Peter Felten, director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, is a member of Georgetown University’s “social pedagogies working group.”
This two year project, funded by an $83,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation, is led by Heidi Elmendorf (Biology, Georgetown) and Randy Bass (English and Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Georgetown). The other eleven participants in the group, which met for the first time August 16-19, come from Skidmore College, Carlton College, California State University Monterey Bay, the City University of New York, Hope College, the University of Kansas, and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest.
This project will create a framework for designing better general education experiences through social pedagogies. Research has demonstrated that learning is strongly affected by the social setting in which it takes place. Social pedagogies are a diverse set of strategies for creating educational environments where learning occurs in the context of a community and learners are required to represent knowledge for others.
The project will explore the idea that social pedagogies can be particularly effective at developing in students certain qualities of “adaptive expertise” such as the ability to use knowledge fluently and flexibly, to manage and proceed confidently from uncertainty, and to have self-awareness of one’s knowledge.
The working group’s goals are to capture the essential assignment structures of social pedagogies, and to create a clear, commonsense framework that demonstrates parallels between pedagogical practices and assessment issues. Over the next two years the working group, along with colleagues from participating institutions, will document examples of social pedagogies with close attention to the evidence of student learning. The working group also will create a set of resources to support teaching with and further research on social pedagogies.