Digital Pedagogy Lab 2019 Fellowship Application

Posted on by Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh

Yesterday morning I woke up to an email from the Digital Pedagogy Lab that announced the opening of the 2019 Digital Pedagogy Lab Fellows program:

I was excited to see this email, y’all. I really enjoy thinking about and blogging my answers to the questions asked within the application.

Do I honestly think I have a chance of becoming a DPL Fellow?

The overwhelming likelihood is no. And that’s not imposter syndrome talking – just an acknowledgement of the realities of the awesome folks who apply and the need for several marginalized voices to be heard more than mine.

But I’ll fill out the form anyway because it’s an important exercise in tracking my evolution as online instructor. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll start a conversation that we can continue before, during, and after the Digital Pedagogy Lab meets.

Ready to begin? Let the fun commence…

In the length of a single tweet (280 characters), offer your definition of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Include text here, or tweet and share a link.

Confession time: When I first answered this question, I really had no idea what I was doing. I was searching for meaning – in terms of the question, in terms of how others had answered it, in terms of my own digital pedagogy.

But over the last few months (during a sabbatical semester for health issues), I’ve had time to deeply engage with this question through reading several books, including An Urgency of Teachers and How Humans Learn, and through engaging with several excellent blogs and talks, including some given by Robin DeRosa (which I discussed here), Maha Bali (through #UnboundEq, personal discussion, and her blog), Bonnie Stewart (which I wrote a bit about here), and Kevin Gannon (whose talk I tweetstormed here). I’ve had some time to formulate what critical digital pedagogy means to me and what role I play within it.

And so I tweeted about it to try to engage more folks in discussing it.

First an introduction to the tweetstorm:

Then my definition of critical digital pedagogy:

Defining some terms and boundaries in terms of the parts of the class I have control over (or must comply with in terms of my institution):

And describing what role I play within the classroom:

 

All of which is to say that I recognize that since my students are accomplishing the goliath task of learning the course material, my goal in teaching is to support and help them in their learning as much as I can. I also try to embed learning products that emphasize important life and career skills that might help my students throughout their future studies as well.

Please give us a little background about yourself in the form of links to your work online or a short overview of your pedagogical interests.

I gave a short overview of my pedagogical interests the first time I filled out this application. So, here’s my background as found in links:

My webpage, which includes my CV, my open teaching sites, and my blogs – https://clarissasorensenunruh.com/

My YouTube site, which shows my teaching in the form of video snippets for my students and the public – https://www.youtube.com/user/csoren1

My Twitter handle, which I use to reflect, engage, and network with my Personal Learning Community – https://twitter.com/RissaChem

My ORCID website, which lists my publications – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7429-4660

As a DPL Fellow, you may have the opportunity to present a 75-minute workshop. Please include a title and a short description for a workshop you might lead.

I recently pitched a whole bunch of curricular ideas to one of my graduate departments (of which this is an extremely small subset). Any of these could be turned into a workshop that would at least begin to embrace thinking about and implementing more critical and open pedagogies in the participants’ classrooms.

Implementing Critical Digital Pedagogy in a STEM Classroom – How has critical digital pedagogy been defined and implemented within STEM classrooms? This workshop will discuss the considerations and the many student successes inherent in implementing this type of pedagogy F2F or online.
Embracing Open Pedagogy in a STEM Classroom – This workshop will discuss using hypothes.is, OERs, blogs, and cMOOCs to give students greater agency and expand classroom pedagogy openly, collaboratively, and digitally to an international community of scholars.
Digital Fluency and Identity in the Classroom – How do we define and create meaningful assessments for students with online media that empower and expand student digital fluency and identity? This discussion based workshop will embrace this concepts and build upon them using source material and participant experience.

We try to integrate Fellows into the community of the event in a variety of ways. In lieu of a workshop, is there another, creative way you could participate?

I discussed so many alternate and different ways for me to creatively interact with the DPL here, But my strength is in engaging in real time with a larger community composed of STEM and Open Pedagogy folks via social media (i.e. Twitter, Instagram, etc.), blogging, and Virtually Connecting, for which I’d happily serve as an onsite and virtual buddy.

If you are not awarded a fellowship, do you think you will still be able to attend?

The answer to this question is a giant MAYBE? It all depends on if CNM has travel money available (and that remains allotted and not usurped for something else more pressing) for me to attend.

Are there any other factors regarding your application for this fellowship that you think are relevant or that you would like to share?

I’m currently evolving in the ways I embrace my students and my own pedagogy. I’ve been exploring this evolution for months via blogging: Wrestling with the Inner Pedagogue, Jazz Teaching and Open Pedagogy, A Reflection on Robin DeRosa’s #PaLa2018 Keynote, etc. I think going to the Digital Pedagogy Lab now will help catalyze and accelerate my praxis of this evolution in my classroom and in my research.

Published by Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh

Learning/Teaching Enthusiast. Intro Chem, Gen Chem, & Organic Chem Prof at CNM Community College. #ChemEd Researcher. Statistics MS & Learning Sciences PhD student at UNM. #LGTBQi. Editor of "Communicating Chemistry Through Social Media"

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