Jennifer Terrell

Teaching Experience

Teaching Statement

On October 1st, 2010, I received an email from a friend who was sending me an article written for FOX news he felt I needed to read.  He stated that this article was “most stirring” to him and he wanted my feedback. The article, by Dr. Keith Ablow, published September 30th, was about the role of technology in the recent death of Tyler Clementi. Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers University, committed suicide on September 22nd, after finding out that his roommate had been recording and broadcasting Tyler and another man’s sexual encounters in the privacy of his dorm room. The article states, “This "stunt" isn’t just a college prank gone bad. It is evidence of the dehumanizing effects that technology is having on young people.” The article continues to place blame entirely on the technology the students used, completely ignoring any social and cultural factors that might have led to this unfortunate incident. This article was most stirring to me as well, but for a different reason than it was for my friend. The article is a clear example of technological determinism – that is, the mindset that technology is an autonomous force that impacts society, forcing society to adapt to all technological change. The kind of rampant technological determinism shown by Dr. Ablow in this article is precisely the kind of dangerous thinking I want my students to be able to recognize and argue against.

Social informatics, which I loosely define as the interdisciplinary study of the relationship between society and technology, is important because how we think about and discuss the relationship between society and technology has significant implications for the design, use and implementations of technology within the world around us. When teaching undergraduate students an introductory social informatics course, my main course goal is for the students to leave my classroom with the understanding that social aspects of computing matter. To this end, a very close secondary goal is to get students to think critically about the technological determinism they see every day in popular culture and even within some academic discourse.

This article has proven to be very useful both in demonstrating that technological determinism is active within the media my students consume and in setting a foundation for analyzing how this kind of thinking can lead to real consequences that may be detrimental to society. I gave this article to my students and had them highlight the technologically deterministic statements. As active users of the technologies involved in the case, none of the students agreed with Dr. Ablow’s perspective. We then brainstormed other, social factors such as students’ fear of those that are different and social patterns of bullying in school, which may have actually played a more significant part of this situation than the role of technology. The students then discussed how blaming technology ignores other, very real factors in the situation and thus when changes to policies or legislation is considered, appropriate fixes may not be put into place because the problem has been identified incorrectly.

An exercise such as this one, where we can analyze an artifact that is currently relevant to these students’ lives is extremely helpful in getting them to understand how theory relates to real world situations. It is also critical to help them understand the value of social informatics. One of the primary challenges I face as an instructor for a social informatics class, is that I primarily teach informatics majors. It might seem that this would not be problematic at all, except that students who are informatics majors expect to learn technological skills such as programming, 3D modeling, or computer animation. They do not expect, or initially appreciate, learning about human beings. They do not tend to understand the significance of the social dimensions of computing. I often would hear in regard to my assignments, “so… basically we’re not doing informatics at all then.” It is a challenge then, to get the students to engage the social side of computing.

One of the ways I am able to meet this challenge is through discussion and interaction. Thus far, in my career as an associate instructor, I have been responsible for discussion classes. I work under the supervision of the instructor on record, usually a faculty member of the school. The faculty teaches a lecture section which typically has approximately 75 students enrolled; each lecture meets twice a week and is then split into three discussion sections of approximately 25 students each that meet once a week. This is the time when I have my 25 students to myself and can structure my lessons as I wish. Here I make class as interactive as possible. I try to get the students up and moving around the classroom and speaking with other students.

For example, this semester in order to prepare for their final topic, a debate between teams of students, I designed an activity to take advantage of the fact that our class was held in a computer lab rather than a standard class room. This meant the students were seated in office chairs that rolled along the tiled floor. Our activity was “Debate Chair Racing.” The students were split into teams, each team gathering on opposite sides of the room. We set two chairs along the center aisle of the room, which was lined with computer stations, where the students normally sat. The students who were racers, one representing each team, were allowed to move their chairs forward one computer station for each point their team scored. The first chair racer to the end of the aisle was the winner. The team scored points by coming up with counter arguments to claims related to their debate that I read aloud. An unexpected outcome of this activity was that some students who had not been particularly talkative all semester became quite involved with this game; it allowed a new voice to be heard. These activities breathe life into the topics we’re discussing and help the students understand why this field is relevant to their careers after they graduate.

After teaching the discussion section of this particular course for four semesters, I feel confident and comfortable leading students in a group of 25. I am able to run an engaging, energetic discussion meeting.  Next year, I am hopeful to gain experience as instructor on record. I would like to be able to lead the larger lecture section. I am curious to tackle the challenge of how to make a class energetic and interactive in a lecture setting when there are so many students that the methods I employ in discussion meetings may not be possible. I also welcome the challenge of more responsibility in course design. Though I have to work within some bounds of what the introductory course to social informatics must cover, I welcome the chance to move assignments and topics around the syllabus.

The classroom atmosphere I would like to achieve with my students is one of freedom and partnership – where students are expected to actively engage to learn, where they are as responsible for learning as I am for teaching. I do not view them as empty vessels to be filled with the knowledge I deposit and I do not treat them as such. During my first year of teaching, students often stated on reviews that I appeared unprepared and completely unstructured. Students tend to crave structure where they are presented with neatly defined problems that have unambiguous right and wrong answers. As the field of social informatics does not deal with such problems, I am unable to provide the students with this kind of learning environment. This is one of biggest challenges my students face.

I want to share my passion, not create social informatician clones. In trying to create this type of class, the freedom and element of choice I give my students can come across as unstructured uncertainty. As I continue to grow as a teacher, my main goal is have my students understand that this type of education experience is not lacking in structure and preparation, but rather is the way that we achieve a classroom rooted in respect, freedom and passion.