Dialogs on Teaching #1: innovation vs Innovation

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

Welcome! This blog post is part 1 in an ongoing conversation between myself and Stacey M. Johnson on her blog. Since we met a few months ago, we’ve been in an ongoing dialog about some of our favorite issues in teaching and educational technology. We decided to take the dialog public on our blogs. You can see her first post in the conversation here and she will be posting the next within a week or so of this post.

I’ve very excited for this dialogue and public reflection. There’s some delightful, whimsical, and slightly risky in participating in a conversation like this. It’s the kind of thing you read about but not necessarily do. Shout out to Derek Bruff and his Take It or Leave It episode on his podcast, Intentional Teaching, that brought us into conversation! 

In reading your post, I had a lot of thoughts and lots of “hmmmm” moments, which I think is part of why we started and continue our dialogue! Like you, I share concern and a distaste for the term "innovation." Of course, this is coming from somebody who has innovation in their current title. It is a word that has been overused, much like so many other terms: best practices, creative disruption/destruction, high impact practices. All of these buzz terms from overly simplified research that is touted everywhere but rarely understood, Silicon Valley, or from spaces that more often privilege profit than they do actual solutions–spaces that are never satisfied with enough efficiency. 

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Innovation is a clunky, unuseful word, and I appreciate the way you raise it up as another form of deskilling and decoupling. Innovation as it is used can often mean taking out the nuance of a context. Innovation as technology is the proverbial hammer to which all problems become nails: throw more tech at it, invest in tools, not people. 

In many ways, it’s the toxic and most leveraged brand of innovation that we have– an overly capitalistic, productivity-oriented understanding of innovation and technology and its roles in teaching and learning. These have entered into higher education in many different facets and ways: the classroom, faculty lives, staff lives, all of that. It’s hard not to hear the I word and instantly want to eye-roll or be prepared for the ONE SOLUTION TO RULE THEM ALL (something, of course, AI is currently being offered as). 

I'm skeptical of capital "I" “Innovation”, the kind of innovation that is touted, the kind of innovation that is the metonymic stand-in for so many other practices, views, and alienating practices that creep into learning spaces. 

 And yet, I know “Innovation” has been transformational in my own life-long learning journey. I think about how one of the major reasons I'm able to do the work that I do and be the professional that I am is technology and “Innovation.” I would not be as knowledgeable, I would not be as thoughtful, I would not be as capable of understanding a variety of complex ideas without digital technology. I would not be able to key into the more complex aspects of teaching, learning, care, and nuance without Innovation. 

Here is where I get on my soapbox about audiobooks (yet again) as one of several examples of how Innovation has made me better at all my work. Audiobooks in the 21st century are a different technology than in the 20th century. We aren't lugging around tapes and cassettes, making it unbearably unaffordable and unportable. Instead, I have literally a whole library on my phone, and I'm able to read two to four books a week on a variety of subjects. I can listen to them in ways that make them more comprehensible to me (e.g. at a faster speed cause it keeps my focus better) and access a variety of more texts and ideas because scale and digital platforms (Audible, namely) made it possible. Audiobooks witnessed a big “I” Innovation and it has made a world of difference for me and many others who thrive with this format for learning and experiencing new ideas.

Having access to a computer in middle school also played a role in my educational trajectory. Being able to type instead of write opened up my desire to put ideas into text after a long history of poor penmanship that impacted my grades. The ability to type and the encouragement by my teachers who realized that I had a computer at home and could type has led me to write millions of words (including a really crappy 400-page novel in high school but that’s a story for another day). 

O f course, there’s all Innovation that has occurred in digital communications–allowing for us to meet one another (podcast), dialogue synchronously (Zoom), and now asynchronously (email and blogging). I know I’m speaking to specific technologies–many of which feel less innovative today and yet, were still part of the Innovative machine and were the gateways to learning and changing that has significantly contributed to my learning and growth as an educator–as a human being–over the decades. 

So I feel a tension with Innovation. Over the years, it feels pushy, overly productive-focused, and dehumanizing in many ways. But so does the higher ed, even if we take out the Innovation. Creating classrooms that are never comfortable or inviting (uncomfortable chairs, inconsistent room temperature, etc) for everyone; it’s basically who has the body and minds to endure 50, 75, 90, or 180 minutes at a go of being in that space. These are spaces we tolerate. Similarly, how we structure learning time as a set amount of times spread across a week, over a (somewhat) arbitrary amount of weeks (1, 4, 8, 10, 15, 18-week semesters) makes little sense for what we actually know about how learning happens. So even before we step into the Innovation being crammed into our headspace, there’s a need to acknowledge that all higher education (K-12 probably as well) is a construct and set of practices we do that are a result of scaling costs but not necessarily conducive to learning. 

Much learning and relationships have come from this artifice (or despite it?). Innovation feels like just another part in a series of inconveniences that make up the entire higher educational construct. Something as useful as it is insufficient. 

Where possible, I think it’s important to bring even the big “I” innovation to learners. I want them to be critical of it and also know that this Innovation also has some transformational possibilities. 

I appreciate your framing of innovation. “The innovation I want is not scalable and won’t replace well-paid, professional human teachers who have the time and funding to pursue their own professional development.” It makes me think about the importance and power of small "i" innovation. Tools and practices that don’t “scale” but still change what can be done, how, and for who. 

My passion for audiobooks (again!!!) has also shown up in my literature courses. Particularly when I teach literature from before 1930, I am also providing both the free text from Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, etc as well as the audiobook version from Librivox. Librivox is a website of volunteers who have put up nearly 20,000 audiobook narrations that are in the public domain for others to download and use. For final projects, students can do a narration of a text or related text that ends up on the Librivox. I’ve framed it often under the concept of digital service-learning. 

To me, there is a small “i” innovation in having students sit with American literature and not just read it, but speak it, and perform it. One theme we play within the course (particularly American literature) is examining "what and who is the American voice?”. That's a false question, but it's a good question to get started thinking about who gets to be read, who gets to speak, who gets spoken to, whose voices are preserved in the “canon” and whose voices are silenced or forgotten. 

 But this assignment raises lots of other questions like what does it mean to take a text that's 100, 150, 200 years old, and voice it, give life to it?

• How did it sound?
• How should it sound?
• What do with do with the speaking parts?
• What do we do with pacing?
• How emotive should we be? What the text suggests in a modern context or what feels appropriate for the time it was publsiehd based upon what we know?

And many more questions. It’s an interesting challenge and proves to be a powerful contemplation that goes more than just reading and recording. 

Now, this could be done without technology. Students can just come up and read it in aloud in class. Live performance is also meaningful, yet there's also something powerful in the editing, in taking the finished product, getting feedback from a community of listeners, and putting it up onto a website for other future students and listeners to benefit from for years to come. In a very (dare I say) innovative way, students of my past get to speak to future students because they have chosen texts that we are likely to read and listen to in the future. 

 It feels like small “i” innovation because I do see how it transforms some students ideas of what it means to learn about, think about, and engage with literature. However, it’s also not scalable for many different reasons (accessibility being one of them) and does require me to be more in relation with students to support them through a new process.. 

So if I am talking to the Lance of 2006-2009 (the first few years of teaching--the period in which I would like to issue refunds to all my students), I would want to highlight this (possibly false but helpful) dichotomy of big "I" and little "i" innovation to help me think about what I deploy, why, and how. I think I'm at my best when I'm finding the middle path between small "i" innovation and big "I" Innovation. I want Educator Lance 1.0 to more fully understand this and use it to better support students to also figure out what their middle path looks like, how to walk it for their own benefit and learning as well as while helping students also understand what that middle path looks like and how to as well as the hazards of having to walk it.

One thought that arose from reading your first post about deskilling to the “subject matter expert” is this interesting question about whether classrooms themselves are already scaled endeavors and in reality, insufficient for the kind of learning and change that higher ed often promises. 

Do we need a village to teach a course to do it well? I have more to unpack there, but I wonder it did spark an interesting question that I would love to hear you engage with–particularly for advice to your younger self: 

What would you say to your younger self about looking for and asking for support in teaching and learning and how public and open they were about it? 

Maybe the answer is easy because you already did that in your own past. But if there was hesitancy to get help in any capacity, I guess I’m curious to read what would have been the right message that your younger self needed to hear to act on it?

---

Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and check out some of my other posts!. You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by signing up for them via email.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.