrence and interaction of six forms of ethical engagement are documented: judging, distancing, empathizing, affiliating, disclosing and resisting. The study concludes that ethical matters are interwoven with the socially accomplished, situated work of engaging with literature and with specific pedagogical structures.
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Papers by Alice Lesnick