Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

In ‘What the Best College Teachers Do,’ author Ken Bain asserts that great levels of individual engagement and choice in the classroom often leads to high-performing students and graduates. This idea has compelled me to practice and refine over the last fifteen years what I call “teaching as a conversation,” which is loosely based upon the Socratic Method. Through this teaching style I aim to create a positive working environment where students feel more comfortable contributing to class discussions, replying to questions in a lecture, or engaging in a substantive one-on-one exchange of ideas in a design studio, site field trip, or in impromptu casual conversations. This approach is highly engaging, inclusive, flexible, and conducive to learning for very diverse student populations. But when the Covid-19 pandemic slammed into our collective consciousnesses in March 2020, how could this teaching technique still be brought to its fullest effect? How did new modes of content delivery and engagement affect the teaching process? And, how could teaching as a conversation provide levels of student support comparable to those pre-pandemic? This conference presentation and paper discusses experiments in content delivery during the tumultuous 2020-2021 academic year. It was a year – for this paper’s author – of teaching online, in person, hybrid, indoors, outdoors, in small groups, and in socially distanced lecture halls. It was also a time to carefully rebalance traditional pedagogy with technology, and a time to reassess how to proceed forward in our ongoing pedagogical journeys.