Abstract
During the COVID-19 crisis, teaching and learning activities were largely conducted online through open and distance learning (ODL). As a result, educators and students lacked the personal warmth and emotional support usually found in face-to-face classes, which affected the quality of the teaching and learning process. Therefore, what could educators do to facilitate the teaching and learning process during the pandemic? This chapter features narratives on humanistic practices in teaching that were carried out during the pandemic by five university lecturers. The narratives shed light on how they embedded humanistic elements in either one or several of these aspects of teaching: delivery, content, consultation, and assessment. Their pedagogical approaches indicate that education is not a rigid domain, but it can be extended beyond the four walls of the classroom and executed from the sincere heart.
TopHumanistic Learning Theory
Humanistic psychology, developed by Maslow around the 1950s and expanded later on by Rogers, as well as Bugental among others, emerged as a prominent theory in education towards the 1960s (Schneider et al., 2014). It, then, spread extensively in the 1970s (Untari, 2016). Unlike behaviorism and psychoanalysis, the two more prominent learning theories that directly preceded it, which tended to focus on only specific aspects of students as learners, humanistic learning theory regarded them as holistic learners or, in other words, as ‘whole’ human beings. Behaviorism reduced humans to organisms that ‘learned’ desired behaviors through shaping and conditioning by manipulation of their external environments. Meanwhile, psychoanalysis proposed almost the opposite, adopting a biological deterministic view of humans. Maslow, however, sought to understand human beings from a different, more positive lens, taking into consideration learners as multi-faceted human beings, complex and unique (Hare, 2019; Johnson, 2014; Schneider et al., 2014).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Motivation: The drive for someone to pursue a particular task.
Humanistic Learning Theory: A learning theory founded by Abraham Maslow that emphasizes the need to consider all aspects of the learner as a 'whole' human being, particularly the affective domain, so that they may reach their full potentials.
Flexi Scaffolding: Any form of support or assistance from the instructor and peers in a flexible and interactional learning environment to promote student engagement.
Online Assessments: Assessments that are conducted and administered entirely through virtual means including providing feedback and consultation.
Care Pedagogy: The emphasis on connection (human connection, feelings, and relationship) before content delivery and assessment.
Storying: A space in which individuals feel safe to share feelings, emotions, stories, and events that occur in co-constructing relationships and knowledge.
Pandemic Teaching: Teaching and learning that occurred during the pandemic which requires a pedagogical approach that is more adaptive and flexible in nature.