5.3 - 5) Encourage Students to Lead

The next pedagogical principle we're focusing on is-- again, it goes back to that root meaning of pedagogy:
5) Encourage Students to Lead.

Our textbook for this class is probably the best example of that. My graduate students in the Digital Literacies class said they didn't want to write research papers; they didn't want to write term papers that would just be read by me. They wanted to have more good in the world. So what we decided on collectively is that, instead of term papers and research papers and blogs, they would actually write a handbook on how to encourage student leadership in a class. It's a peer-to-peer handbook-- it's the handbook we're using in this class-- Field notes to 21st Century Literacies, modestly talking through the very detailed minutia of how you make a student-led classroom; how you turn a conventional classroom-- even a graduate class-- to something where students choose the syllabus, students lead the research, students contribute the research, and collaboratively in this case make a textbook that now can be used by all of us in this MOOC.

The second example-- and this is the homework assignment for this week-- is a class that I taught with my dear colleague behavioral psychologist behavioral economist Dan Arielle called "Surprise Endings Literature and Social Science". In this, we talked about the different methods that social scientists and, writers use to think about human nature. We came up with 7 topics, we came up with a syllabus, and then we invited students to come up with their own syllabus.

We're giving you the URL to the website for DukeSurprise, and you will see the way that website allows you to find very, very interesting information about 7 topics: self-control, racism and political correctness, gender and success, relativity and defaults, and other very, very important topics for social science. What you'll find on the website is not what Dan and I planned for the class, but the way students in project teams of 4 remixed all the material. They interviewed me and they came up with interview questions, interviewed me and Dan, edited the
interviews, and uploaded those to the website. But they also came up with completely discrete mini-courses on the topic. So there's a wealth of information that they came up on each of those 7 topics, and we put that into a new website, which is basically a student-led website.

On your assignments this week, you'll find several different ways and several different assignments about this remix of a professor-led course-- the old idea of pedagogy-- into a student-led course, a new version of child leadership, or pedagogy writ new.