Dialogs on Teaching #2: transformational and transactional learning

Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes

The Story So Far:  Welcome! This blog post is part 2 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. 

1. Stacey's first post
2. Lance's first post
3. Stacey's second post

I thoroughly enjoy these conversations. So, thank you for continuing this.

I appreciate your guiding frame: "Does a policy or practice increase our internal capacity and build on the professionalism of our faculty and staff, or does it outsource key functions and fail to consult experts already on campus, devaluing and demoralizing the experience for all of those left behind?" 

Applying this to a technology is a thoughtful practice given that many in the ed-tech space push tools that replace community experiences with individual experiences.

Wresting Technology for Our Innovation

I'm thinking about what you said regarding how education is truly made more accessible and inclusive. It's not just because of innovative technologies, but rather innovations that have been applied in ways that bring us together or ensure that being all together in a learning experience benefits students rather than being an obstacle.

This statement reminds me of Cory Doctorow and the idea of how we critically wrest away technology for our purposes, not the controlled versions that are put upon us. It reminds me of playing with GI Joes as a kid - it was a great space for imaginative play, especially for those of us who were particularly nerdy. You could actually take them apart, switch out arms, chests, heads, and legs, and essentially make up your own thing. There was something very liberating about that, allowing for creative play beyond the prescribed characters.

I think that's something really important for us to consider - not just looking at the technologies themselves, but the ways we bring our own usage to them. It's crucial for us as educators and for our students to learn and think about this.

Transformational vs Transactional Learning

Something that's sitting with me is related to what we talk about in the classroom. A lot of what we feel and dig into is the value and power of transformational learning. The idea is that in this space together, there's a magic that happens. I see it time and again in so many classrooms.

While transformational, community-oriented learning is important, how do we balance or make room for, or just acknowledge that transactional learning is okay too?  

I do understand that the push for transformational learning is part of what higher ed does to justify itself and to push back against the transactional nature of late-stage capitalism and hyper-individualism.  But we exist in that milieu, not a part from it and so when institutions and educators demand transformational–it too can feel like one more demand put upon students.

What has me thinking about this is a recent framing from Karen Costa.  She made the point that the non-traditional student is no longer non-traditional. Her explanation of the non-traditional student really stuck with me.  When we talk about the non-traditional learner, they are largely richly contextualized in a variety of roles that the previous "traditional" learner often is not. The student identity is not their primary identity. In fact, it may be much further down the list of their identities. Other things like being a parent, employee, community member, etc., take precedence.

This has me thinking: for some students all or part of their learning may be entirely transactional. Can we acknowledge that transactional learning can be important and valuable, too?

I say this as someone who, in my own head, often has noticed this bias towards transformational learning: this sense that if there's not true transformational learning, then it's somehow less valuable and meaningful. 

But I’ve been questioning that notion the last few years. The idea that learning can only be "real" if it's experienced in these transformational ways is something I'm questioning now.  I see a lot of this elitism in education (it shows up in the arts as much as the sciences), where if you don’t see, experience, perform, appreciate, in this or these particular ways, it doesn’t count. You’re less than.  

I wonder about this as a challenge: Is there room for both transformational and transactional learning? And what do we do when the same tools that we're critically uncomfortable with - the ones we feel are demoralizing or contribute to distancing - may actually be really helpful for some students?

For these students, not being fully immersed and being able to just take what is needed now might be beneficial. I get it - that's where we lean into more individual experiences versus community experiences. It doesn't feel entirely comfortable or right, and I understand those students are potentially enacting an individual lens or experience of learning. But what if this transactional experience is allowing for more transformational experiences elsewhere (e.g. in their communities)? I worry about that paternalistic lens that we in higher ed can bring to how we view students’ values, contexts, and meaning-making and think it can show up in this valuation of in-person, transformational, relational importance of teaching and learning.

(Again–I don’t wholly believe this is the case but I do feel the need to investigate it thoroughly).    

We've also seen over the last three decades that these tools have allowed people to access education in ways that weren't available to them before. Yet, there's a real tension there about where to draw the line, if there should be a line at all, and who's drawing the line, or supplying the ink (or graphite) to draw the line.

To some degree, even with all the critiques I have of them, those massive online institutions do facilitate transformational learning in some portion of their students, even if it may not be as community-based or feel counter to how we traditionally understand teaching and learning. There's no easy solution for that tension.

“There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.”

You mentioned: 

“I enjoy figuring things out on my own, even if I get a little turned around in the process. I also tend to see most things as low stakes; mistakes are not the end of the world. All that to say that, in my early days as faculty, it never even occurred to me to seek out help.”

That has often been my experience.  I wonder about how that changes our understanding of learning. It brings me back to privileging transformational over transactional learning. We want to encourage this idea that failure is okay, or we can rethink how we think about failure (at my current institution, we have an entire course on “Reframing Failure”).  I wholeheartedly agree with that. My failures have been my greatest learning opportunities, and I feel lucky to have had them (often more so in hindsight than in the moment, of course).

Even though failure is at the center of learning, there's always this edge to it.  Failure is a luxury, or being able to work through failure is a luxury. I agree, I see most mistakes in my life as low stakes. I just don't know that it feels as accurate for students in more precarious situations. Financially, socially, politically, for many folks, is it actually low stakes? Is there an ability to feel low stakes? There's something there that I don't feel, but I do see it in so many people, students and adults alike.

Yet failures and mistakes are not equal in their experiences and abilities to recover.   It’s why we balk at Facebook’s “move fast and break things.”  They can break things because it's other people who feel the effect of their mistakes; if it’s a significant mistake, they can throw billions of dollars at it.  On a smaller level, that’s true for us as educators. Our failures and mistakes may cost us something, but not as much as it may cost our students.

What Did My Former Self Need to Hear

Which brings me to the question: 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? 

Gosh, I would say to my younger self that, just like we often say in teaching, we plant the seeds of trees we'll never see fully grown. So much of the work we do manifests years later, and we experience this in our own lives when we realize that a lesson from that person has actually stuck with us or has made us do something.

Of course, we have to consider the other side of that seed planting. I would want myself to know that I may also not get to fully see or realize the bountiful land that I spoiled, salted, or corrupted. Think quite deliberately about that. My mistakes and failures to be a mindful and intentional educator has become some student’s “reason”.  To be thinking about how to be a steward of learning.

Because I know there were students I did not do justice by, students whose educational experience was made worse because of me and my sense of what it meant to be an educator or to perpetuate bad teaching habits or ego-centric practices.  

Given that, I would push myself to get insight from others and figure out what it out better. I think an initial action would be to direct my younger self to get onto platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and other spaces to really hear the stories of students about the impact of poor educators–the kind of raw honesty and clarity of impact by students that exist on those platforms–to help glean some sense of my impact.  

From there, I would move him to find a colleague or two that he trusted both to witness but also to be critical to review the course content as well as do an observation. I would have put some of the pedagogical books in his hands sooner (Friere, hooks, Giroux).    

My former students deserved better, they deserved more nuance, and they deserved a way to really be who they are and find their way through the subject matter. For myself, there wasn't space to do that. That's something I would really try to draw out in my younger self and help him understand.

I think I would also help him understand that part of the way I approached that classroom was that we so often fill it up with content, but not necessarily relationships. He filled it up with the thing he thought he could control the most, that he had the most say over. I'd encourage him to learn to lean a bit more into things that feel a little less tangible or manageable. I would have liked to encourage that, particularly in his first five years. I think he was some interesting things, but I think his sense about who students are should have sat with him more and should have been discussed more thoughtfully and curiosity with others.

I go back to Karen Costa and her point that being a student is one part of their identity, and the younger me demanded it be all. That just wasn't true. It wasn't true for me as an educator or student. It wasn't true for them. It's not really true for any of us.  So more leaning into all that.

Beginning With What?

You ask, if I have any programs you have designed or imagine designing for new faculty that would provide our colleagues with the support I wish I’d had?

Early on in my adjuncting (i.e. first or second year back in 2006), I was already in a support space. I lucked into a moment at one of my institutions where they were launching a professional development program for adjunct faculty, and that actually helped build the bridge to my current work. 

Dr. Laurie Messina, a mentor and friend, was piloting this program and pulled me into participating in it. That led me to become involved in that program and doing what I've been doing since.  In stepping into that space, I would have encouraged myself to be a little more vulnerable about the challenges of teaching and learning. To stay in that space, even as I grew to facilitate it, to maintain a beginner's mind–to recognize that I was still a learner and had much to learn from colleagues (a lesson I’ve learned amply since!). 

I do think back about that professional development program which I was involved in for nearly a decade, and I would love to recreate it and have it ongoing. It was a Saturday program for many years. It really did build some relationships and provide guidance. There are definitely folks from that program that I'm still friends with today, colleagues I connect with regularly.

I've often worked at places where we can't get two wooden nickels to rub together to support the work that we do. So, the idea of doing anything that is beneficial but also asks more of faculty feels challenging, especially for adjunct faculty. They're already going to be often underpaid. They are already going to be asked to do lots of things (administrata and the like) that we just kind of slip into the work. To add in more training or more programming that they're expected to do as part of the onboarding or development - yeah, it just feels hard. It feels like it's a challenge to meet or rise to. And it’s more than “training” but no matter what, it’s going to feel like that to some (again, transactional vs transformational).

That said, I think what I do bring - my work that I am offering and have carved out in the last few years - is just an attempt to be honest about the institution and how power works there. Institutions wield their power in a way that reinforces the difference or the power between the institution and the faculty member. Particularly in working with adjunct faculty, their precarious situation shows up in institutions in how disposable and absence of care and support for adjunct faculty.  

That's something that I do my best to raise up.  I do my best to be candid and caring about how power works and what I can do to help them with that.  It's to name the disempowering effect an institution can have on faculty and also, where they can resist.

That earnestness builds a report with faculty that I believe creates trust.  It’s grounded in the idea that if I can be honest about what the institution is, and the ways it can be challenging, it might also open up an opportunity for them to feel like they can ask for help, they can reach out, they can look for guidance, and either I can support them directly or find the right people to do that.

I think to me, just clarifying the lines of power is important because it is so easy to step into, especially if you don't have a rich background of understanding higher ed, to be like, "Oh, I'm a faculty member now, like that means something." That comes with certain power and certain emphasis–for sure, but also, many institutions don’t care. And as you learn that, you also feel the fragility of your situation. So I think I just try to name and clarify that a bit more in my own work with faculty to help them feel supported.

All right, so continuing with the questions for one another–I’ve got one for you, Stacey (or anyone else who wants to join us  :::stares with wide-eyed hopefulness into his (turned off) webcam:::).  

We’ve been talking about what we would want to help our younger selves with.  

But let’s flip it.  What do we think our younger selves would tell us, teach us, or ask us about our current work and how we show up to it?

And of course, if there is anyone else out there who wants to chime in about the successful supports they had as early-career faculty or about the supports they would love to create for new faculty now, please join in the conversation! Please feel free to comment below, write up your ideas on your own blog or on social media and tag me or Stacey to let us know about your contribution. You can find us on our blogs (Stacey, Lance) or on LinkedIn (Stacey, Lance).

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