What’s in a Name? – Teaching Commons Journal Club – February Meeting
Natasha May, Teaching Commons
Did you know that the Teaching Commons celebrated its 5th anniversary in 2017 and this May will be the 6th Teaching in Focus (TiF) Conference? Do you know where the Teaching Commons got its name? To mark the Teaching Commons’ 5th anniversary, a discussion of Building the Teaching Commons during the Journal Club on February 12, 2018, initiated reflections over the past 5 years as well as looking to the future. If you want to know where the name Teaching Commons comes from, read on!
Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings (2006) define “the ‘teaching commons,’ [as] a conceptual space in which communities of educators committed to pedagogical inquiry and innovation come together to exchange ideas about teaching and learning and use them to meet the challenges of preparing students for personal, professional, and civic life.” (p. 26). The article notes that this open exchange of ideas for the advancement of knowledge is a tradition of disciplinary research through collaboration and publication, but is not typical for teaching. There are different avenues where this sharing does occur, namely through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), that is, research into teaching. Technology has also enabled more sharing of instructional materials and ideas. For example, the Teaching Commons at York has a resources section on their website and the First Year Experience (FYE) in the Classroom Toolkit has, in addition to resources, the mechanism for you to personalize the resources, as well as share your own resources and ideas via the community forum. Projects, like MIT’s OpenCourseWare and the Carnegie Foundation’s Knowledge Media Laboratory are other examples of avenues where sharing occurs. Building the teaching commons is more than building avenues; a “readership”, “usership” or “audience” also has to be built and sustained. How do we continue to build the teaching commons? What are necessities? The article argues that “…openness, quality, publicness, and organization…” (Huber & Hutchings, 2006, p. 31) are all challenges to building the teaching commons. In particular, there must be a balance between high quality scholarly work on teaching and learning and an openness to “experiment and push into unknown territory.” (Huber & Hutchings, 2006, p. 30). There are many sides to consider when making work public, including commercialization, intellectual property issues and access.
Our discussion of this article began by comparing the Teaching Commons at York to the teaching commons as defined in the article. Someone who has engaged with the Teaching Commons via a couple of our courses recognized there are two characteristics of the teaching commons in the article, sharing and co-creating. They recognized the Teaching Commons at York contributing, facilitating and taking the lead on sharing ideas about teaching and learning, but did not associate the Teaching Commons at York with co-creating ideas about teaching and learning. Employees of the Teaching Commons at York in attendance then shared examples of what they have created and co-created, or are currently creating. This includes books and book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles, peer-reviewed conference presentations and workshops as well as invited presentations and workshops. A list of Teaching Commons’ co-creations is available on the Teaching Commons CV. The Teaching Commons at York does not solely consist of its employees. The Teaching Commons at York is a conceptual and physical space and everyone who teaches at York, or is interested in teaching, is a member. There is certainly much the Teaching Commons at York can do, collectively, to contribute to overcoming some of the challenges to building the teaching commons as mentioned in the article. During the journal club meeting, we recognized that in each discipline or department there are pockets of the teaching commons, from teaching and learning committees to colleague mentorship and colleagues working together to design and teach courses. A lot of this work is invisible, but as the article suggests, “…more visible, shared conventions need to be established for the citation of individual work, as well as for the mapping and management of knowledge in order to organize a vast and diverse collection of information in ways that allow it to be used.” (Huber & Hutchings, 2006, p. 31). The Teaching Commons at York is committed to helping with this and we hope you will engage in conversation and action.
We are interested in your perspective of what the teaching commons (in the article and at York) is and what it could be. How can we continue to build the teaching commons? Do you have any strategies or even questions about the challenges of openness, quality, publicness and organization that influence the growth of the teaching commons?
Please join the conversation using the comments box below.
References
Huber, M. T., & Hutchings, P. (2006). Building the teaching commons. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 38(3), 24-31.
The Journal Club is an opportunity for colleagues interested in exploring innovation in teaching and learning to collaboratively read and discuss literature in the field. Participants are provided with a journal article identified as a topic of potential interest to be discussed in an informal gathering at the Teaching Commons.
Do you have an article to share or a topic you would like to discuss? Are you interested in leading a conversation of the Journal Club? Contact Lisa Endersby, Educational Developer (lendersb@yorku.ca).