August, 1999

Teaching and learning occurs in complex ecosystems, dynamic environments where teachers, students, materials and supplies, concepts, social structures, and architectures are interdependently related and interactive. With our support and through their experiences in healthy university ecosystems, students make important transitions from K-12 environments that are rigidly structured, other-determined, rule-governed, and tightly sequenced, toward professional lives in environments that are increasingly unstructured, self-determined, independently governed, and networked rather than sequenced. Increasingly, professions are making it clear that they need graduates who are not merely vessels of academic knowledge, but active learners with imagination, flexibility, initiative, critical thinking skills, and independence. Students graduating today are not only expected to be well prepared to enter their professions, but also well prepared to continue learning and developing throughout their careers.

We have an important job: we are charged with developing in young people the knowledge, practices, and habits of mind that enable them to build lives rich with meaningful action, intellectual engagement, compassion, public responsibility, and ongoing learning for their full life span. We are also charged with an even more complex and challenging job: to contribute to the culture through advancing knowledge and understanding and through demonstrating intellectual leadership. I am not convinced we are doing as well as we could; as a teacher, however, these are my goals. Through study, experience, and reflection, I have continued to develop my understanding of how teaching and learning ecologies function, and the methods and practices that support students' healthy intellectual development. Some key theorists have deepened this understanding: Etienne Wenger's work on communities of practice, Vygotsky's work with development and the zone of proximal development, Mary Barr and Myra Barr's work on documenting student achievement and performance in complex environments, Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards, Grant Wiggins' work on teaching for six kinds of understanding, Edwin Hutchins' work on distributed cognition and cognitive ecologies.

To be effective, we need to set educational goals that are appropriate for the student, the subject of study, and the expectations of the university and the larger culture. Goals should be reasonable, and students' progress toward them should be measurable. Values and ideals are not goals; neither are fixed "outcomes". In my view, teachers need to consider carefully the course of development by which students move from dependency to independence, from structured activity to more open activity, from rigid production to flexible and imaginative creation. Our goals for a particular class should describe a trajectory of learning across multiple dimensions, and our measurements should be able to identify the paths taken by students and their progress from their individual starting points along that trajectory. I am particularly interested in students' development of their abilities to compose, collaborate, and communicate effectively in technologically-enhanced environments. In my classes, I am concerned with development across five dimensions of learning: confidence and independence, knowledge and understanding, skills and strategies, the ability to use prior and emerging experience in new situations, and reflectiveness, the ability to think deeply and critically.

Good teaching practice coordinates students' inherent drive for self-determination, our specific academic goals, engaging activities, and evidence that represents student achievement and performance. Careful scaffolding is the key. My practice is to create an environment that is highly collaborative, project-based, resource-rich, challenging, and equitable. I've tried to accomplish this through creating innovative courses such as Virtual Worlds, Information Architecture, and Knowledge Ecologies. Ongoing assessment of performance and achievement is built into my course environment through the use of the Online Learning Record (www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/olr). This large-scale project has been funded by DARPA, UT's ITAL, and the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). I've challenged students to imagine alternative futures and to develop a deeper understanding of technological changes and their impact on language and culture through the Worlds Fair project (www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/worldsfair). I've designed classes to provide students with more experience working independently and interactively; some students find this difficult and even exasperating, while others find it energizing. I believe it is essential.

We improve undergraduate education not only through the courses we teach directly, but also through our influence on faculty and future faculty. I've also been involved in supporting and teaching undergraduate instructors through my work with the Online Learning Record and my role as director of the Computer Writing and Research Lab, as well as through my graduate course for future college faculty, Coursebuilding for the Electronic Classroom. The Online Learning Record, through its availability on the web, is used by a wide range of teachers at many different institutions. I support this work through a program of workshops, email support, web-based information, examples, and shared moderation readings.

I believe that the liberal arts are the heart and soul of a great university. The work we do is central to the development of fully realized human beings. It depends on the relationships we construct with and between students, the give and take of dialogue, the challenging of assumptions (our own and our students'), and the engagement of students in the practices and habits of mind of our disciplines. We are not merely injecting them with "knowledge," we are fundamentally changing their ways of being in the world, shaping individually their understanding, their skills, their abilities to apply their experiences, their abilities to reflect critically and compassionately, and most importantly, their abilities to continue to learn throughout their lives. I can't imagine more challenging, creative, satisfying, and important work.