Presentation Panel
Can We, The Educators, (Re)Create a Band of Learners or an Esprit de Corps That Supersedes the Boundaries of Age, Gender, Abilities and Preferences?
Date Thursday, Nov 24 Time – RoomKoepenick III
Learning is a multi-faceted action, often based on trust. We know that creating a band of learners often results in more in-depth, contextual, and textured learning. However, this community feeling seems to be less evident today, as society is interwoven by many echo chambers tearing us apart as humans. Educators are experienced at building bridges, so can we reinstate trust in a more diversity-aware society?
Annasofie Lund Wædeled will zoom in to 'what affects learning communities in a digital era and how we can approach that as educators’, while Inge de Waard will highlight 'innovative learning approaches that place educators in a mentoring position creating learning communities'.
Warning! This will be an interactive talk, using the boardroom lead experiences as a starting block to create an ad hoc community of practitioners, where we share our own experiences and views. Let's get together, and share some real-world experiences in our quest to bring learners and educators together to ignite a community spirit that benefits all learners.
Annasofie Lund Wædeled
Administrative Officer, The Royal Danish Defence College, Denmark
Annasofie is a teaching and learning consultant at The Royal Danish Defence College. She has an MA in pedagogy and didactics and has and has extensive experience as both teacher and counselor. Her main areas of work include training of teachers in different sectors, development of teaching courses and pedagogical/didactic consultancy. Her key skills and interests include E-learning, learning culture, "civic literacy", storytelling in education, PBL and reflective practise learning.
Inge de Waard
Learning Strategist and Connector, EIT InnoEnergy, Belgium
Inge de Waard is the learning strategist at EIT InnoEnergy, she is a longtime researcher, activist, award-winning learning innovator and (e)Learning coordinator. She developed multiple online & hybrid courses, co-designed AI tools, and embedded learning innovations. Inge coaches and co-creates international, blended curricula with engineers and teachers, and explores innovative learning formats. Her expertise is recognized by peers, resulting in additional co-authored papers, invited talks and keynotes in both academic and professional conferences, workshops and seminars. She recently founded the Power Elders initiative to spotlight role models who changed their lives at any age beyond 50. Most of all, she likes to connect with people and share stories.
Links
Moderator
What Affects Learning Communities in a Digital Era and How To Approach That As Educators, Annasofie Lund Wædeled
This presentation adresses the changing norms and rules of behaviour and interaction in physical versus digital communities and how this affects the (manily online) framework for Learning and Development and the role of the educator.
Lately the Danish Defence had cases of abusive and offensive behavior which, ofcourse, was scrutinized by the media. The “me too” waves were rolling but it’s different and worse when it happens for those in uniforms. That, alongside with encounters with frustrated educators at The Royal Danish Military Academy (responsible for both practical training and theoretical education of officers), made me wonder: What happened to “esprit de corps” and “band of brothers”, that’s supposed to be in a soldiers DNA?
As a bystander and fellow practitioner it lead me to think that maybe we are not very good at just being around one another as we used to. Maybe it is no longer natural for us to take part in a community. And this complicates the framework for learning and development and challenges the role of the educator.
If you want to learn more about how communities of practice and communities of learning work, there are many great sources. The work of developmental psychologist Robert Keagan and Danish psychologist and researcher in leadership Svend Brinkmann alongside with Etienne Wenger, all offer some understandings on learning and development in communities.
To explain the collapse in our ability to be part of a community, I looked at the work of philosopher and logician, Vincent F Hendricks, that in his latest publications shed some light on WHY we struggle to participate in communities in a “post-factual” world where we act accordingly to the ”The Online Disinhibition Effect”. Our primary arena of socializing and acquiring norms and rules of behavior and behavioral adjustments takes place online, takes place in the “wild west”.
So the question is: how do we work with digital literacy in a way that improves our learning community and environment? Looking to Amy Edmonsons theory on psychological safety, we will address and discuss how we - across age, gender, abilities and preferences - figure out the norms and rules of interaction in a community of practice and learning. This will lead up to a panel discussion about how we, as participants in a community, could address basic values, attitudes and actions in both digital and physical communities.
Overview
- Presentation of the concept “civil literacy”
- Understand how the digital influences communities of practice and learning.
- How to facilitate this discussion with students/colleagues.
Innovative Learning Approaches That Place Educators in a Mentoring Position, Creating Learning Communities, Inge de Waard
In this interactive session, Inge will share how EIT InnoEnergy professors and teachers took up the roles of guides on the side, resulting in learning communities that frequently superseded the duration of courses, combining teachers, students, and businesses. The innovative approaches used are:
- Challenge Based learning, where students, business employees, and professors tackle real-life engineering challenges, frequently resulting in useable solutions and startups.
- Case methods, a learning methodology built on learning by doing and which aims to prepare students or learners for strategic decision-making in companies.
- Moonshot thinking: where Moonshot thinking refers to an approach of choosing a huge, seemingly insurmountable problem and proposing a radical solution to that problem using disruptive technology.
The implementation of these approaches meant that we provided support from central learning management, to any educator that wanted to be trained in this technology. The combination of these technologies, also ensured that there was something in it for the more pragmatic-oriented learners (case method), for the more innovation-driven learners (challenge-based learning), and for those who want to build solutions at the vanguard of innovation or entrepreneurship (Moonshot thinking).
Because these learning approaches are learner-centered, all actors working on solutions became collaborators, which in turn built learning communities that stayed active also after the respective projects were delivered.