on the performativity of teaching

8 November 2024 - kudos:

Before writing what I want to write, I want to make a few things clear. Teaching is an important and noble profession, I love being a teacher, and it’s possible (and often easy) to distinguish between better and worse ways of teaching. With that out of the way, I want to start off this post by arguing that teaching is less of “a thing” than learning is. That is, learning is the real phenomenon here, and teaching is sort of an auxiliary practice that aims to support learning but can’t ever quite be the same thing.

on Scrabble, French, and what it means to learn

19 January 2024 - kudos:

In the summer of 2015, New Zealander Nigel Richards won the French-language world Scrabble championships despite not speaking a word of French. I heard this story on a Radio Télévision Suisse news show repackaged as a podcast (probably Le 12h30, but I can’t remember exactly) and wrote myself a note that if I ever got a chance to teach a class on games and learning, I would use this story in it.

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Are education and learning engineering problems? – George Veletsianos, PhD'

8 January 2024 - kudos:

I’m grateful for George’s comments here. link to “Are education and learning engineering problems? – George Veletsianos, PhD”

14 October 2023 - kudos:

I’m becoming more and more skeptical of “improve teaching and learning” as a motivation for education (and especially edtech) research—it’s a noble goal, but it distracts us from so many other important questions.