Dr. Maggie Melo recently published “Where’s the ‘Video Off’ Button in Face-to-Face Instruction?” on InsideHigherEd.com. This opinion piece highlights the benefits for students to turn off their computer cameras during remote instruction and questions how a similar effect could be implemented within in person learning. When teaching remotely, Dr. Melo observed ways that students benefited from being able to turn off their cameras and explore creatively by themselves, including being able to customize the environment they were working in.

“Having a virtual classroom with the ability to turn off our cameras offered a generative, unusual sweet spot for learning …. It’s an environment where students were supported but also weren’t being observed by their instructor or peers — one where we could take a collective exhale from the performative demands of the classroom with a simple click of the “stop video” button.”

View “Where’s the ‘Video Off’ Button in Face-to-Face Instruction?” on InsideHigherEd.com.

Dr. Maggie Melo’s chapter, “Pedagogical Violence and Language Dominance,” will be published in the forthcoming book, Hybrid Pedagogy: Pedagogy, People, Politics. The book will be released tomorrow, February 23, 2020.

Book Description

How can education survive in a post-truth era full of alternative facts and a reality-TV star armed with nuclear codes and a Twitter account? We must recognize that teaching is political. Schools need to help students counter the social erosion of trust in knowledge. Preserving that trust, we have seen, can help preserve democracy. Trust, like politics, involves people. In their classes, people learn to see themselves as members of communities and also to engage the world around them. Schools have a responsibility to support students as they learn. With the rise of anger-fueled nationalism around the world, it is clear that caring for others has never been so vital.

It is also clear that technology and capitalism will not solve education’s problems. Social media companies promise connection but create echo chambers and conspiracy-mongering. Ed-tech companies promise insights and solutions while delivering surveillance and suspicion. Education must connect the personal to the technological—it can no longer afford to work offline. All teaching is necessarily hybrid.

Pedagogy, people, and politics influence each other, and educators of all stripes have an opportunity—a responsibility—to build human connections with ethical technology.

Gathering the voices of over two dozen progressive educators, this volume combines perspectives from across academia and around the globe. The authors in this book use critical digital pedagogy as a guide for navigating today’s turbulent global political climate. Timely and accessible, Hybrid Teaching challenges higher education faculty and administrators to consider the political implications—and the political power—of teaching.

Read more on Hybrid Pedagogy’s website.

Dr. Melo presented her SILS Lightning talk on Friday, September 18, 2020.

Lightning talks by faculty members include individual brief (10 minutes or less) presentations on their research interests and projects.

View the full SILS Lightning Talks playlist on YouTube.

Re-making the Library Makerspace: Critical Theories, Reflections, and Practices

Editors: Maggie Melo and Jennifer Nichols

Expected: November 2020

From the Publisher:

The Maker Movement is a social phenomenon that has generated excitement around tech-centric making and learning throughout the world since the mid-2000s. Hailing from Silicon Valley, the Maker Movement has inspired hundreds of libraries across the US to integrate makerspaces into their own ecosystems to further support users’ learning and discovery. While the affordances of the Maker Movement have been highlighted extensively over the past decade, the limitations and drawbacks of this movement have been largely overshadowed. The Maker Movement has popularized a narrow, classist, predominantly white, and heteronormative conceptualization of maker culture. Makerspaces, like libraries, are not neutral, but rather are imbued with ideologies stemming from Silicon Valley that consequently dictate who makes, why making occurs, and what is considered making. This edited collection centers the limitations and challenges emerging from this particular brand of ‘maker culture,’ and emphasizes the critical work that is being done to cultivate anti-oppressive, inclusive and equitable making environments.

Many authors have focused on how to start a makerspace and/or the benefits of integrating one within a library. Alternatively, this edited collection captures how librarians and educators have disrupted and re-made their makerspaces in response to the constraints of the Maker Movement’s ‘makerspace.’ This collection offers readers a critical examination of library makerspaces at the site of praxis: theory, reflection, and action. Particularly, critical considerations around race, age, class, gender, sexuality, power, and ability will be centered in this volume. As such, the intended audience for this body of work are librarians, educators, administrators, and library professionals who work with(in) or are interested in library makerspaces.

View more and pre-buy online!