What is Humanist Teaching and Learning

This chapter focused on the challenge to build an interactive online environment based on a progressive pedagogy that puts the student at the center of the learning. The authors grappled with the question, How do instructors transform discursive dialogue into generative discourse? Helping students understand what it means to engage in discourse is part of this challenge and it is not separate from building an understanding of content. They are interconnected and interdependent. Online learning, like on campus learning, requires purposeful experiences in which learners are able to negotiate meaning and reflect on what they have learned. The authors set out to discover how to create the structures that support active engagement. It was their understanding that through the learning environment they created, they would model and define how to engage in the discourse of the discipline. In exploring this understanding, the authors offered the distinction between participation and engagement.