Interview with Piret, Veiko and Erkki

Over dinner after the training yesterday, I had the chance to grill the trainers on online/digital learning and issues for adult educators in this field. You will now have somewhat of a clear idea of what Hitsa do, so the context is set for you. To add to that, the trainers also work as educators in Universities, as consultants and freelancers. All their work is connected to IT and/or education.

Now, just to be reminded of the 'researcher as a learner with'-idea, I learnt a lot last night, both content-wise and about myself. I would like to begin there. After describing where my interests lie and what my future research focus will be (the interest being in various forms of critical pedagogy and future research of gender educators in Sweden), Piret asked me 'but why did you choose Hitsa? It is not connected to what you talk about.' Valid question indeed. In fact, I have my reasons to why I sought myself to this placement, but the conversation that followed this evening gave me more reasons that I didn't know I had before speaking to these three educators. Prior to speaking to them, I simply wanted to learn more about an aspect of education I am new to, add another tool to my toolbox. I was interested in the connection between social change and online learning (e.g. intrigued by the work of http://www.moocsandco.com/en) but knew that Hitsa didn't focus overtly on this. Or so I thought, but through the thoughts expressed this evening, I heard a lot of connection with theories and pedagogies such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Critical Pedagogy. I will return to that.

The first topic we came upon, was the idea of the 'Flipped Classroom'. The flipped classroom was quoted as an aim for some of the educators and this is where I could hear a strong connection to social change and critical types of pedagogy, even though it wasn't explicitly referenced as such. The flipped classroom was explained to me as building the infrastructure to support students, where the role of the teacher is more advisory. I found this image to illustrate it:

To me, this emphasises students' own decision-making, and the fact that the teacher takes a bit of a back seat. In many ways, I think this can be used to give autonomy and power to students and hence weaken the authoritative position given to teachers traditionally. In other words, I heard a connection to aspects of critical pedagogy, where I didn't expect it, which was very interesting to me!

I was curious about what these three educators came up against in their work - what issues do they and their colleagues encounter? There were two main things that I heard in the following conversation. The first was a sense of feeling relatively safe in their roles, whilst knowing there is benefit in pushing oneself. Examples were raised were other teachers had been very far out of their comfort zone, for example teaching a subject which wasn't theirs, and how enriching that had been described as. It was expressed that the further one gets in one's career, the harder it is to go outside of this comfort zone - perhaps both because it gets bigger and because habits are more established. The space outside one's comfort zone is one site of learning that we perhaps need to seek out a bit more actively. The comfort zone we are usually in per default and we don't have to seek it out. But I don't believe it has to be bad to be in it, the awareness is most important.

The second issue that came up is the question of how to sort in resources and sources, and how to teach participants or students to do this. This was said to be especially important and crucial in the current climate online where there is so much false information circulating.

After two hours our time was up, and we headed back to our rooms, ready to start the second day of the workshop. It was a very enriching conversation and I'm grateful the three of them took the time out to talk to me! As you will see, this conversation informed the workshop I co-facilitated with Loren on our Workshop Day.

#Interview