One of the most influential books on the development of my teaching persona and on my philosophy as an educator has been Atkinson and Claxton’s The Intuitive Practitioner: On the value of not always knowing what one is doing (2001). I was drawn to purchasing this publication around the time of completion of my Master’s degree because I so readily identified with its perspectives on teaching and learning. I still treasure it today as one of the most valuable educational books in my personal library. While it acknowledges the popular notion that teaching is akin to a performance art where teachers as performers get to practice all the nuances of their profession, it also challenges this perspective.
Traditionally, teaching nurtures and values routines; somewhat like the learning of lines for a dramatic play. How many of us in the Caribbean remember with detail and sometimes amusement, the many routines of our early school days? These included prayers and songs recited at assembly, good morning mams and good morning sirs at the start and end of each class, times tables repeated after lunch, uniform inspection and the like. While some of these routines may have changed with time, many have remained, and new ones formulated as integral components of the teaching-learning experience.
The idea of the intuitive practitioner, however, seeks to challenge these notions of performance and predictability as inherent components of good teaching. This is not so much to disrupt the practice of providing our students with solid routines and daily courtesies, as it is a challenge to the reality of becoming stuck in one’s routinised teaching/professional practices and often to the detriment of the learner. I thought of revisiting this perspective particularly at this time, since the COVID 19 Pandemic has shown itself to be a great de-stabilizer and disruptor in every facet of human existence, including education. What lessons can we learn about the notion of being an intuitive practitioner, particularly as we are currently grappling with the realities of one of the most anomalous and unpredictable times in our recent human history.
Admittedly, schools and higher education institutions with blended approaches, digital frameworks or complete online platforms would have found themselves ahead of the game in a manner of speaking during this time of global disruption. Professor Luz Longsworth, Pro Vice Chancellor and Principal of the University of the West Indies Open Campus, (the UWI’s online campus) in describing her institution’s response to the COVID 19 pandemic, described the Open Campus as the “campus for the times” (University of the West Indies Open Campus, 2020). This description was likely hinged on the campus’ digital infrastructure inclusive of training of faculty, for the navigation of teaching and learning in the online environment and all that that entails.
But this is to be expected of an institution whose inherent focus and design is the online environment. What about regular, traditional institutions, which must now embrace Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) (Hodges et al, 2020) as a temporary response to an unexpected crisis situation? How can such institutions maximise on teaching and learning in a structure that is so different from what they have known and practised? What will the educational future hold after a figurative bout of ERT? Can we realistically return to our previous inadequate structures having witnessed firsthand the tremendous potential inherent in digital education?
Understanding the principles of intuitive practice could be a first step in a professional re-calibration for many educators who may currently feel out of their depth. Intuitive practitioners acknowledge and embrace the messy complexity which often constitutes everyday human experiences (Atkinson and Claxton, 2001). Intuitive practice is reflective and is comfortable with discomfort. For intuits in education, life is nothing like the tidy neat rows of desks in our schools where approaches to teaching mirror an expectation of identical understanding and learning. Educational intuits recognize that learning and its environments, like life, can be messy and disruptive. Intuitive practice, therefore, acknowledges the presence of uncertainties which cannot be readily answered by text-book, routinised approaches but rather require nuanced judgements, deep ruminations and personal interpretations to ensure that the needs of our educational clients or students are met. In my estimation, intuitive practice then seems directly linked to the higher-order socio-emotional competencies needed for competent and effective digital use (Eshet-Alkali, 2004). This is by no means a co-incidence and represents a perfect marriage of suitable approaches to teaching in the digital environment, at this time of global uncertainty.
This understanding of complexity and need to cater to individual circumstances requires a keen understanding of the digital divide in terms of the socio-economic and psycho-social factors which can complicate student access to online learning. It also includes empathetic approaches by principals and local educational authorities in terms of understanding the personal challenges which teachers themselves may face in adjusting to a context where there is uncertainty, anxiety and a sense of a loss or re-alignment of notions of professional control. The demonstration of understanding, empathy and integrity in digital environments is an important corollary of the digital wisdom which must undergird the professional practice of both leaders and teacher practitioners in 21st Century educational institutions (Prensky 2009; Charles 2019). In this respect, there is a perfect marriage between an intuitive, reflective approach to teaching and the socio-emotional competencies which define the digitally literate practitioner (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008; Eshet, 2012).
How then can the intuitive practitioner approach, assist us in navigating the unchartered waters of Emergency Remote Teaching or of online education in a vulnerable, digital environment? For educators, toggling with our deeply ingrained beliefs about what constitutes good teaching and learning may be our greatest hurdle yet. Quality teaching and learning in the digital age cannot, however, be represented by the wholesale lifting of structures and routines from the face-to-face environment (like seasoned performances of well-rehearsed lines) to an online platform.
The digital revolution represents not just a revolution in terms of technical tools, gizmos, gadgets and strategies. It is at its core, a deep philosophical shift of ideas on knowledge ownership and what learning facilitation looks like. It is people-oriented and client-focussed as we have noticed how the ideas of digital marketing, digital branding and digital story-telling have leveraged the importance of the consumer or client in the online environment. In the educational context, the student is now that all-important client. This signals a movement away from the idea that the service of teaching revolves around the needs of the producers of education (teachers) as opposed to around the needs of its consumers/clients (Atkinson and Claxton, 2001).
For the most part, the traditional classroom environment has been heavily teacher-centred and has relied on expert driven performances by teachers as professional owners of bodies of knowledge located outside the reach of ordinary people (Atkinson and Claxton, 2001). The digital learning environment has the potential to effectively re-calibrate this as students now have access to available repositories of knowledge for their own self-paced learning. In this setting, the re-positioned teacher is forced to either re-evaluate and re-define herself/himself as the much touted guide by the side or else persist in holding on to the chalk-and-talk, text-book driven, one-size-fits-all modality of the industrial age classroom. The latter choice will only serve to concretize teacher irrelevance.
What then are some of the best practices of the intuitive practitioner which could prove useful in a digital environment at this juncture of the COVID 19 pandemic or for any other burgeoning national or global crisis? Whether at the level of leadership or classroom practitioner, modelling intuitive practices in a digital environment should include the following:
- The acceptance and embracing of personal limitations as starting points for new knowledge engagement and for the required professional development to increase 21st Century relevance through effective digital practices
- The cultivation of both expertise-based and experiential learning and the balancing of these two facets of the teaching-learning paradigm, in order to add needed value to student-teacher interaction
- Leveraging student individual experiences as critical to the classroom learning environment and allowing such experiences to guide teaching and learning
- Opening the self to different ways of knowing including trusting one’s gut instincts in catering to students’ learning and or socio-emotional needs
- Asserting the value of teachable moments over rigid objectives and plans and allowing for deviation if students’ psycho-social needs are being addressed in the moment
- The demonstration of sensitivity towards student individual psycho-social needs which may be independent of COVID 19 or magnified because of it; this includes issues related to tension, anxiety, grief, fear, displacement, disengagement and even apathy
- The demonstration of sensitivity towards students’ socio-economic needs (sharing of devices, absence of devices, lack of food, lack of parental support, crowded living conditions, abusive environments) which may impact learning quality and which speak to the digital divide
- Advocacy for vulnerable students through individualizing learning approaches and programme development; this should include lobbying with school leadership and educational authorities for fairness and equity
- The reframing or reconceptualization of crises as tools for personal, student and organizational growth and development. This should include developing organizational, teacher centred and departmental strategies for better home-school engagement, the diversifying of instruction and of assessment, to meet a range of needs and learning styles. This should also see the building of meaningful teacher-to-teacher, departmental and organizational relationships in a move to create a more cohesive institutional community.
© Dr. Denise J Charles (2020)
References
Atkinson, T. & Claxton, G. (2001). The intuitive practitioner: On the value of not always knowing what one is doing. Buckingham, Open University Press.
Charles, D. J. (2019). Exploring the digital literacy practices and perspectives of higher education leaders and the implications for digital leadership: A phenomenological study. Doctoral thesis
Eshet-Alkalai, Y. (2004). Digital literacy: A conceptual framework for survival skills in the digital era. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 13 (1), 93-106
Eshet, Y. (2012). Thinking in the digital era: A revised model for digital literacy. Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology. Retrieved from http://iisit.org/Vol9/IISITv9p267-276Eshet021.pdf
Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T. & Bond, A. (2020). The difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. Educause Review. Retrieved from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency- remote-teaching-and-online-learning
Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2008). Digital literacies: Concepts, policies and practices. New York, Peter Lang. Retrieved from
Prensky, M. (2009) H. Sapiens digital: From digital immigrants and digital natives to digital wisdom, Innovate: Journal of Online Education: 5 (3) Article 1. Retrieved from http://nsuworks.nova.edu/innovate/vol5/iss3/1
University of the West Indies Open Campus. (Producer). (2020). Online Delivery: The lifeblood of education in the COVID 19 pandemic. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/UWITV/videos/4164280626930409/
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