Why Structured Renewable Assignments?

Many of the problems of teaching today are not problems of pedagogy, but problems of power. Sometimes, they are problems of power masquerading as problems of pedagogy. I’ve spent ten years of my career trying to help teachers get ready for semesters and quarters. Help solve problems as they arise. Most teachers did not have the time to prepare to teach well. They wanted to. Unfortunately, there’s little a teaching and learning workshop at University, a few days at a conference, or even a few years of teacher education can do to bolster educators against the rush of the quarter or semester, the ever-present demands of research, technology, administration, and the clock. Teachers aren’t given the power to prepare well.

There are many great teachers – but they often are great teachers in spite of, rather than because of, the ways we’ve organized teaching and learning. Learners are in a similar bind. Most learners want to learn in deep, open, explorative ways, and want to contribute. Usually, they are not given the opportunity, nor the choice. Faced with three mid-terms back to back, short-term learning makes sense. Students aren’t given the power to learn well.

There are many ways of working against this trend. There are many people working against it. I’m trying to help with this work by contributing to research in structured renewable pedagogy. Renewable pedagogy is already an encouraging development – teachers working together with learners to contribute to knowledge in the commons. However, I believe these efforts could be improved for two reasons. Unstructured contributions to the commons are so easily washed away in the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data we create every day. If every teacher and learner, at every school, made every single assignment open, it would still be a minor stream in that flood. And who would have time to look at or listen to it all? Teachers barely have time to give feedback as it is – and learners barely have time to read it, much less, absorb, and practice.

I’m hopeful about structured renewable assignments because they have the potential to create ally relationships between teachers and students, both of whom are trying to save future learners money and frustration by creating useful knowledge – and organizing that knowledge so that it can keep being useful. While doing this, structured renewability empowers learners with better feedback, from teachers and peers. I’m hopeful that structured renewable learning can be one way in which teachers and learners take power, and create ongoing cycles of positive preparation. I’m idealistic enough to hope that these practices will go beyond the ivory tower’s power, and create practices for the construction and sharing of knowledge in communities, businesses, and lives. I believe that being a contributor to knowledge draws us into relationships with knowledge that help us be careful with it. But perhaps that’s for another day.

For now, I want to acknowledge, with my whole heart, that parts of this work are the gifts of indigenous scholars, like Megan Bang and Robin Wall Kimmerer, white scholars, like Michael Foucalt, Robert Caro, Robin DeRosa, scholars who are the descendants of enslaved people, like Langston Hughes and Angela Davis, scholars with recent immigration backgrounds, like Rajiv Jhangiani and Sanjay Sarma; and many others with and without academic credentials who have thought and worked on learning, equity, and power.

With all that in mind, this book’s objectives are next. ->