Lately I’ve heard from numerous professors who want to teach differently, but who feel stuck because of the bureaucracy of higher education and lack of support. In my experience, the closer one’s role is to the student experience in college the more one knows how broken our higher education system is. Many professors feel compelled to do things differently, but don’t know where to begin. I wrote this article to share a bit about my personal journey as a professor and provide ideas and examples of how others can also do things differently. If you have tried things that work or if you have questions, please share in the comments section.
Final class session of the Passion Based Leadership class I taught during my final year as a professor at Concordia University. At the students’ request, we had a potluck at a friend’s floating home on the river.
When I founded a college - Wayfinding Academy - six years ago, I did so because I wanted to revolutionize the higher education system. I wanted whole-human, community-based learning to be at the center of the college experience and to give students the opportunity to learn in the ways that work best for them. Before I had the opportunity to create Wayfinding Academy and pursue this dream of bettering the way we do college, I spent 15 years as a professor, gradually trying to revolutionize higher education from the inside.
But let’s back up a bit...I first fell in love with the idea of teaching during an Organizational Behavior class I took during my junior year in college with professor Don Van Eynde. Up until that point, I had gone from a traditional high school to a typical college setting and had grown accustomed to a certain style of teaching. It usually consisted of stuffy, neck tie, intellectual types who stuck closely to the classic pupil-teacher relationship: holding students at arms length while they focused heavily on lecturing and furthering their academic careers. This is not to say many of them weren’t excellent teachers, just that they weren’t very interested in fostering relationships beyond the confines of the classroom. Dr. Van Eynde’s class was different. He was interested in fostering community with the students and facilitating thought-provoking conversations. He didn’t pretend to know everything and cared just as much about giving respect in the classroom as getting it. He seemed genuinely interested in getting to know the students as whole people. He would invite us to holiday parties with his family and wasn’t afraid to open up to us and use his life as an example in lessons. Sometimes he even brought his grandkids to class and they did art while we did class activities. Needless to say, I was inspired by him and even changed my major (well, added a second one since I was already in my junior year) so I could take more classes from him. He is the first person who got me thinking that maybe I, too, wanted to be a college professor.
Me receiving my hood from my Ph.D. advisor, Jean Lipman-Blumen, at my graduate school graduation ceremony.
When I graduated from college, I had two options in hand - a job offer from a consulting firm in Houston, Texas and an acceptance letter from a Ph.D. program in southern California - I did what anyone who wants to be a college professor does and I went straight into graduate school. The first day of the program, the department head told us “Half of you will not finish this program, and those of you who think you want to be professors will go into consulting, and those of you who want to go into consulting will end up as professors.” Being who I am, I wondered why he would tell us that we were wrong and (half) likely to fail from the start and I wanted to test his theory. I tried all the different consulting industry jobs I could during my first two years of graduate school - a research consultant, an external consultant, and I even moved to San Francisco for a summer internship with a large corporation as an internal consultant. It was totally worth it, but none of them felt right to me and I couldn’t envision this as my path. The one thing I had left to try was teaching.
The month after I turned twenty-four, I got my first professor gig and I was terrible at it. I was hired as an adjunct to teach a night class called Principles of Supervision at Rancho Cucamonga Community College. The class consisted of people predominantly in their 40’s and 50’s who worked in factory settings and were taking the class as a requirement for a promotion to supervisor. I was young with no real life experience, and I was scared out of my wits. I decided to take a page out of Dr. Van Eynde’s book and not go into the class pretending to know everything and be completely human. I started the class off with a confession and a proposal. I told them I wasn’t going to pretend to know anything about the real world day to day of their lives and jobs and all I could provide was what I knew from the books and theories. I proposed that we worked together with me providing the information and them providing the real scenarios from their decades of lived experience. I would love to tell you that the class was 100% perfect after that and we had some real Dead Poets Society moments, but we didn’t. I achieved fostering mutual respect and trust in the classroom, but it was still my first time teaching and it was awkward - I was awkward. What I took away was that the whole-human aspect is real and important and needed to be part of every class I taught.
During my four years in graduate school studying organizational psychology and leadership I was immersed in the idea that people are complicated and when we work with people they show up with many different histories. Your role when you're working with people is to respect and honor that history and use it to shape the learning process. A large part of that meant taking unilateral teaching out of the classroom and providing a flexible, collaborative space where students could develop self-directed skills. When I was adjuncting in my first few years of teaching, this philosophy was always in the back of my mind, but I didn’t have the freedom or experience to integrate it into my classroom, aside from my general collaborative approach. I still gave grades and had textbooks and all that. It wasn’t until I got a more permanent teaching position and got the chance to observe other professors that I integrated my philosophy in a tangible way. The first big change I made was to eliminate textbooks from my class and replace them with videos, articles, and mass-market affordable books. If I needed an excerpt from a textbook for some reason, I just scanned those few pages and handed them out. Textbooks are way too expensive and half the students wouldn’t or couldn’t buy them.
A little later, I changed all my lectures into hands-on activity-based learning. One of my (and my students’) favorites was an activity where after they took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test, I asked them to split up into two groups - sensing types in one and intuitive types in the other - and I gave each group an object with instructions to write down everything that comes to mind as they describe the object. Then we would all come back together and compare the differences in their descriptions. The MBTI is faulty and goes against my “you can’t put people in a box” value system, but the lesson was meant to show that people all see the world differently, process information differently, and we need to understand and respect that in all situations.
Eventually, I eliminated tests and quizzes and made all the homework and projects open-ended and personalized. So if we were learning about personality, for example, I would tell them to do a project in any way they wanted, apply it to their lives, and demonstrate to me that they understood the concepts. The projects that would come back were incredibly moving. I had one student who was trying to decide whether to break up with her boyfriend, so she created a project about their personality compatibility that was both brilliantly thoughtful and hilarious. The idea to invite students to bring all elements of their personal lives into the classroom was inspired by reading Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution by Derrick Jensen in which he describes his approach to teaching creative writing courses both in colleges and prisons and the power and joy that comes from inviting his students to show up as whole humans in the stories they write.
Me with a student and friend, Katarina, at her graduation from Concordia University during my final year as a professor.
Through my classroom transformations my biggest challenges weren’t the administration or registrar (they didn’t pay much attention to what went on in my classroom), but my fellow colleagues and the students themselves. When I told students I was eliminating grading from the course and I would allow them to assess their own progress in my course, half of the reactions were “Can you do that? Is that allowed?” The students were just as concerned with holding up the restrictive bias conditions of grading as the professors were. Student comments would often give way to thought-provoking conversations in which I would use excerpts from Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz to discuss what grades actually mean and how they play into identity politics. I offered the students the opportunity to grade themselves with the contingency they write a reflection explaining how they chose the grade. Some chose to set goals for themselves related to standard things like attendance, completion of assignments, participation, the “usual.” Others were more creative in their grading. For example, Jordan, rolled dice to prove the point that grades are ultimately random and ended up giving himself what the dice showed...a B-. Another student, Colin, gave himself a C because he had always been a straight-A student and was on a journey of deep personal exploration having to do with being the “golden child” and wanted to prove to himself that grades don’t define him. Some of my students even lobbied the registrar to let them have a Q because they wanted something on their transcript to represent their belief that asking good questions (Qs) is more important than having specific answers (As). Ultimately the class discussions we had about grading were more important than the grades themselves.
The backlash from my colleges wasn’t because they disagreed with me or my tactics, usually, but because I was making their lives more difficult. After being in my class, students would ask other professors why they couldn’t eliminate grades and tests from their classes too. Luckly, I had a good relationship with my department head and nothing ever came of the few complaints I ever received from other professors, but it was interesting to observe where the resistance came from.
When I was hired for what was to be my final teaching position (although I did not know that at the time) at Concordia University, I was hired with full understanding on both sides that I was an experimental teacher and my teaching style would be appreciated and accepted, which it was. During these final years as a professor I continued to try to push against the status quo. I took one of my classes skydiving, went zip lining with another class, and even hired a friend to create a more engaging visual sketchnote version of my leadership course syllabus.
In the end, the feeling kept growing within me that all of these things - eliminating textbooks, grades, and lectures and restructuring courses to invite students to show up as whole humans but within the context of traditional college - were treating the symptom and not the problem, and I needed to do more.
I created Wayfinding Academy because students deserve to be treated as whole human beings. Many educational spaces require the students to leave their personal lives at the door and enter the classroom as a clean slate as an individual competing with the other students. This takes away so many vital parts of the incredible process of true learning. I have learned a lot from my 15 years and tens of thousands of hours as an educator. I have consistently found that when students are able to connect their work to their life story and share these contextual ideas and passions with a trusted community, their learning becomes much more transformative. To acknowledge each student as a person with good days and bad days, with hopes and dreams, with niche talents and fears, is to empower them. And to bring these empowered students together to collectively process in a space that they feel secure and heard is to foster community bonds that create unbelievable opportunities.
If you are a professor who is asking questions about their role in the higher education industrial complex and who wants to get out or wants to stay in, but do things differently, know that you are not alone and there are big and small things you can do that make a big difference. There are colleges out there that champion alternative styles of teaching, if you want to be in an environment like this rather than be a revolutionary within a traditional setting, you do have that option. For a starting place to look for possible colleges like that, check out this list by the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) of colleges and universities.
If you need any assistance, guidance, or want to share any resources you have, please do so. We all need to be resources and advocates for each other in order to bring this revolution to the forefront of the higher education system.
If you would like to learn more about Wayfinding Academy and the fight to revolutionize higher education please visit wayfindingacademy.org
If you would like to learn more about me or my thoughts on alternative higher education check me out on my social media pages:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MichelleDJones8
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelledjones1/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michelle_d_jones
