Minimizing the Familiar and Maximizing the Diverse: Emergent Pedagogy and Self-Differentiation in a Post-Covid World

Abstract

COVID-19's global sweep disrupted educational conversations, institutional plans, teaching models, and learning competencies. After mid-March 2020, teaching and learning moved online, forcing faculty, despite experience and pedagogical philosophy, to engage with technology. Content was also reduced, unintentionally reflecting the pedagogical framework of Backward Design (Wiggin & McTighe, 1998). The compressed, online semester consisted of essential content only and placed faculty and learners into an involuntary, innovative circumstance that minimized the familiar and maximized the diverse. While this forced pedagogy was responsive to a global crisis, it also raised awareness of learners' social and economic contexts, industrials' skill needs, society's obligations to communal safety, and technologies ability to innovate learning in a way that might democratize learning. Part one of this article provides an introduction to minimizing the familiar and maximizing the diverse in teaching and learning by providing a behind-the-scenes view that uncovers learning as accessible to and transferable by all learners. Part two invites readers to set aside their familiar expectations of academic articles and embrace the spirit of creativity, innovation and fun by participating in two, brief activities. Part three provides an analysis of the "culinary event" presented in part two. This metaphorical activity reflects the various challenges in curriculum design, minimizing the familiar, maximizing the diverse, and differentiated learning experiences. Rather than viewing learner diversity as a hindrance or an impossible challenge, educators need to provide learners with transferable concepts, tools and strategies for self-guided differentiation making them independent designers of their own future.