Introducing the Engaged Learning Collective
A group of educators and educational developers got together around the idea of publishing our writing, in community. This Substack is the result.
Welcome to our experiment in collaborative thinking and writing about higher education, particularly from the perspective of educational developers and their thought partners! In this first post, we lay out what you can expect, who we’re writing for, how to get involved, and how this experiment got its start.
We chose our name, the Engaged Learning Collective, because we have emphasized from the beginning the supportive, community-building commitments that undergird everything we hope to share with you here. This experiment gives each of us an opportunity to step outside of the day-to-day work of our roles, outside of our embeddedness in our institutions and contexts, and outside of the discourse of higher ed that often seems to exist without us. Those are big goals, but by creating a community committed to asking questions and seeking answers collaboratively (and kindly!), we hope we can bring a diversity of viewpoints to conversations about higher education and particularly about educational development.
What to expect from the Engaged Learning Collective
Perhaps most importantly, we hope that the ELC allows us to think about conversation as methodology in educational development.** We can trace this kind of thinking back to Annie Murphy Paul’s book, The Extended Mind, which has inspired many of us to think about this project as a manifestation of the kind of affordances discussed in that book. How can we use community wisdom (through mentoring, collaboration, and formative feedback on each other’s works) to increase our own thinking? We hope that the Engaged Learning Collective allows us to think about conversation as methodology in educational development. Tied up in these conversations is careful thinking about and examination of the role of authority in educational development … and the gatekeeping of whose voices matter in higher education more broadly.
Among the many genres we’ve considered, we’re hoping to share with our subscribers:
Educational developers sharing what they are working on
Thinking about emerging trends in higher education (and within educational development)
Resources we’ve developed and hope that others will adopt
Dialogues between two or more voices on a topic of interest
Book reviews, particularly ones that are somewhat under the radar for faculty/educational developers
Opinion pieces, such as conversations that aren’t happening (but should), an idea that changed how the author looked at something, or reframing an issue in a way that makes it more interesting/useful
At least two members of this group are also interested in developing a series they’re calling Potty-Mouth Pedagogy, which might be written pieces or might be a podcast, and would offer a more conversational approach to our work.
Who’s the audience?
Our thinking about our (potential) audience is connected to our discussions of why we came together initially. Namely, many of us spend a lot of time thinking about and reading others’ thoughts about the state of teaching and learning broadly, but the traditional places where those thoughts might be shared—such as the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed—have proven impenetrable for some of us. If acknowledged at all, pitches to these kinds of publishers often languish for weeks, rendering their writing less relevant or urgent. Multiple people who have engaged with this group have been frustrated by how cliquish the traditional, mainstream higher education news sources seem to be for newcomers.
By creating a place where writers could collaborate, get constructive and formative feedback, and publish as a collective, this group hopes to provide a new way of engaging with colleagues and others who are thinking about teaching and learning in different ways. In other words, how can we talk about our work, with each other, welcoming comments and feedback. Sarah Silverman’s newsletter, Beyond the Scope, is an excellent example. Just by looking at the number of podcasts in the higher education/teaching and learning space, it strikes us that many of our colleagues (and us!) yearn for connections with one another through conversations and discussions.
To that end, we are (mostly) educational developers writing to others working in higher education, including our fellow ed devs but also including instructors and others interested in education.
How to get involved
As excited as we are to have a dynamic and diverse team, we are eager to have others join us. Right now, we’re still finding our footing as a group and establishing norms, processes, etc. We’ll share more information within the next few months about how to let us know you want to join our ragtag group of renegades!
In the meantime, these are things you can do to get involved:
Subscribe to this Substack! Go ahead and hit subscribe. This is an entirely free publication, and we have no current plans to change that.
Share this with others. Let your colleagues and friends know that the Engaged Learning Collective is a thing and deserves a spot in their inbox. Social media boosting would be very kind of you.
Chime in with your comments below this post. We’d love to read your thoughts, advice, or topics you’d like someone to tackle.
Send us good vibes! We are excited … and … just a bit nervous. But mostly excited!
Conceptualizing intellectual work: Our stories
We embrace the idea of considering intellectual work as part of a career path—and, indeed, this collaboration will, at least in part, create space for dialogue that is part of that intellectual work. Importantly, by sharing that dialogue with others, we model care and equity, two values that are central to much of educational development.
For example, Adam has found writing a weekly newsletter for faculty has been a key creative outlet in a job that hasn’t afforded him many… but it’s also been a way for him to find a point of view and challenge himself to put it into short posts (300 - 400 words) with an idea, research, and… yes… maybe a practical suggestion (or two… or three).
As Anna S. and her coauthors wrote in their piece, “What (Is It) About Dialogue? We Make the SoTL Road by Walking”:
“What does the nature of orality, the willingness and desire to engage in live relational meaning-making, mean for us as SoTL practitioners? To what extent does it afford for more inclusive, permeable boundaries of what counts as scholarship, while at the same time also potentially excludes those who, for a variety of reasons, cannot participate in these exchanges as we have the privilege to do? What do you think, dear reader?” (see Santucci Leoni, Yeo, and Stalheim 2024, p. 80)
Adam says he has the good fortune to know colleagues with varying foci within the work of educational development. That might be scholarship; equity and inclusion; or, in his perspective of his own work, being a restless, questing philosophical pain in the petunia^^. Just as philosophy of science and history of science help us zoom out and see our work from a different perspective, discourse/history/philosophy of our work can help us get some distance from our assumptions.
Katie strongly relates to Adam’s drivers for joining this collaborative work, with the added twist of craving community support/guidance/input to bolster efforts to engage with this type of intellectual-work pursuit. As an individual whose job description in educational development does not include strong support for publishing, finding time (and let’s be honest, motivation) to engage with pursuing intellectual works that added her voice to large-scale conversations has felt daunting (and often highly discouraging). A light inside (that had been sputtering and struggling for a long time) reignited for Katie when she observed this community organically forming in pursuit of making change, taking space, and having voice… in new and exciting outlets that allow space for still-forming ideas and social-learning. Perhaps “zooming out”, as Adam describes, will give us new ways to make meaning together through a new creative/collaborative space and advocate for change through new avenues?
Similar to Katie, Anna D. has been wrestling with how overwhelming it can feel to contribute to larger conversations within teaching and learning, particularly through peer reviewed articles. As someone continually trying to overcome writing imposter syndrome, coming together with other educational developers to support one another in writing and engaging in collaborative writing was appealing. This is the kind of support and nudge that she, and several members of the group, expressed they needed to help get back into writing.
In addition, she’s trying to figure out ways that we can take our “mountains” of ideas and make them into “molehills.” How can we create something more manageable, something to be shared with others in higher education, and something that can be shared in a way that invites continued dialogue such as ideation, feedback, or application? (Incidentally, this is what we try to teach our students about writing, too!) The ability to co-construct this space is a welcome one as a way to explore different forms of sharing our work and ideas, even if they are in-progress or may not fit traditional scholarship outlets.
Collaborating with respected colleagues
Daphna puts it pretty bluntly when she says that she joined this team because she saw cool people she respects doing a thing, and she wanted in. She also appreciates the opportunity to write and publish in a way that is more tentative, provisional, searching, and collaborative. Daphna has been talking to instructors lately about facilitating participation in class discussions (we are always talking about this, it seems) and how some students think of something they want to say and participate in order to share it, while other students participate in order to find out what they think. Perhaps this effort of writing with a group and publishing as a community will allow us to throw out some ideas or questions and work with people to shape them into something.
Joey agrees with Daphna; he observes that there are a lot of cool people here whose work he respects—and he wants to contribute to that work. Part of his interest in joining is to explore themes he’s seeing in the existing outlets (Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, To Improve the Academy) and in podcasts he listens to regularly (Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning, Centering Centers, Tea for Teaching, etc.). He’s eager to use this platform to ask follow-up questions and draft responses to these themes in a context that allows for a bit more free-flowing ideation.
As an art historian, Joey also appreciates the opportunity to explore a new process of writing. Although the writing he does in his job offers relatively fewer opportunities for creative expression, Joey has enjoyed the more collaborative process of writing in that role. How can we bring that spirit into writing that is a bit more researched/composed?
Joey also hopes this effort will allow for sharing practical ideas or designs with a larger community to see if others can take them a step further. For instance, he drafted a Metacognitive Lab Report for a faculty member at his institution, but he’s not sure if any of the faculty there are actually using it. Perhaps by sharing it here, along with some framing text about why it was developed and what purpose it might serve, Joey hopes someone might take it and run with it. Getting feedback about how these drafts are used and how to improve them could help Joey further refine what he designed!
Other goals of the project
As John Warner likes to remind us, “writing IS thinking.” The opportunity to engage in peer mentorship and formative feedback/support around writing is a major goal of this project. The use of the word “collective” in our title is intentional; it communicates our desire to create a true writing community, where the norm is service to the community through generous exchange of feedback, ideas, and collaboration.
By doing so, we hope members of this group—and new members who may wish to join the group (more on this soon!)—will help one another engage in a more consistent writing practice and break through feelings of imposter phenomenon around our individual writing. For members like Chris who are new to these avenues of writing, having the chance to work through our ideas (to write as a thinking exercise) without the pressure of a traditional peer-reviewed publications structure feels like something relatively novel when done as a community. (None of us were especially excited to start our own individual Substacks, but together? Yes!)
As many of us are big fans of Priya Parker’s work, including her fantastic book The Art of Gathering, we also conceptualize this as a space for ideation around, for example, how we think about educational development programming.
How this started
At the Making Change, Taking Space virtual gathering in June 2024, the University of Mississippi’s Joshua Eyler facilitated a session called “Building a Career in Educational Development: A Backward Design Approach.” Through a series of reflection questions, educational developer attendees thought about where they hoped to see their careers go in the next five to ten years. With Josh’s permission to share, those prompts were:
In 5-10 years, what position do I want to have and in what kind of center?
In 5-10 years, what kinds of programs do I want to have led or to have had a role in leading?
In 5-10 years, what kinds of intellectual work do I want to have accomplished?
In 5-10 years, what kinds of change-making do I want to have participated in?
Josh then prompted us to consider which of the things we’d written down are those that matter the most to us, with the following follow-up questions:
What kinds of change-making am I ultimately interested in?
What skills will you want to build in order to make progress on your goals?
Will it be possible to move toward your goals at your current place of employment? If yes: What are the avenues? If no: what would be a better fit?
What are TWO STEPS you can take in the next academic year?
Meeting in the notes
For each session of that virtual conference, organizers provided a community Google doc/note-catcher document, into which attendees could opt to share their answers to the reflection questions and their two steps.
It was in that community document that Liz wrote: “Find a writing mentor (who’s writing regularly in popular venues like the Chronicle or IHE) to help me figure out how to pitch these places successfully.” Almost immediately, others started adding comments and reaction emoji to Liz’s goal. Others sent Liz direct messages in the Zoom room or later followed up with emails expressing an interest.
This nascent group began to talk about how we could work collaboratively to write, mentor, and publish pieces about higher education.
So here we are! We’re ready to get our thoughts and our work out there and can’t wait to engage with our readers in this conversation around higher education.
** That’s Adam’s phrase, by the way.
^^ A quote from Adam’s niece.
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