The Resilient Pedagogy podcast with your host, Travis Thurston. On this episode, we discuss "resilient design for learning" with authors from Resilient Pedagogy. This is the space where we discuss practical teaching strategies to overcome distance disruption and distraction. We also explore how approaching course design, classroom communities, and pedagogies of care can humanize our learning environments. Today, we welcome two guests, Rebecca M Quintana is the Learning Experience Design Lead at the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan. She's also an intermittent lecturer at UM's School of Education. Jacob Fortman is the Learning Experience Design Certificate Coordinator at the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan. Welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having us, Travis.
Thanks, nice to be here.
I'm really looking forward to discussing some of these ideas from your chapter. But before we get started, I want to ask you the question that we ask all of our guests: as an emerging term resilient pedagogy has been designed in or defined rather in in a number of different ways. And it continues to be applied in varying contexts. But what does resilient pedagogy mean to you?
I guess I can, I can start and then they can think carry carry on. So when I'm thinking about resilient pedagogy, I'm really focusing on the design aspect of the term. So thinking about how we can intentionally create designs that will withstand disruption. So designs for learning in particular. So it's not so much about cultivating resilience within an individual but more about thinking about how our designs can be created such that they can withstand disruption. Things that that come along that we may or may not be anticipating, we can recover from those things.
And just to add on to what Rebecca was saying I think for us when we're early on, in our conversations with this, we're trying to distinguish it from purely thinking about as perseverance or grit or like overcoming certain obstacles, but thinking about it as a specific type of design framework where we can foster the capability to be resilient. And that was an important distinction that we tried to make early on, when we're thinking about this. And also framing this as a conversation with a larger community of instructors and instructional designers as well.
I really like that. coming at it from a from a design perspective, I think has been helpful for me, in thinking about how we, how we can plan flexibility into into our designs. Yeah, I like that. So there's a few ideas that I want to talk about today, that come from your chapter that stood out to me. When disruptions occurred early in 2020, there was there was a bit of a lapse in quality when we shifted to remote teaching. And and many of our educational experiences and our practices were changed. Specifically, in your chapter you point to a MOOC that you created a course that you created on resilient design, and offered that course. So I'm interested to discuss in those terms, what is resilient design for learning? And how did you, how did you frame that?
Yeah, I'm just reflecting back, it's almost exactly one year ago that we started to sort of conceptualize what resilient Design for Learning was or is. And as we all recall, we were kind of, you know, right in the midst of a somewhat, let's say, traumatic transition from our usual work environments to fully online environments, and teaching environments So we really, as Jacob mentioned earlier called on the community, so we wrote a blog post and, and asked for insight from instructional designers, instructors at all levels, to sort of share what how they were thinking about emergency remote teaching, but also how they were thinking about successfully, you know, moving their students from this difficult situation to completed semester and although this semester might look different than they were originally anticipating, at the beginning of 2020, it would still be a successful conclusion because we all we all got there in the end. So we reached out through a survey and asked, you know, the community of learning experience designers, instructional designers, and we really, you know, we...Jacob pored over that survey to get and we did together. And we kind of, we tried to really honor the ideas that were surfaced through through our call there. Jacob, do you recall any other aspects of that point in time?
Yeah, I'm trying to recall some aspects from that point in time. You know, I've been kind of poring over some of the case studies that we created for that for that MOOC. And one thing that I've been thinking about and speaks to transferring your points that you brought up about humanizing pedagogy is I think, one thing that I find really encouraging or kind of like hopeful about that rather stressful point in time was the, the the humanity that many instructors showed for their students, and just the ethic of care that instructors had, while they're going through that time. And for me, like that really resonated for me, because it for me, like, I've always felt that the purpose of education is to imagine the world that we hope will someday become and for me, I saw glimmers of hope for like a really human kind of pedagogy, between instructors and students, in that rather stressful time of emergency remote teaching, or, or a lifeboat teaching, I think, is another metaphor that's been used for that. And also another thing that kind of came from that when we're praying for the community, types of responses that blog posts, and also within the MOOC that we created was just like the rich, diverse array of like metaphors that people were using to describe that period of time. It was just, I think, so accurate, and so helpful to kind of empathize and relate with other folks that were going through those struggles,
Yeah, some of the words that stood out to me in your comment there were, you know, empathy, and humanizing and hope. And, and I think that's so true for for many of us. Thinking about teaching includes all of those things, right? Or we're thinking about the, the type of world that we want to create, in learning from and with our students, and, you know, building classroom communities, those things are so important. Yeah, thank you for that. So I also, I also really liked you had some kind of three principles that you came up with, in your chapter that you used in your MOOC as well. And you're talking about extensibility, flexibility and redundancy. How did how did you kind of come to those three terms? And how do those help frame this resilient design?
Yes, so we really sort of did a guess, some research into how other disciplines think about resilient design. So we turn to disciplines like architecture, you know, who, who planned for adverse events, structural events that could affect structures, we look to disciplines like business, who, you know, plan for financial crises that can occur. So we sort of, we read widely, maybe not deeply, but widely, as much as we could, during that, that short period of time, and discovered that there were sort of connections across across these disciplines. Also, you know, computer networks, the idea of having a failsafe if one aspect, you know, doesn't function, we have another node over here that will, so we really kind of wove those ideas together. And also drew on the universal design for learning framework as well to to construct these these three principles, which can inform resilient design for learning. So as you mentioned, the first one is extensibility. So this, this idea of sort of designing, designing a version of a course or learning experience, that we know in the future may need to be adjusted. So, you know, we put aspects into our design that can flex, depending on circumstances or even depending on potentially, you know, an influx of new resources in the future, you know, we can think we can think positively so it's not always about disruption. But, you know, in the future, we might be able to do more, but right now, this is what I can do. So putting a version of a learning experience out into the world that we were confident will work well, given our current resources, our current constraints, but at the same time envisioning how that design either could be adjusted or might need to be adjusted. So that's what we mean by extensibility. And if you know something were to occur. You know, if we were to to all go back remotely, again, if we were teaching in person or vice versa, we would be able to make that adjustment the design itself would withstand these types of changes. So that's the first one: extensibility. And then flexibility, the two are a little bit similar. Jacob, I don't know, if you want to jump in on that one, or I can also keep going prefer,
I can speak a little bit to that, um, perhaps you can just build off anything they perhaps missing Rebecca, but I think with me flexibility was looking at what's already like existing within the core system or within the kind of course ecosystem that we have, then thinking about how those elements could then be modified or changed or become flexible. So while while extensibility might be like, looking into the future, I think I think flexibility for me is a little bit looking at the president and modifying what we have in the president. But to be sure, you know, the three, you know, principles of flexibility, redundancy, and extensibility are not like mutually exclusive categories. They are, I think, mutually reinforcing, hopefully reciprocal to each other. Did you want to add to that one Rebecca, you want to get into redundancy?
Yeah, no, no, you're right. So it's, it's about being able to sort of put into practice, the plans, or the contingencies that you had built into your original design and, and, you know, being able to make those adjustments in real time, as needed, and then redundancies a little bit easier to sort of carve off as a as a principle, which is, you know, building aspects into our design that can function in similar ways. So, for instance, you know, you might have a learning goal in mind, and it could be achieved through an instructor offering a live lecture, but it could also be achieved through a pre recorded lecture or students reading something. So they're creating components that may be somewhat, somewhat duplicative. But perhaps they have different modalities. So that, you know, again, if things need to shift, you can pull on a different version of something that you've created. Now, this one can be a little scary to think about, Oh, do I have to create multiple versions of everything in my course, we're not saying that at all, you know, and again, it starts small start with what you can do. And maybe it's in the future that you you're able to build, build out these redundant components of your course. But still, having those there, I think, really enables you to enact reasonably design effectively, because then you're not sort of creating things as as you have to, they're kind of already thought of in advance.
I think with that redundancy, redundancy principle to it, there's a lot of resonance with universal, Universal Design for Learning there. So just thinking about ways that things can be duplicative, but also through multiple means of representation and expression action. Um, so like, highly resonant with Universal Design for Learning.
Yeah, I really liked that. Thinking about it in terms of universal design for learning. And, and one point you made Rebecca as well, that I was introduced to, from Tom Tobin, is this idea of "plus one teaching." You know, like thinking of just what's one, what's one thing I can add? What's one redundancy, I can add? You know, from where I'm at right now, and thinking about that, in terms of small steps and making making small changes as we can. I want to talk a little bit more about that idea of universal design for learning, and how that how that can help frame this idea of redundancy in like you said, Jacob, and multiple means of representation, or multiple means of action and expression. What advice would you give on utilizing UDL, in designing, and, and teaching courses?
So I'm, of course thinking in the present, and Jacob and I are both supporting a course an online course this semester called educational applications of augmented and virtual reality. It's a fully online course, but students have been lent through the university library, Oculus quest headsets. So they're using those in their homes, but as for wherever, wherever they are learning from, but as you can imagine, with that kind of technology, we needed really to think about universal design for learning and building redundancy into our learning design. So we've really, you know, created as many options as possible for students to engage. So if the tech doesn't work, then we have another way for them to to experience the application, maybe through a video, or Jacob has been creating these walkthrough through videos where he records you know, himself in in the application and the like. So, you know, that's one way we've been thinking about it in the present. Take have anything to add to that?
Yeah. Well, so this is kind of a more recent thinking, I've been following Jesse Stommels, Twitter. More recently, I'm quite quite fond of his Twitter, Twitter presence. But I'm here he had a really nice point in there about the creation of learning outcomes or the creating learning objectives. So I've been also thinking a lot about universal design for learning for who and for what purpose, and you know, for what outcomes. So I think it's important when we're thinking about multiple means of representation, expression, action, etc. but also like, towards what ends? Why like, and how are we defining the purpose of education, when we're also thinking about universal design for learning? And I'm totally I'm totally channeling Jesse Stommels twitter feed there when I'm thinking along those lines. But yeah, going back to the Rebecca's XR course, I think it's been really kind of interesting to see how we've been incorporating it within our extended reality course. Yeah, so extended reality is such like a difficult technology to work with at this point, with so many different software, things to work through, and technology, logistics, so it really is actually kind of a necessity for us to think along those lines in that course.
Yeah. So and then thinking about the future, we would offer the course, you know, next semester, and maybe in the winter of 2022, would we do it differently? I don't think so. I mean, I think what we've learned from this is that it actually allows the instructor a lot of freedom, you know, when you're in when you're facilitating a class, you have less sort of anxiety over something going on, do you know you have all of these backups. And if this doesn't work, well, you can try this over here. And it really just allows you to engage with this with the students in a much more sort of present way, without having to keep your mind on all of it that the technical and logistical aspects of the course. So I have found it to be very, although it's more definitely more work for preparation. And we do spend a lot of time creating multiple versions and documents and backups, I think for the actual teaching, it is it has really been quite liberating.
I really like that, not only kind of pointing back to some of Jessie Stommel's, or he's, he's challenged my view of of learning outcomes as well. And thinking about how we can allow, you know, allow for some things in our courses to be emergent, right, depending on on who the students are in our classroom. And I think that also points to this, this idea of choice and agency and autonomy, not only for our students, but as you pointed out, Rebecca, as instructors, when we have put in some of the prep work to have some of these redundancies when tech fails, like it always seems to do in a live demo or in front of a class, right? There are other options, right?
Yeah.
We have other ways to reach our students. And we have other ways to, to engage them.
I mean, I'm also going to add that, you know, right from the beginning of the course, we really positioned the course, as you know, even though it was a one credit course, seven weeks long, we really wanted to honor this idea of fostering a community of learners, which comes from the work of Brown and Campione. And that's something that's sort of long guided my thinking about teaching, thinking about design. And this idea of the voice of the learner needs to be a present entity within any within any course. So, you know, creating opportunities for learners within the course, to surface their perspectives in ways that will be consequential to the direction that that course takes. So for instance, we left intentionally a week, open for emergent topics. And as students were, you know, reflecting on their experiences within within the virtual reality environments, this idea of equity and access continually came forward. So by creating that space within the course, so maybe that would be, I guess, the, I guess, the extensibility principle, by making sure that I had room there, we were able to then spend sufficient time really, you know, investigating a topic that the students themselves were very concerned about. So, you know, I think that by kind of incorporating these ideas into to one's one's design, the idea of student voice and student agency and sort of this notion that, you know, we are all as a community trying to make sense of claims that are being made in this case about XR and education and, you know, together we're going to make progress on that. So you know, throughout throughout the the weeks, we've been trying to showcase student artifacts, you know, through our, we're using a system called "Gather" where they can kind of wander around and view things. But a lot of the artifacts in that space are student created. And they're often aggregates of, you know, questions that we may have surfaced the week prior. And then we create some type of a visual that shows the voice of the whole community. So the idea is that students in the class can see themselves in these representations, but also in relation to the community voice. So that's kind of some ways we've been thinking about, about these these principles.
Yeah, I really like that. So you've already kind of addressed this on on things that you have done differently. You know, this time around and teaching this course. I've been thinking about the topic a lot lately of what are things that I've changed in my own practice over this past year, that I don't want to just get rid of that I don't want to drop? and go back to the way I was doing it before. I'm curious to kind of pose that question to you. What are some of the things that you've done differently, or you've changed, that you, you don't want to see, go away (that you'll continue to use looking forward)?
So for me, it's about communication. I have been more intentional, I think when we are remote to, to try to, either with a class or with a team to, you know, have regular points of contact. So I sort of deliberately set for myself a goal, okay, I'm going to send a weekly message, or I'm going to send a follow up, you know, and I tried to do that consistently. And, you know, it does, it does mean that I have to plan for that it does take additional time and resources. But I think that it has really helped everyone sort of feel that we're moving along together. And there's kind of less confusion about what's happening. So, you know, that was born out of necessity, I think, with the remote environment, but at the same time, I think it's worth continuing, you know, even if we are back face to face, sort of my initial feeling was it's too much, you're gonna be tired of hearing from me. But I found that actually isn't the case, people do appreciate it. So that's something that I plan to carry forward.
Yeah. And as I'm thinking about the XR course, I mean, next door, it's just been such a wonderful experience in so many ways, because it's such an exciting and interesting, emerging piece of technology. But one thing that I've been working a lot on in that course, is all of these, um, the ways that we can also experience similar types of XR experiences, but not be in the XR itself, but to like, have YouTube videos of the of the experience, or I can feel myself going through the experience of talking aloud as I'm going through it. So thinking about all the additional ways that we can engage with something that's comparable, and have tons of different ways of entering into that experience has been a really important for me. And also, just to underscore point I made earlier, the ethic of care and humaneness has been something I hope to maintain, into the future, especially with my the work that I do with learning experience, design graduate certificate program, I think that's really been really important.
I'm so glad you brought that up. Because actually, something that's really changed for me is the way that I approach assessment with students. So last, last spring, I moved to a specifications grading approach, which is similar to ungrading, you may have heard about that too. But this idea that, you know, I'm not going to create a rubric that has four levels of you know, excellent, very good, good. And with descriptions, of course, but rather, I'm going to create what I'm expecting to see, you know, in terms of these are, these are requirements, you must meet these requirements. But that, you know, that frees me up because if the students meet the requirements, great, they get an A, and I can then give them lots of feedback. I'm not agonizing over which level of the rubric to choose, if they don't meet the specification, I can also say, you know, what, you've met all these specifications, but this one's missing. Can you just work on that? And, you know, we'll look at it again. So, I've been using that in all of my courses recently. I don't plan on changing that. And that was born out of an ethic of care, I think, you know, to sort of ease the burden a little bit, make it less complicated, make it really transparent. And I believe students appreciate it. I mean, it's, it's, it's more authentic, right. That's kind of how, how we operate in the world. You know, maybe we do have performance reviews and things like that, but at the same time, it's, you know, on a day to day basis, it's kind of like, Well, have you met the, you know, have you have you solved the problem? Have you completed the task? Yes. And we can give each other qualitative feedback on that, but we don't have to sort of make a judgment about you know, this is one is better than this one, so that's been incredibly freeing as well.
I really liked those perspectives. Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you to both of you for taking the time today to talk. It's been great having you on the show. I
t's been a wonderful conversation. Travis, thank you for leading the effort for for creating this Resilient Pedagogy volume. I'm really excited to share it and to read all of the other chapters in the book.
It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.
Perfect. I love I love your contributions. So thanks again. And thanks to our listeners. Goodbye, everybody.
