Ryan Button Email & Phone Number

Ownership, Creating a Shared Experience and “the Life Long Learner”A brief philosophy of pedagogy by Ryan L. Button, Instructor at Kansas State UniversityIt is the common approach for an instructor to say that understanding concepts and critical evaluation are key elements in the classroom; this is the most usual form of learning assessment for courses. While I share this perspective, my philosophy of teaching manifests me into a facilitator with the creation of an environment in which students partake in ownership within the classroom through the creation of a shared experience. All too often in disciplines, sociology in particular, I have witnessed instructors use personal experiences to relay concepts to students. The use of individual level experiences can pose problems, as the containment of concepts to the individual level removes all other relevancy from their connectedness to other individuals, thus limiting the material by taking away objectivity the student needs to critically connect to the lesson and application of concepts to the life world. The teacher-student relationship is a reflexive process. To be an effective facilitator is not just about talking at my classroom, it is about listening to my students so that I can understand how they are thinking and learning. I must be engaged in a reciprocal learning relationship with my students and not merely standing before them and talking at them, which will indeed convey the information, but it will never instill within them a sense of ownership in the discipline, and will never help me to grow as an instructor.

Listed skills include Spss, Statistics, Sas Programming, Data Analysis, and 11 others.