Honoring Expertise
The Student Learning Community
In July 2018, I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Student Learning Community, or SLC, as part of my MFA thesis research project. Developed by the Teaching for Effective Learning (TfEL) initiative (housed under South Australia’s Department for Education), the SLC is a professional learning community that includes both students and teachers. There are several SLC partnerships, each comprised of a network of schools. I collaborated with the Murraylands SLC, which is a unique partnership in that students and teachers explore arts-based teaching and learning methods as their pedagogical focus. I designed two days of professional learning for the Murraylands SLC July 2018 meeting, where we explored arts-based learning design and participatory action research. Students and teachers used drama-based strategies (“Drama-based Pedagogy” / “Creative Body-based Learning”) to research their experience with arts-based teaching and learning and the SLC in order to support their future SLC work and teaching and learning at their school more broadly.
A teacher’s 3D Model representing her experience of the SLC.
Students’ and teachers’ data analysis through Visual Mapping.
From this collaboration, I learned:
A student’s 3D Model.
-When you honor the expertise of everyone in the room, you always learn something. When I asked students and teachers to help me think through my research methods, they guided me in a new direction for gathering data.
-Honoring expertise supports confidence-building. A key finding from my research analysis was that by teaching their teachers in the SLC, students felt more confident in their capabilities as teachers and learners.
A teacher’s 3D Model.
-Honoring expertise can build more equitable teaching and learning environments. Evidence from teacher and student data suggested that in the SLC, teachers step back to let their students lead and that students feel that the SLC is a shared learning environment with teachers.