I want to reflect on the digital pedagogy of group work within case studies and forums posts within the course before working up my final reflections for the final assignment on leadership.
One of my concerns about modern tertiary education, especially when you get to post graduate study, is that students live such full lives with partners, jobs, and a society that pressures them to fulfill needs in every moment that they don’t have the time to dwell with the learning and knowledge that is torrenting from the tap of institutional education or with the experiential emergent studenting that happens from incidental interactions. I feel the value of this is lost in the rush of getting it done. People rush back to their lives and miss out on the enrichment lying around in its potentiality.
Within this course I succeeded in the first semester by getting into contact with 5 of the Melbourne cohort and getting at least 3 together in the Northcote Library and once meeting one other in Victoria’s State Library. I found this to be enriching, empowering, and exciting to draw people together into a learning community.
The second semester was quieter in that I had no physical interactions with my cohort and this 3rd semester pandemic has put paid to interacting with anyone at all in the course in the physical realm.
Yet it seems to me that this course was resilient in the face of the disruptions which have shattered the execution of tertiary education across Australia.
As universities struggled without enough experienced practitioners to execute the shift of all courses to online learning, the Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship) which has been delivered online for a number of years and has its roots in a correspondence course operated decades before had resilient and effective pedagogical structures in place.
I have seen leadership in the effective structures of communication used by all of my teachers this semester in quite different ways that accord to the strengths of their own particular style. One provides weekly video instructions, one does exhaustive lists and links, and one has been particularly effective in responding to emails from me. I even had a personal phone call from one.
Communicating ideas and structures is a key part of instructional leadership and so must be kept in mind within the teacher librarian role. Choosing which structures to use and being able to understand their strengths and weaknesses is a key role of a teacher librarian.
My teachers either have experience working as a teacher librarian or have extensive research experience across the library field. The ways they model information transmission within their subjects informs us as their students how we might structure our own missives in future.
Given that this course has had a consistent online delivery, compared to the scramble of every other tertiary course in this pandemic, the forum and case studies were the critical tools selected for our group interactions and opportunities to explore leadership with the theoretical frameworks provided by the readings in mind.
People being time poor was still an issue as several members of my group were working teachers doing 1 – 2 units part time during the crisis transition to online learning delivery of primary and secondary school as part of the CV-19 pandemic for case studies 3 – 5.
With the first case study being responded to via our posts in the public discussion forums this allowed us to become fluent with the context of hypothetically working as the director of information in a three campus K – 12 school system. Case studies are an effective and complicated learning experience that requires critical engagement towards narrative, comparative critical reflection on fictional and real world experiences, and the synthesis of both of these to create potential solutions to large problems.
Doing this as a group adds another layer of complexity but also allows the sharing of alternative perspectives Tactics included proposing deadlines like ‘can we all get some ideas down in 24 hours’ and my suggestion of moving our discussions into the Wiki.
I made a couple of mistakes during the process. One was that I tried to post a summary of the context and characters but posted the body of my post in the discription which then wrecked the visual aesthetic of our forum but another student kindly deleted and reposted it in the way I intended.
I also tried contributing to Case study 4 in the discussion group but found eventually that everyone else had been working in the wiki
by case 5 everyone seemed pretty wrecked and we were just happy to get something in as led by our most prolific poster.
Now to put this all together in the final part of the final assignment for my Leadership unit