Abstract
The philosophical beliefs of instructors directly impact how a course is designed, the extent to which each instructor's belief systems may impact the course experience, and the beliefs that may underlie instructional design and engagement systems throughout the instructional process. The focus of this discussion evolves around the philosophical belief systems of three higher education instructors at different points in their career trajectory, from adjunct instructor to full professor, that focuses upon an analysis of philosophical beliefs associated with the teaching and learning process, that leads into the potential impact upon one's elearning instructional decisions and styles of instructional engagement that may support a better understanding of styles of transformative social learning environments within the higher education elearning instructional environment.
TopIntroduction
Beliefs and understandings around how one learns reflects a lifetime of experience and engagement in the learning process. Slowly, over significant time and engagement, beliefs slowly develop into underlying values and into philosophical beliefs associated with the teaching and learning process. After all, the success of a learner to do well within different forms of active and passive learning, formal and informal learning, develops ways that each person understands and views the world of teaching and learning. These habits around cognitive ability and procedural engagement within the teaching and learning process are understandings that each person not only develops as reflective of their own self, but also these philosophies develop and enhance structural engagement as it solidifies into deeply held beliefs within each person.
Background
This is an extensive and lifelong journey towards more fully understanding the habits around thoughts, customs, behaviors, traditions, practices, beliefs, and philosophies that are learned as well as developed and solidified by each teacher. So much is passed down within subject matter areas of expertise, through implicit and explicit means such as through instructional modeling, the success of a student when learning through an instructor’s style and then slowly takes in the modeled instructional behaviors and engagement as their own due to the success achieved through these same instructional means, but also through explicit guidance by teachers, mentors, and colleagues who mean well but instead are actually sustaining prior traditions and expectations around the teaching and learning process. How one critically analyzes their engagement in the teaching and learning process, how one questions and considers their own instructional abilities, is integrally important towards developing transformative ways of understanding the differentiations between the ways that a person comfortably engages in the learning process, and the ways that this person develops into a teacher who may move between rigid styles of instruction and assessment, into less rigid and more vulnerable and creative ways through which to rest and potentially recognize different ways that learners may engage with and successfully learn the subject matter under study.
As a teacher or trainer, critical pedagogy (Freire, 1996, 2001, 2014a, 2014b, 2018; Freire, Quiroga, & Gayotto, 1989) urges the instructional facilitator to carefully analyze aspects of one’s instructional efforts so as to qualitatively and quantitatively reflect upon strengths, weaknesses, and areas of progressive understanding and improvement within one’s instructional efforts and understandings. This transformational engagement within progressively understanding how one’s philosophical beliefs not only initially developed, but how one’s philosophical beliefs shift, change, and transformatively develop over one’s career journey is also vitally important to study. For this reason, three colleagues come together to share their own philosophical beliefs around the teaching and learning process, not merely as a professional curiosity but more so towards joining forces towards more fully articulating professional understandings and engaging in instructional landscapes that are specifically framed within elearning environments.
Main Focus Of The Chapter
The questions and prompts that were the focus of each contributor is clearly articulated in the style and manner that is most appropriate for the person’s style of communication and ways through which to most appropriately frame an understanding of response to each question or prompt. Each contributor is allocated an alias, labeled as Contributor One, Contributor Two, and Contributor Three. The anonymity associated with each contributor support the ability to more fully and completely articulate one’s own philosophical beliefs that more clearly may develop as a lens through which to view one’s understanding of the teaching and learning environment. This may reflect expectations, beliefs, and procedural responses to questions related to how the instructor views and understands an instructional phenomenon. Towards this end, the contributors responded to the following questions or prompts that were articulated in Crawford’s (2016) work:
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Learning: Supports the belief that the learning process is embedded within social contexts of communication, wherein people better understand information through community-based environments.
Vulnerability: The ability to set aside one’s preconceptions and deep-seated beliefs, to rethink processes, procedures, ways of viewing the world, and other aspects of the ways that a person preconceives living in the world and being of the world.
Critical Analysis: This is a deep and exhaustively comprehensive examination of ideas and efforts. This should be a subjective effort, removing the emotional engagement and allows for a vulnerable approach to better understanding a situation, event, or information presented.
Transformative Learning Environments: These are communities of learning that include social learning engagement, that not only encourages social interactions and working with the information, but promotes, encourages, and develops the creativity of the learner.
Critical Pedagogy: People in the teaching and learning profession support the belief that continuously analyzing one’s strengths, weaknesses, creative endeavors, and instructional support success, is an integral aspect of the profession.
Instructional Philosophical Beliefs: The ways that people think about the teaching and learning process, whether underlying and unrecognized beliefs or recognized opinions and behaviors.
eLearning: There are innumerable types of instructional environments within which the teaching and learning process occurs. The elearning environment is articulated through digital realms of communication and engagement.