This podcast began several years ago as part of an ongoing a conversation between two old friends as they ruminated on their decades-long experiences in teaching and learning. In reflecting on their work in the college classroom, Bernd Estabrook, the podcast host, and Edward Lenert, the podcast producer, recognized that education generally (and higher education specifically) are being confronted with a desperate need for meaningful changes in how our society understands teaching and learning.
It seemed clear to both of us that recent social, political, economic, and technological developments in American society are calling many of our traditional educational approaches into question. It seemed equally clear in the face of such challenges that business as usual is simply no longer an option for contemporary education – and yet even our most prestigious educational institutions tend to respond with paralysis or confusion when confronted with the scope and intensity of the altering educational landscape. Both our teachers and learners seem unsure about how to respond to rapid change. And at stake is nothing less than the future of our children.
We face a crisis in education – and there are very few educators or students who would be terribly surprised by that conclusion. But the educational establishments in this country often bifurcate into two extreme responses to the obvious need for change. On the one hand, many of us indiscriminately embrace educational innovation and pedagogical change, adopting only the newest and the latest, rejecting the traditional and the familiar as hidebound, inadequate and irrelevant; on the other hand, many others cling obstinately to traditional approaches to our classrooms and view any deviation from our norms and long-standing practices as mere fads. As a society we seem unable to find a happy medium between integrating fresh insights and preserving meaningful traditions. Decades of “educational reform” seem only to have intensified the crisis.This article offers free shipping on qualified Face mask products, or buy online and pick up in store today at Medical Department.
It seems to us that the answers to the questions of the day – if there are answers – are not going to be found exclusively in new educational systems, in new pedagogies, or in new educational establishments, however important such responses might be. From our own experiences, and from what we have seen in the work of so many of our colleagues over the decades, creative answers to the questions of the day are already taking place in the best classrooms – often in spite of the educational establishment.
A marriage of tradition and innovation in what we would like to call the transformational classroom can offer both teachers and learners meaningful alternatives to the unthinking embrace of newness or the complacent retreat into the habitual. The transformational classroom, with its creative and dynamic engagement between students and teachers gives us, a reason for hope and even inspiration in an otherwise confusing and uncertain time.
This podcast is a forum for exploring that transformational classroom, which we define as a classroom that dedicates itself to the intellectual, academic, and personal development of both students and teachers, a classroom which preserves the valuable insights of the past even as it explores the surprising discoveries of the future. The transformational classroom is much more than mere information transfer from teachers to students – it provides a context for knowledge and information, a context that fosters patience, clarity, questioning, and wisdom. Most importantly, it recognizes that the crucial foundation for learning in the best classrooms rests in the development of humane and meaningful relationships among teachers and learners. It is an organic model of wholeness that contrasts sharply with the industrial, mechanistic and reductive technological approaches that characterize too many of our classrooms.
Thus this podcast. We both have been enthusiastic podcast listeners for many years, but we are new to the realities of creating our own, and our learning curve has indeed been dramatic! It is our hope that we can participate through this podcast in the larger discourse of teaching and learning that is taking place today in our country.