Pedagogy is itself a contested category, so it is no surprise that most instructors and most institutions do not aspire to have a single, fixed pedagogical approach. Design Forward orients itself around three pedagogical questions with the hope that it will bring cohesion to the program without forcing faculty into prescriptive approaches:
- What happens if we ask critical questions about the choices we make when we design our courses?
- What happens if we resist the devaluation of care that infuses our educational institutions?
- What happens if we align our teaching with a larger institutional mission that we co-create?
We will learn to ask questions about the norms we’ve accepted about teaching, and ask questions about new horizons of educational possibility. We’ll examine the ways in which teaching and learning are invested in and/or alienated from care work, and explore the value of care to our teaching goals. And we will consider how our own pedagogical journeys dovetail (smoothly or with friction) with the mission of the institution(s) within which we teach.
