pedagogy – Katie Kearns

Fall Harvest

I have been compassionately harvesting pedagogy lessons from this past semester teaching a graduate course in college pedagogy. Harvesting seems like an appropriate word given the end of fall and beginning of winter is upon us. Parker Palmer’s poem, The Harrowing offers grace and guidance about harvesting and plowing, reminding us to plow, not to dig up the past and find all the faults, but to prepare for the future growing season.

Not just a course design institute

"Imagine if you will...the academic chalk talk" is at the top of the image. There is a picture of people sitting around a round white table. A woman is standing looking at a computer screen and presenting.

“Transforming Your Research Into Teaching” (TYRIT) came about because eight people, each leading their own course design institutes for graduate students and postdocs at different institutions, thought there must be a better way to do this. We were each delivering the same course design content in workshops, and we were finding ourselves reiterating the content in one-on-one consultations about job application materials. Drawing upon previous work from a member of our team, we started asking questions about the potential design of a course institute for grads and postdocs. Most of all: What if multi-institution, flipped model, hybrid workshops weren’t just about delivering content at scale, but about supporting boundary-crossing communities of belonging and purpose?

Origins of “Teaching as if Learning Matters:” A book for and by graduate students about becoming teachers

a powerpoint slide excerpt; the title is at the top, with two book cover images on the side (Teaching as if Learning Matters; Higher Education Careers Beyond the Professoriate). There are three text bullets: "1) interdisciplinary conversations provide contrasts and support disruption of dominant discourse; 2) micro-spaces of belonging, affirmation, agency, and empowerment; 3) opportunities for reflection, construction of new narratives, and meaning-making"

At least three seeds started a new garden for me in graduate student development: who is at the center (marginalized graduate students), what is at the center (the embodied experience of becoming a teacher), how things are centered (how we talk with each other, what we talk about, what we read, what kind of knowledge is privileged). Being part of that learning community in 2015 fundamentally changed how I am part of the scholarly community in graduate student development.

Facing self-doubt: Teaching a grad pedagogy course

A woman with brown hair is in the foreground with a classroom behind her. There are square tables with chairs around them

Despite coaching so many people through their own decision-making, I never stepped back and asked myself what I would do and why with a graduate pedagogy course. Somehow, I never, ever gave a thought to how I would want to teach my own graduate course in college pedagogy. I never invited myself to develop self-awareness and self-authority within that community of pedagogy faculty.