Pedagogy under Construction: Learning to Teach Collaboratively

Abstract

Usually a teacher's first step to prepare for class is to write a syllabus, and Professor M had copies ready on day one of "Teaching Mass Communications in College." Instead of distributing them, however, he offered class members an option. They could follow a traditional route and use his detailed outline, or they could immediately put constructivist learning theory into practice by choosing to build their own syllabus and chart their own course. With this gauntlet dropped, he left them alone to decide.The class members opted to be constructivists, and this article reports the participants' observations during, Learning to Teach Collaborativelyin College" be to approach the class as active learners? Constructivists see knowledge as actively constructed by learners, not passively acquired from instructors. For this reason, students learn more effectively when they "own" the process and work collaboratively on tasks that seem real and authentic. Journalism educators often apply some of these constructivist notions in their classes but rarely to the degree used in this graduate-level pedagogy class.This article presents a case study of a constructivist pedagogy class and argues for the use of constructivist theory in mass communication higher education.

Creativity in advertising design education: an experimental study

“…Researchers have reported problem-based learning (PBL) to be a viable approach in enhancing real-world competencies in a number of academic fields, including medicine (Lycke et al 2006), nursing (McLoughlin andDarvill 2007), criminal justice (Jones 2006;Sims 2006), engineering (Bütün 2005;Litzinger et al 2005;Newstetter 2005), management (Kloppenborg and Baucus 2004), mass communication (Chen et al 2001) and marketing (Hocutt 2000;Wee et al 2003). However, to the best of the author's knowledge, a thorough assessment of the effectiveness of the PBL approach in enhancing creativity in the context of advertising design education remains lacking.…”

Students as partners in collaborative course design and educational research

“…More rarely, collaborative course design can "start with the syllabus," (Blinne, 2013) such that course topics, learning outcomes, activities and assessments are all negotiated and co-designed with current students, turning an essentially blank course outline into a jointlyconstructed syllabus over the course of, typically, the first several class sessions. Examples include the co-design of a graduate journalism course (Chen et al, 2001), a graduate pedagogy class (Fassett & Warren, 2006), and an undergraduate experiential-learning summer course (Hains & Smith, 2012). While these examples typically involved co-creation of low-enrollment courses (10 students or fewer), Brubaker (2012) explores authority in the classroom through the collaborative design of a required teacher education course involving 22 undergraduates.…”

Delivering on the e-learning promise: A case for a learning environment that enables collaborative online problem solving (COPS)

“…This focus includes the creation and delivery of online activities that engage learners in constructing knowledge through experimenting, experiencing, forming assumptions, testing, and creating meaning from experience. This approach is in vivid contrast to the traditional didactic view of learners as passive recipients of knowledge (Chen, Chung, Crane, Hlavach, & Viall, 2001;Jonassen, 1991;Savery & Duffy, 1995).…”