Dewey, Experiential Learning, and The Reddit Project

In 1938 John Dewey gave us Experience and Education, a book that offered both a critique of traditional and emerging progressive educational models, and an educational philosophy that attempted to put values like freedom, experience and individualization in a balanced and functional conversation with order,  facilitation, and long-term sustainability.

Seventy-five years later, the educational system still has yet to comprehensively catch up. Though there have been widespread steps away from what Dewey called the "old school" (Let's pause and give Dewey credit for coining the phrase more than half a century before it became a Millenial catch phrase), those steps have been far from a critical, mass re-thinking of institutionalized education.

The contextual scenario is now infinitely more complicated than it was in 1938, and not simply because of the swiftly shrinking, globalizing, hyperconnected nature of the world circa 2013, but because of changes in our concepts of diversity and equity, the broadening expanse of "disciplines", the impact of postmodernity on social, cultural, and even educational philosophy...

In short, I mean to say the world has evolved faster than our system of education.

You don't say?

Of course that disparity was, to an extent, inevitable. We're never going to stay ahead of change, but Dewey had some pretty radical things to say in 1938 that--though he has been distinguished and studied as the major voice in pedagogical theory over the course of the century--somehow missed being picked up in full by the educational bureaucracy and thus fell far short of their potential for revolutionizing academia any number of years before now.

Like in chapter one, when he points out that seeing the need for--and adopting--a new philosophy is not in and of itself the solution to the flaws in the old philosophy, nor is reacting in the violent and polarized opposite of a broken system necessarily any better than reiterating the broken system.

Or when he observed that, despite their intentions to educate a new generation in preparation for the future, present teaching methods actually treated contemporary knowledge as if it was this static, Truth-y thing that would never be altered by future discovery or cultural enlightenment, endowing us instead a mentally immobile generation with a massive distaste for learning.

I was fascinated when, in chapter five, Dewey reminded us that freedom is the means for learning, not the end. That teachers cannot know how best to cultivate learning for each student when the students have no freedom to express their individual differences, learning needs, and identities.

And again in chapter seven, though it seems so simple and obvious now, Dewey was the one to point out that no one can hope to learn a thing that does not conceptually begin, or have foundations, inside their realm of experience—that we cannot be expected to wrap our head around ideas that are entirely foreign—and that teachers must consciously select a stepping off point that is within the existing knowledge of the student and create learning as a series of gradual steps expanding outward from that point.  How neat was the idea that we could treat not all old experiences and memories as fixed, but as potential to be written in new language that opens up the floor to new knowledge in a way that is interesting and engaging to the learner?
So this spurred me to sit and think about my Reddit project and how it related to some of Dewey’s key propositions of experiential learning:

☐        The philosophy of experiential education begins with the assumption that we are naturally and socially inclined to learn from our experiences as our primary means of making sense of the world.

☐        It is not enough to merely foreground experience as the ideal learning opportunity, but quality experience that is both immediately interesting and contributive to long-term growth.

☐        The primary job of the educator is to use their expertise to create opportunities for students to have quality learning experiences, by implementing a structure that balances the hand of organization and guidance with students’ individual freedom to negotiate their own purpose and methods of learning.

☐        To accomplish this, an instructor must create a path of learning that begins within the learner’s realm of experience, accounts for the diverse environmental factors that each student brings to the table, and proceeds gradually, building on the foundations of prior experiences, as is the most reasonable expectation for progress.

My vision for the Reddit classroom project is this: Begin with a subreddit dedicated to the course, ideally creating a virtual space that promotes group identification, inclusivity, and entertaining discursive participation.

Divide the course itself into thematic units—UNT Comm classes have done a solid job of this already. For Intro to Communication it might look much the same: a foundations unit that highlights various overall communication models like social constructionism, followed by subsequent units that focus on particular perspectives: power structures in society, feminist criticism, communication as performance, etc. The objective is for the learners to, by the end of the term, have a broader and more critical understanding of the different ways communication can be approached and understood, and why it is useful to have that variety of models for understanding.

For each unit, create its own subreddit. Within these thematic forums, learners are encouraged to find texts from popular culture to analyze from the standpoint of the current unit, recall relevant examples from their own experiences, even share personal narratives and connect them to the concepts. 

√        The philosophy of experiential education begins with the assumption that we are naturally and socially inclined to learn from our experiences as our primary means of making sense of the world.

First principle met! And because the challenge is to use these past experience to develop their critical thinking skills for viewing, interpreting, and responding to their future encounters with the world… 

√        It is not enough to merely foreground experience as the ideal learning opportunity, but quality experience that is both immediately interesting and contributive to long-term growth.

Second principle: Check!

For me, the most important factor of this project is that learners are to use the comment system to extend the conversations into dialogues in a way that previous “blogging” learning tools have not been able to stimulate. I am opposed to setting the expectation for each student to reply to their peers in blocks governed by the minimum word count.

 I see Reddit as a solution for its ability to spark conversation, and even debate, in as many words as it naturally takes to keep the students participating in a back-and-forth, rather than submitting their 250-word peer responses and promptly removing themselves from conversation and severing any possibility for meaningful, extended discourse. It would be naïve to assume I could achieve this naturally. After all, most of the students are not likely to be familiar with Reddit and for those who are, well, even if they have some familiarity with the critical side of Reddit, most of their sense of its usefulness and entertainment value as a social media probably looks like 

Let’s be real for a moment. Reddit is the land of trolls. The land of clever one-liners. Puns, communal inside-jokes, cheap shots, and shock value are prioritized almost above all else. Though thoughtful conversation can be found there already, it’s not by any means the norm. In fact, it’s hidden amongst the countless threads that Dewey would describe as problematic (or “mis-educative”) experience for this purpose because back-grounding the thoughtful reflection for the humor-shot, while immediately entertaining, doesn’t do much for one’s potential for long-term growth. This is the problem that I face because I have decided to experiment with Reddit as my social-media learning tool of choice. 

This is where the role of the instructor, as course-builder and Dewey-ian hand of maturity, becomes necessary to consider. How am I going to control for the tendency (that Dewey claimed students had) towards immediate amusement over longer-term learning development, especially in this context where it seems to be such an apparent danger? 

I envision the first few days of class to be dedicated to setting up and strengthening the implemented structure: using icebreakers and activities to strengthen the sense of social connectedness amongst students, and then to have an orientation to Reddit that familiarizes students with the medium and also creates an opportunity for the class to build their own contract for learning and behavior expectations when using Reddit. 

The key is allowing the students agency to participate in creating their own mechanism of social control, but having enough—and only enough--of a hand in contributing to the process so as to build personal credibility and establish my role as a facilitator. This doesn’t mean giving students the ultimate freedom to set rules that don’t lead towards quality learning, but keeping in mind our ultimate purpose of  developing long-term experiential learning skills and designing expectations that are conducive to this, but customized to the desires of the class.

After the orientation period, my plan entails briefly previewing concepts before each unit opens up on Reddit, to kindle the spark of understanding enough that learners are sufficiently prepared to converse on the subject, and then synthesizing the conversations that students collaborated in on the Reddit subforums in a dedicated in-class follow-up which aims to reinforce explicit and critical connections of the concepts, experiences, and future implications, reserving enough time at the end of the follow-up discussion to preview and define the next concept and begin the cycle anew. 

√        The primary job of the educator is to use their expertise to create opportunities for students to have quality learning experiences, by implementing a structure that balances the hand of organization and guidance with students’ individual freedom to negotiate their own purpose and methods of learning.

Appropriate structuring that gives students agency… also check!

So overall my vision involves a preliminary discussion that helps to enhance students’ understood definition of a concept and provide them with a vocabulary to engage in critical discourse about the concept, and then give them the freedom to, in a social virtual environment, actively participate in conversations that explore these concepts according to the experience that each learner brings to the table (their text, artifact, or narrative for sharing). Through those dialogues I expect learners to be enabled to strengthen their connections of experience to concept, to similar situations they might experience in the future, and then bring the now critically empowered and more knowledgeable learning group back together to synthesize their discoveries.

 √       To accomplish this, an instructor must create a path of learning that begins within the learner’s realm of experience, accounts for the diverse environmental factors that each student brings to the table, and proceeds gradually, building on the foundations of prior experiences, as is the most reasonable expectation for progress.

…. Dare I say it?

Perhaps I am being optimistic about the promise this vision shows on paper, but over the past three weeks, I have attempted to sharpen the blurry edges of a vague idea into a plan while being faithful to some of my favorite learning philosophies put forward by Dewey, Jarvis, Garrison, and Vaughan. Among the greatest contribution from the readings was the illumination of possible problems that emerge, and each scholar’s theories on solving the problems not from an immediate, bandaging approach but from the roots. I believe their comprehensive perspectives enabled me to figure out my own specific strategies, adapted to my personal vision and educational setting from the bottom up, and I feel more confident and excited than ever to see my vision enacted into reality.  

C.C. 

r/Classroom

I talk a lot about Reddit, especially about its potential (as I see it) as a dialogic learning tool with a distinctly relevant appeal for interesting students in critical thinking on their own turf, as I argued last week. Now it's time that I take a minute to show you what Reddit is; how does Reddit work as a social media site, and what is it about Reddit that I find so exploitable for my pedagogical purposes?

Reddit is, put simply, a discursive forum for sharing content and engaging in conversations about that  content.  "Content" can be generally divided into two types: Primary or Secondary.

Primary content is that which is original (to varying degrees) information or production generated by the user (called Redditors). This sort of content is often either artifactual, such as a picture, gif, or video clip, or textual, written narratives, anecdotes, and/or personal reflections.

 Secondary content is that which has been found on some external area of the web by a Redditor, and taken into the Reddit community for the sole purpose of sharing with other Redditors.

Ultimately, the end goal for sharing either Primary or Secondary content is the conversation that it sparks. A post's "success" is measured by how popular it is in the Upvote system (comparable to Facebook likes) and by how broad and deep the web of comments from other community members grows to be (comparable,  to Facebook comments)--so Upvotes and comments function as direct feedback, as discourse facilitation,  as capital for determining the Redditor's standing in its internal social structure, and finally as reward or incentive for the Redditor's participation.

This is what the Reddit home page looks like:

The content that you see on your homepage is customized according to the themed subreddits to which you have subscribed, with the most popular new content appearing first. Redditors pick and choose which posts to investigate based on their evaluations of the very little information, a title and a small preview, that they are given. Now zoom in...

This is an example of primary content. When you click the title, this is what you are directed to:  a photograph that the user captioned, uploaded (to imgur, a web utility created especially for this purpose), and then linked to.

But look what happens when, instead of the title, you click where it says "123 comments"...

And now you see in a nutshell how Reddit functions. The site is inherently discursive, with the two dimensions of discourse being found in the post and the comment thread. And while Redditors, like anybody, have a lighter side---they enjoy the casual posts, like the one pictured above, where the post and comments are given value purely for its utility as a source of amusement--the discourse that can be found on Reddit has an established critical side as well. See below.

This is a secondary posting; the title links to an external news story. But the comments section, rather than being a venue for jokes and surface-level feedback, becomes a space for engaging in mindful public discourse:

Granted, in the typical example of the discursive Reddit thread, arguments tend to be rife with logical fallacies and there are frequently individuals that attempt to undermine the authentically critical attempts at other users with disruptive wisecracks, etc. It’s not a perfect system—but it’s already captured interest as a social media site, and established a precedent for stimulating a degree of social critique and critical discussion. It takes only the careful efforts of a teacher to encourage the discourse to delve deeper, draw on sources, and craft their responses. 

Congratulations, you now (hopefully) have a deeper understanding of Reddit and can follow along as I set up my idea of how to incorporate Reddit as a legitimate blended learning tool, drawing largely on theories of postmodern influences on education as justification. 

In The Theory and Practice of Learning (2004), Jarvis set up for the reader a thorough understanding of the changes that occurred on a larger, social level as we moved from the modern to the post modern era, and also detailed what some of those changes meant specifically for the field of education and learning. He reminds us that “modernism and the consequential educational model arose from specific social conditions” (19, emphasis added). In the modern context, such characteristics as strong emphasis on the values of nationalism, objectivity in scientific and especially social scientific study, and a significant emphasis on the use of education to transmit profitable, technical knowledge and skills and reinforce society’s dominant cultural values, made sense and were appropriate to the time. 

Society has been moving on since about the 1980’s, however, and while some traits of modernity still remain, as Jarvis asserted, “the social conditions from which education arose—and within which it functioned—are being replaced. The new conditions call for new and different concepts of learning (19).”

In this Postmodern age we have been impacted by rapid globalization, a changing and aging demography that appears to be pulling away from traditional domestic models and working-class trends, and a growing value on individualization. People no longer believe they have to conform to external values or traditional lifestyles, which is affecting their career aspirations and motivations for seeking an education. 

Postmodernity has also seen a breaking down of the distinctions between high and low culture; the lines that once separated pop-culture and the bourgeois are diffusing and knowledge can be extracted from and applied to just about any area of interest. I believe this effect, which Jarvis called fragmentation, reflects an increased value for non-conformity and deciding for oneself the value of both knowledge and culture.
 

Culture and style themselves have become commodities , and are replacing traditional cultural values as one’s capital and evaluative criteria. Our attention has turned away from the glorification of production and communication, and the media, have instead become the basis of society (19). Reddit can be seen as just one of many examples of this, as a community that gathers individuals for the sole purpose of engaging in discourse and media and social commentary. 

A major way that this postmodern condition has impacted learning is by challenging the idea of knowledge itself.  Jarvis explains how truth itself is now increasingly accepted as relativistic even in fields like science, ideology, and religion, and as a result the educational curricula which were governed by discrete assumptions of truth are taking the shape of reflexive, experiential learning. The teacher is no longer a bona fide expert who gives knowledge, but takes on the role of facilitator who helps guide people on—not what—but how to learn effectively, and increasingly the learners are charged with discovering and determining knowledge for themselves. Finally, reflecting again upon the blurring between high knowledge and pop culture, the learners, not the teachers, have become the ultimate judges of what is significant and in good taste.
 

The general learning attitude has shifted as well; students do not expect to re-hash dry blocks of information that has no relevance to their life, but expect to engage concepts that are critically significant. Generally speaking, an attitude of ambivalence has replaced the dogmatic certainty of the discrete disciplines and the unquestioning acceptance of knowledge  (22), and so “learning itself must be reconstructed on a much more individualized basis” (22). 

How do we do that using a tool like Reddit? The book explores three models of learning that begin to answer this question, especially when integrated into a final approach to the medium: Experiential Learning, Self-Directed Learning, and  Distance Learning. None of these alone is sufficient framework for incorporating Reddit, but each gives us objectives and assumptions to be met that a thorough understanding of Reddit functionality allows us to plan ways to fulfill. 

Experiential Learning

Experiential learning operates under several premises (56): that our experiences stimulate our learning, and that experience is that which we learn from; that learners actively construct their own experience, and so their reflections upon experience are not objective but subject to the influence of cognitive processes, memory, and context, and as such learning is socially and culturally constructed and should be considered holistically.

A classroom should endeavor to address these assumptions by creating opportunities for learners to reflect on their own experiences in conjunction with a provided learning objective. Students should practice both critical reflection on their own, primary experiences as well as on the secondary experiences that are shared by their peers in dialogue. The objective is to navigate these mediated experiences to an end point where learners develop their own conclusions about the experiential significance. 

Reddit provides just the mechanism for sharing experiences of all senses; not just an anecdote of an actual experience which a learner has lived, but experiences that he or she has had with bits and pieces of visual and auditory media that they have discovered or been exposed to, and experiences that are created within the discourse itself, the collaborative processing experience.  This exemplifies the student-centered classroom learning approach which “endeavor(s) to use students past or recalled experiences and to provide primary and/or artificial experiences from which they may continue to learn” (66). 

Self-Directed Learning

Adopting a blended teaching approach requires a comprehensive rethinking of your pedagogical philosophy to make it work, especially in a situation like this which focuses significantly on student experience and constructing learning through communication.  The instructor must step back from his role as the authoritarian information giver and become a facilitator, and to do this you have to have trust in your students to take more accountability for their own learning. 

Jarvis reviewed several important studies on self-directed learning, including the framework by Malcolm Knowles that really hails self-directed learning for its importance to the lifelong learning perspective. According to Knowles, it’s important to teach self-directed learning because it stimulates better learning, in a way that traditional educational models cannot do in the postmodern deinstitutionalization of learning.

To this idea, Brookfield (1985) added that self-directed learning is inherently tied to the social context that the student brings with him or her to the learning environment, positioning self-directed learning perfectly for objectives that are critically and socially contingent. 

So to implement Reddit as a learning tool, instructors must arrange a course structure that motivates individuals to take the initiative in forming their own learning goals, identifying the appropriate materials for learning, and evaluate their learning outcomes.  Jarvis provided us with some specific strategies through his review of researcher Allen Tough’s work that can particularly help in facilitating self-directed  learning when using Reddit. 

First, the curriculum itself must be created with self-learning in mind. Blend the contexts; use face-to-face class time early on in the term to establish supportive networks for the learners, allow them to group naturally as they learn how to use the site.  Have learners create their own learning contracts, so that each may see specifically what they intend to accomplish by the end of the semester and can monitor their progress in concrete terms through the term.

When using Reddit, the facilitator should create the course’s own subreddit and organize it as best as he or she sees fit: Reddit allows for infinite strings of subreddits embedded with subreddits, so if it suits your purposes best to divide threads up by earning group or by unit, theme, or concept, just make sure to implement an organization system consistently so as best to minimize confusion and maximize visibility.
 

Be an active Redditor yourself. Provide resources at the top of each subreddit relating to its personal theme that can be used as reference material for the posters, establish rules and guidelines for postings, but be a significant presence in submitting content and commenting on other discussions as well. This is the instructor’s best opportunity for providing direct and guiding feedback, while standing on relatively equal footing with the learners gives them more motivation to direct their own conversations. 

Ideally, the equitable power structures and system of trust will give students internal motivation for taking responsibility for their own learning, while learning contracts, assessment, and comprehensive instructor feedback throughout the process will stimulate motivation in those who are not naturally so self-directed. In both cases, I argue that employing Reddit as a learning environment adds its own element of motivation and engaging interest for learners, so as to make the task of eliciting self-directed learning that much easier.

Distance Learning

Finallly, Jarvis provided us with a list of distance learning resources that, in my opinion, Reddit is particularly suited to handle. To fully engage a NewGeneration audience, like that which would be the most engaged by the use of Reddit as a learning medium, he suggested adopting a comfortable teaching presence that incorporates easily readable, moderately dense resources and colloquial language. The strictly conceptual material is up to the instructor to control for these factors, while the rest of the material that learners will be studying in this environment—the content that one another posts to the community as living texts and examples for critique—will almost always already be in an understandable format, thanks to the diffusing lines between high knowledge and popular culture and the interest that students have in applying concepts to pop culture and real world texts. 

Jarvis advises that implementers of a distance learning method invite learners to exchange views and create an open environment that stimulates freedom of questioning, commentary, and opinion and feedback giving that attempts to involve the student on a level of personal or emotional interest. Giving students the freedom to select their own content will ensure that content appeals to students on this personal or emotional level, and the entire Reddit structure is constructed to be free and inviting to dialogue, and is clearly successful in stimulating that. 

In order for the instructor to maximize the effectiveness of this distance learning tool, he or she does need to remember to draw a clear and explicit line connecting themes and content to the desired concepts, which it is the duty of the facilitator to do through his own participation in the social-learning mechanism. 

I hope that I have drawn a clear justification of using Reddit as a blended learning tool by connecting it back to principles of learning in the postmodern condition, a context from which this present age of blended learning and globalization is inextricably bound. Experiential learning, Self-directed learning, and distance learning are just a few themes to emerge from this new school of thought that offer clear strategies for instructors to adopt; strategies which I have applied not just to blended learning but to the specific context of Reddit.  Perhaps you can share now in my vision of the discursive opportunity for engaging, self-directed, and experiential learning for which Reddit is a wealth of untapped potential, and one that I am excited to use at the soonest feasible opportunity. 

Socially Learning to not Critically Think: Women's Roles in Society

As I am standing in front of my Intro to Communication class, lecturing them on symbolic interactionism, social construction, and stereotypes, I hear myself telling them that our perceptions of “how the world is” can change over time. And as I utter these words, I find myself wondering, will anything really change? During my time as an undergraduate I was constantly amazed at how little the people around me cared about anything outside of themselves. I’m not trying to say that I am perfect, but at least I took the time to read the news instead of the tabloid magazines in the morning. Today I stand on the other side of the classroom, trying desperately to encourage these learners to become critical thinkers, so they can evaluate the conditions of society, and when they see a problem, they are capable of determining a solution.

I recently watched a documentary on Netflix titled, Miss Representation. This film explored the ways that women are represented, or not represented in the media. Films, television shows, magazines, even news broadcasts project an image of an ideal woman. She is tall, thin, sexualized, and to be seen, not heard. This pervasive image has real repercussions on our society. The documentary cited evidence such as, “women make up 51 percent of the U.S. population, yet comprise only 17 percent of congress,” “only 34 women have ever served as governors compared to 2319 men,” and “the U.S. is 90^th in the world in terms of women in national legislatures.” The growth of women in politics is growing at an alarmingly slow rate, and it is not difficult to conclude that this is largely due to the way that women are represented, and the way that they are socialized. At one point in the documentary, Caroline Heldman, Associate Professor of Political Science at Occidental College states, “Little boys and little girls, when they are 7 years old, an equal number want to be president of the United States when they grow up… but then you ask the same question when they’re 15 and you see this massive gap emerging.” I was amazed at how true that felt for my own experiences. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be president. I can still clearly remember my decision calculus in determining why I did not want to pursue that route: positives – I would be doing something productive with my intelligence, I would be serving the needs of others, and I would have the potential to make a difference in the world. On the other hand, I don’t want to deal with the emotional repercussions of being scrutinized for my physical appearance. Decision made.

All of this relates directly to Chapter 5 of Jarvis, Holford and Griffin’s book, The Theory and Practice of Learning (1998). In this section, the authors discuss the ways we learn socially. Socialization refers to “the process by which individuals internalize the values, beliefs and norms of behavior of the society into which they are born” (p. 38). They argue that failure for the individual to conform to these norms means that the society will not survive. It seems to me that to internalize the values and beliefs of a society means blindly accepting them, perhaps sub-consciously. The authors turn to a number of theorists to develop this idea. Jarvis criticizes the idea of the individual as merely passive and conformist, and says that there is more of a mutual relationship between society and the individual. Mead claims that through interactions with social structures the individual acquires habitual ways of acting. Bandura is more in line with the idea of reciprocity, but clarifies that people have the potential to influence their own destiny, but act neither as free agents, nor as passive conformists.

All this informs our ideas about how individuals function, but what about society as a collective? After all, as critical thinkers, isn’t the goal to influence and change social constructions that we see as problematic? The chapter concludes with the idea that the collective learning process is greater than the sum of its parts, and in competitive environments, groups or organizations adapt to survive. As a born and raised American, and a member of the American education system I look at how America has learned. It seems that although there are some deviant individuals, some members of society that act against the traditional roles of men and women, we are overwhelmingly still a patriarchal society.

So, with these ideas in mind, we as educators should continue to challenge our students to be problem-solvers, to be reflective thinkers, and to envision ways in which they can be a positive impact on society. It is one of my goals as an educator to illuminate for my students the unconscious barriers to their critical thinking and, unfortunately for women, patriarchy has been an impediment to their learning and critical thinking.

-HSJ

Theory Light: Missed Opportunities to understand the connection between Theory and Practice in the Blended Learning Classroom

D. Randy Garrison and Norman D. Vaughan’s utilize a Community of Inquiry framework to guide their recommendations in their book “Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines”.  Framed in the foundations of experiential learning, Garrison and Vaughan (2008) provide an overview of the Community of Inquiry Framework (CoI).  I’m continually struck at the lack of acknowledgement of the theoretical influences at play in the Blended Learning and Online Learning literature.  While the authors provide an excellent foundation with suggestions for practical skills to design and facilitate a problem-based experiential framework, they overlook the important theoretical foundations at play in the knowledge they share.  In order to highlight the missed opportunities I outline the CoI Framework and begin to draw connections to education theory, philosophy, and communication theory (providing perhaps some directions for further research and exploration by communication scholars).

CoI Framework is a pedagogical approach which combines social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence for online learning. I first encountered the CoI framework in the process of revising a research paper which provided a comparison of face-to-face, online, and blended learning in the Basic Communication Course. I have taught the CoI model as part of a broader discussion on online learning as a higher education consultant (http://prezi.com/mq4krbllc9ix/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share) and truly appreciate the utility of the framework.

At the heart of it the CoI Framework focuses on the importance of creating an open and supportive communication climate to facilitate a method of inquiry that is designed to be collaborative and experiential. The authors spend only a few paragraphs situating the CoI Framework within the broader educational philosophy though the work of John Dewey. While Dewey is certainly the theoretical foundation of experiential learning and the students’ active engagement in the process of learning, no attention is paid to the extensions of our understanding of the role of student in this active engagement.  Perhaps a discussion of Kolb’s (1984) theory of experiential learning cycle could provide some nice extensions as to why experiential learning works for the Net Generation of students.   

The model consists of three main elements: Social Presence, Cognitive Presence, and Teaching Presence (Garrison and Vaughan, 2008). 

Social presence is concerned with development of a supportive communication climate through interaction between learners through supporting discourse.  The instructor’s goal is to provide opportunities for students to foster relationships with one another in a collaborative environment.

Cognitive presence is a process of inquiry. The authors utilize a Practical Inquiry Model which highlights the ways in which we move from inductive to deductive understandings of the content.  The model privileges rational solutions and is essentially a hermeneutic circle. The underlying assumption of a Phenomenological perspective is never addressed by the authors.  Even a simple explanation of the phenomenological approach (e.g., Littlejohn & Foss, 2010) would provide a bit of theoretical context for the reader.

Teaching presence centers on the role of the instructor in the design and facilitation of the blended learning environment.  Again opportunities to discuss issues related to the power relationships at play in the educational process and how this informs our teaching presence is a missed opportunity.  The privileging of dialogue in the CoI framework is an important shift in the pedagogical approach.  As communication scholars many of our courses are already taught in a dialogical approach.  The works of Paulo Freire (1970) and bell hooks (1994) both highlight the importance of dialogue and problematize issue of power in the teacher-student relationship.  We must at some point be willing to question our role as a teacher in order to make the necessary shift in our pedagogical approach to embrace experiential learning. 

The CoI framework assumes a pedagogy in which the teacher is willing step back and allow students to actively engage in the co-construction of knowledge (e.g., Freire). The authors discuss the importance of the students to take a more active role and responsibility in their education, but they fail to acknowledge the importance of the paradigm shift of a dialogical approach. A theoretical understanding of the importance of the role of the instructor to embrace an engaged pedagogy (e.g., bell hooks) to accomplish experiential learning is a necessary shift in our construction of the role of the teacher. Simply saying the instructor is now a facilitator is not enough.  What are the consequences of this shift to our understanding of this relationship? Why is this shift important?  How does this shift empower students in a positive way? What are the unintended consequences of this shift and how should instructors negotiate those differences? The missed opportunity here is to highlight how the CoI framework reflects the paradigm shift in our pedagogical approaches to higher education.  As teachers we are not merely information givers but we facilitate dialogues and create an educational environment in which experiences result in deeper levels of meaning and complex understandings of concepts.

The CoI framework is truly useful framework to understand both our online, blended and face-to-face classrooms, however, the authors fail to address the theoretical implications of the framework and miss the opportunity to  address why this framework works as well as it does and how their framework represents a paradigm shift in higher education. – kal