James G. R. Cronin

Throughout the pandemic, scholars, administrators, and developers have been asking: which tools and practices from emergency education during the coronavirus pandemic may become part of established practice? Related to this question is how scholars have responded to the present event by turning to past pedagogies to inform current practices. I focus on the tools for conviviality initiated by Ivan Illich in  Deschooling Society  (1970); defined by Illich in  Tools for Conviviality  (1973); and refined by Illich in  Medical Nemesis  (1975). There is renewed interest in Illich as part of contemporary discussions of emancipatory education.  I historicise Illich’s tools for conviviality to make the point that remote learning and homeschooling during the pandemic has brought marginal pedagogies into mainstream focus. I divide this post into three parts: first, a brief explanation of Illich’s core idea of tools for conviviality using  Deschooling Society...

I reflect on how an emphasis on care has emerged as an active response to "pandemic pedagogy" through four themes that resonate within the emerging academic literature: 1.  Rethinking teaching : the need to rethink traditional course content delivery due to social distancing has resulted in teachers taking on roles as designers of learning. This process has accelerated from March to December 2020 as the first and second waves of the pandemic resulted in government restrictions to work and education. Even before the pandemic, traditional transmissive teaching methods had been challenged and student-oriented approaches to teaching and learning were especially being advocated within the international scholarship of teaching and learning with students-as-partners as a good example of this model. The need to practically facilitate courses online has resulted in reimagining the role of the teacher as a “guide on the side” rather than a “sage on the stage.” In turn, this shift has a...

Visit this link for a short guide to threshold concepts in the curriculum hosted by UCL.

Instructional scaffolding is a process through which a teacher adds supports for students in order to enhance learning and aid in the mastery of tasks and knowledge acquisition. As students master the assigned tasks, the supports are gradually removed.  In the traditional classroom, you can typically see when students are struggling, scaffolding helps address similar concerns that might be less visible online. For a short guide on instructional design  visit sc affolding learning . 

A short guide on embedding reflective journaling in course design for dynamic assessments. 

PandemicPedagogy #1 engages with current challenges of migrating courses online for re-opening of higher education in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. A common issue for educators migrating content online is a concern that the technology will  overtake  the pedagogy. This post addresses ways educators can seek a balance between technology and pedagogy. Pedagogy applied to technology conditions new ways for educators to engage with learning design. Educators now become facilitators of learning performances and curators of learning enactments.  Some practical pedagogical action steps:  1.  Revisit learning outcomes  of your module/s to ask the basic question: what do my students need to "know" in order to demonstrate their performance of understanding?  I will draw upon the decoding the disciplines f ramework to decode the learning enactments in the webinar below at #4 .  Most instructors notice places in their courses where students fin...

We are experiencing a digital hive-mind in these the early decades of the twenty-first century as manifested by the speed and spread of participatory cultures created by online user-generated content. Currently, this manifestation is being ideologically and commercially sold as a utopian vision unfolding with unquestioning certainty. However, are we sweeping away our familiar yesterdays in our rush to embrace global digital cultures? North American scholarship has adopted the rhetoric of “digital citizenship” as an umbrella term enfolding social participation that goes beyond just working with digital tools. This term’s ideological assumption echoes the tradition of democratic scholarship that leads us back to the social utopias of participatory democracy as expressed in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837). Emerson, in this essay, outlined the scholar’s responsibility, as a member of democratic society, to participate in the betterment of society as a whole.  E...