UPDATED: 21st Century Learning & Teaching – Testing Questions, But Not Test Questions

I’ve been a fan of the Wales-based Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts for its 25 year run.  As a “great ideas” festival spun with deep welcoming of diversity, Hay Fest began as a single site international festival based in this Welsh-English borderlands town between the River Wye and the Brecon Beacons.  Now a 15-site event happening around the world with its anchor still in Hay, where bookshops per capita are the highest in the world.  As the Festival site notes:

Hay celebrates great writing from poets and scientists, lyricists and comedians, novelists and environmentalists, and the power of great ideas to transform our way of thinking. We believe the exchange of views and meeting of minds that our festivals create inspire revelations personal, political and educational.

To celebrate thinking linked to the 25 years completed and the 25 years to come, the Festival organizers have developed a set of questions: “Hay 25 – The Way We Live Now.”

Here in Minnesota, to celebrate academic Summer as that time to name, pursue, discuss, reshape and expand big questions, I’ve asked a number of TILT readers and bloggers to put into question format the conversations regarding learning and teaching that we have taken shape in our reading, writing and discussions with colleagues during the past year.  These questions reflect our desires as scholars and community members to (1) understand learning and teaching as it happens now and (2) imagine ourselves into the ways and byways of higher education in the 25 years to come.  And the testing, shaping of questions is part of CTL’s preparing to celebrate histories of its major programs and emergence as an entity on the UMinn campus.

Three things to know as you move into reading the questions – we want to hear from you: What are your responses to the questions?  What questions would you add to or subtract from this list?  And, as this Center for Teaching and Learning is about to move into its 25th year, we’ll be making use of summer thinking to build a list of 25 questions to guide the development of half of our blog posts for the coming year.

Perhaps, as you share your responses and your questions during the summer, you’ll also want to claim a question as one you’d blog about here during the coming year.  We hope so.

To the starting out questions:  Read!  Ruminate!  Discuss!  Hit reply or email us to send your questions!  And, we’ve added to the end several new questions that have come in during the week this entry has been posted.

1. If we stopped asking students to read textbooks, what different sorts of “texts” might university teachers incorporate into student learning?  And why?

2. Who taught you the first thing that you remember learning – vividly or in some hazy way, and why has that lesson stayed with you?

3. What piece of writing from you academic life has most changed your heart and mind?

4. Are you happy watching the ways students interact in your classrooms – whether in person or online or in communities?  If yes, why?  If not, where do you begin doing something about it?

5. What factors determine the ideas at the core of each course you teach?  Or, in another way of asking this question: Who and what are the most important influences on you when you make decisions about how and what to teach?

6. If you became the leader of a higher education organization (such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, or the Higher Education Academy, or of Million+) what would you boldly and clearly say needs to be gotten rid of first?

7. Teach a new faculty member or first year student – neither in your academic unit – something important you know.  What and how would you be teaching?

Tags: learning, questions, teaching