Sean Michael Morris
Due to circumstances out of our control this seminar has been postponed. We aim to reschedule later in the year and will post further details in due course.
Abstract
Critical pedagogy demands a lot of us. It demands we walk away from our assumptions about how teaching and learning happen. It demands that we question the teaching we received. It demands we listen. Sometimes, it demands we step aside from our own identity to make room for the identity of a student struggling far more than we are—but just as hard as we once did—to find their identity. Critical pedagogy requires a radical hospitality.
And yet the very notion of hospitality implies a host, someone who is offering space, someone who makes the plan, invites, sets the table. Hospitality requires that a center be established before anything else can happen. It requires occasion, and to some degree, authority. A classroom requires a teacher because the teacher understands more in its entirety the circumference of the community. The host knows the occasion from which transpires hospitality. Saying “yes to who or what shows up” requires first that a place be determined for that showing up.
When we teach in hybrid environments, or in fully online classrooms, we face bigger, more complicated questions about not only what table we are setting, but also who will arrive and from where and in what way, and about what occasion and authority imply. To actualize a pedagogy of hospitality in digitally-inflected learning environments, we must find ways to teach through the screen instead of to the screen.
Biography
I am a digital teacher and pedagogue, with experience especially in instructional design, networked learning, digital composition and publishing, collaboration, and editing. I've been working in digital teaching and learning for 16 years. My work in the field of Critical Digital Pedagogy and Critical Instructional Design is founded in the philosophy of Paulo Freire, and finds contemporary analogues in the work of Howard Rheingold, Audrey Watters, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, and Jesse Stommel. I am committed to engaging audiences in critical inspection of digital technologies, and to turning a social justice lens upon education.