Tech Pedagogy Oveview
Below you’ll find some of the central tenants of what Dr. Pagnucci has labeled Tech Pedagogy.
Focus on Your Main Teaching Goals
- Content should precede technology (see Teaching Writing with Computers, p. 22, where Dickie Selfe cautions, “Don’t let technologies themselves drive your pedagogy.”)
- Technology changes the nature of content
- Decenter the classroom
- Focus on activity-based learning
- Use writing to learn
- Facilitates the use of new types of writing/literacy activities (non-linear)
- Helps teaching keep pace with societal changes
Teach for All
- Vary your teaching methods to suit multiple learning styles
- Technology is useful for accommodating different learning styles (Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences)
- Celebrate students’ voices and honor those voices through publication which also holds up World English models for others to see
- Gather all the teaching tools you can
- Aims at today’s “digital natives” or, at least, U.S. society’s general interest in/worship of technology
Value Collaboration
- Enables collaboration/links students together/sharing of information
- Links isolated classrooms to the outside world
- Students sometimes will know more about technologies than you do, so they can be useful resources
Remember the Wisdom of Uncertainty (Milan Kundera)
- If you use technology to teach, you will encounter technical difficulties
- The newer the technology, the more likely you will encounter problems
- But, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs
- To learn how to teach with technologies, you have to try them
- You can’t be afraid of making mistakes; mistakes are a natural part of the learning process
- Always have a backup plan; flexible
- Making mistakes can be frustrating, so it’s useful to be patient and not aim for perfection//process orientation rather than a product orientation
- You don’t have to know everything there is about a technology to try it
- You learn technology by using it, not reading about it
- Make friends with the technology support people
- Using technology teaches patience
Preserve the Historical Record
- Creates lasting digital archives
- Makes student knowledge/texts part of the conversation
- And speaking of the historical record, Dr. Pagnucci first began calling this teaching approach Tech Pedagogy back in 2010!
