Critical Pedagogy and Online Learning: Reflections on My Facilitation

This week I got to facilitate on Critical Pedagogy and Online Learning.  I'm quite familiar with critical pedagogy, but I'm still trying to learn more about online learning in general. So I figured I would combine something I knew pretty well with something I don't and see what happens.  

Doing this presentation really made me think of the benefits and problems online learning could introduce.  Something I didn't get a chance to mention was the fact that there are still people who do not have access to computers.  This can be problematic for those who are in classes where the instructor requires them to do certain assignments online or are required to take an online class in order to complete their degree.  While more and more people own computers and most libraries allow free public access to computer labs, this is not the case everywhere.  So, as Holt (1998) pointed out, that there are economic and structural factors that we need to consider.  People who adhere to critical pedagogy do not want to see lower-income folks left in the dark (even more so than right now).  However, this is not to say that we should just do away with online learning, but we need more funding for public libraries for computer labs and so that they can update the technology/software for these computers.  

I think overall, the facilitation went okay.  However, I think that my topic was difficult to cover in 15 - 20 minutes (I'm taking into consideration that the activity was 10 - 15 minutes long).  However (yes, there is a 'however' to my other 'however'), I think that everyone should be introduced to critical pedagogy and that was really my main goal.  If I were to do this again though I would have done more research on andragogy.  Perhaps critical pedagogy scholars should consider 'critical andragogy' instead, since most of what I've read has discussed college students and critical pedagogy.  Obviously college students are adult learners.  Something else I could have worked on was asking the students questions during my presentation, but this was difficult to do because there was a lot of material I wanted to cover before moving into my activity.  I will say that I think I did a good job of presenting on something new and different, something that not everyone has heard/read about.  

I look forward to the rest of the presentations this semester.  I've learned a lot so far.  I already have some ideas of how to 'spice up' my public speaking class the next time I teach it and other classes that I might get a chance to teach later on  (for instance, Small Group Theory).