Ky Merkley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Queer pedagogy, as a model of education, strives to deconstruct the normative student/teacher relationship in order to bypass the epistemological limits caused by the disparate power structures inherent in traditional teaching models (See Pinar 1998; Rico 2002). In a post-pandemic teaching environment, where student engagement has been a well-noted challenge, queer pedagogy presents one potential solution to issues of student engagement.
This talk will model how principles drawn from queer pedagogy and backward design can be used to create an alternative mode of syllabus creation, one where course objectives and grading models are generated in a collaborative model with student input on the first day of class. This talk will model such an approach based on my own repeated teaching of a Classical Civilization course entitled American Race and Ethnicity in the Classical Tradition. By adopting this model, my class has seen increased student engagement and a more equitable and collaborative student/teacher relationship.
The syllabus is often the first experience our students have with our classes. Yet, often syllabi are written first with the needs of the administration in mind, documenting instructional content for our administration and peers to align it with the department-determined outcomes for any given course. This means that many students rarely even read our syllabi. On the other hand by collaboratively generating the course syllabus, the syllabus becomes a document that directly contributes to student learning and establishes a classroom environment that encourages collaboration and student participation.
One additional benefit comes from this model: by generating a syllabus with student participation, it becomes much easier to demonstrate and apply the principles of backward design. While traditional curriculum starts with activities, works to assessments, and may not use extensive or clear stated objects, Backward design starts with clear, measurable, student-oriented course objects, designs assessments to measure those objectives, and finally creates activities to build the measured skills (Cho and Trent 2005; Wiggins & McTighe 2008).
The first day of class starts with an introduction to collaborative learning models such as Judith Pintar’s “A Student’s Bill of Rights” (2022) to establishes student expectations about the student/teacher relationship and learning overall. Then we discuss course objectives that run parallel to individual students own learning goals and generate summative assessments which clearly derive from those goals. Individual homework and formative assessments are then designed to build the skills necessary to meet course objectives.
Once the course framework has been generated, alternate grading models (such as student grading contracts, or additive grading) can be used to clearly establish expectations while also maintaining the flexibility necessary for accessible and universal learning. Collaborative processes like these decenter the teacher as the source of knowledge within the classroom and empower students in pursuing their own learning goals. In my experience, this is one of the greatest values of queer pedagogy. These students become powerful advocates for the value of what we teach because they understand the learning process from beginning to end and can better see their own personal growth and development.