By: Samah Sabra
Often, when I speak with contract instructors, instructors and faculty, they express surprise when I tell them they are innovative. With last week’s annual Canadian Network for Innovation in Education conference being hosted at Carleton, I had a lot of time to think about how we define innovation in education. CNIE is a national organization which, in its mission statement, is defined as “the voice for Canada’s distance and open education communities.” The CNIE website has quite a bit on educational technology, framed as a way of ensuring justice, inclusivity and accessibility. New technologies can, and I would say, most certainly should be used to achieve these goals. Innovation in education, however, is not only about using the latest technologies. I think it is the conflation of innovation and new technology that leaves so many educators I speak with, with a sense that they have nothing innovative in their pedagogical toolkits or that they are not creative in their teaching.
Over the last few years that I have been a graduate student, contract instructor and educational developer at Carleton, I have spoken to Legal Studies professors who teach through literature, a Canadian Studies professor who asked students to research key players in political debates and participate in classroom discussions as that person, and professors across several departments who give students the option of submitting non-traditional expressions of their academic arguments. These professors certainly take risks with their students, but rather than fearing failure, they embrace the learning opportunities for themselves and students that come with taking such risks. These professors are creative, they are innovative and they give their students the opportunity to surprise them through their own creativity. Most importantly, these professors and their students are creative and innovative in ways that do not rely on the use of new technologies.
This is not to say, of course, that new technologies do not offer avenues for innovative teaching. They do. One professor this year gave her students the task of using such technologies to communicate ideas from their various disciplines to one another and the results were amazing! Yet, even at the CNIE conference, there were papers about applying “old practices in non-traditional ways,” ways of using practices like peer instruction – long associated with clickers – without technology, and the use of comic strips in medical education. Being innovative, in other words, is not simply about using digital technologies to communicate with students or to have them communicate with one another. Being innovative is about taking risks by bringing things together that may not have previously been associated with one another in education: comic books and medicine, literature and law, painting and social science. In each of these cases, what emerges as we hear instructors speak about their classes is a sense that using a different medium of expression often offers us new perspectives on the world around us.
When new perspectives become available to us and the students in our classes, the learning environment is enriched by a deeper engagement with the material being taught. What is old becomes new again, it becomes exciting, there are new avenues to explore, new insights to share. Innovation is not just about new technologies. It is, instead, about developing new standpoints, intellectual invigoration and collaborative discovery. It is something we all do in our own ways. It is time we began to recognize and celebrate this.