Facilitators Fostering Half-Baked Knowledge: World Building in a Graduate-Level Course

• In Event: Integrating Life-Informed Complexity for Practical Professional and Higher Education

Abstract

1. Objective and Purpose
This session shares the journey of a teaching team that facilitated an experimental graduate course targeted for the adult educators and human resource professionals. The course utilized worldbuilding, an adaptable system-modeling technique borrowed from architectural design studios and fictional world creation for film or television. It promotes the design of the system responsive to the interwoven tapestry of complex problems. World building translates a series of “what-if’s” speculation into the detailed design of the “as-if” future world. We introduced the technique to non-traditional learners in a graduate-level course, which aimed to inspire innovative solution-seeking to systemic problems. The session explores the facilitators’ experiences of experimenting with new pedagogical intervention in a graduate-level course, and realigning students’ expectations, discomfort and achievement through scaffolding.
2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The facilitators’ journey of introducing worldbuilding is explored through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) minor pedagogy, which advocates for representational expression, also known as minor language, and embraces resistance against normative paradigm. Minor language is a deliberate practice that resists the majoritarian logic in aim to affirm the agency of language-users within the condition of power. Being minor is a resistant move for “potential (puissance), creative and in becoming” (Conley, 2010, p. 167), as language, is a means of action that is also “shaped by structures of power” (Bogue, 2003, p. 100), deriving from one’s political choice. We viewed our facilitation as an embodiment of minor pedagogy as we introduced world building into the learning environment that has privileged “instrumental problem solving” (Pendleton-Jullian & Brown, 2018a, p. 71) in support of the pedagogy for certainty. We resisted this standard, normative paradigm by promoting the use of half-baked knowledge generated through the world building protocol.
3. Modes of Inquiry
Our experience of facilitating world building in a graduate-level course is narrated with autoethnography, a research method that highlights power dynamics, system interlocks, and relational dynamics in personal experiences (Adams et al., 2022; Boylorn & Orbe, 2020). We used Tillmann et al. (2022) dialogue protocol that incorporates autoethnographic description, collective reflection, generalization and reimagination.
4. Data sources
Following the protocol, individual vignettes were generated by the facilitators to describe the experiences in joining the teaching team and conducting the course. The collective reflection involved in-person discussion, exchanging views on each vignette, and identifying common themes. The discussion focused on meaning-making of the experience, abstract conceptualization of the meaning-making and reimagination of the doctoral education for professionals.
5. Results
The overarching theme was the sensed dilemma of acculturation and decolonization, reflecting the tension between conforming to the academic system and challenging it. The facilitators recognized and empathized with the non-traditional students’ stressing condition with a multitude of conflicting life commitments.
6. Scientific significance
The ethical reflection on promoting different ways of knowing to non-traditional students in a graduate-level course holds practical implications for decolonizing doctoral education. Providing supportive scaffoldings and creating a condition for a compassionate disruption can pave the way for transformative experiences in graduate education.

Authors

• Neal Herr, University of Georgia

• Trisha Barefield, Kansas State University

• Aliki Nicolaides, University of Georgia