James Olsen
Georgetown University
Asst Director CNDLS & Adjunct
Experience, Reflection, and Action Online: Using Ignatian Pedagogy as a Social Justice Framework for Designing Online and Hybrid CoursesKim Huisman Lubreski, Assistant Director of Learning Design (Georgetown University)
Mindy McWilliams, Senior Associate Director for Assessment and Programs (Georgetown University)
James Olsen, Assistant Director, Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship, Adjunct Professor (Georgetown University)
Ignatian Pedagogy is a social justice-oriented approach to education that is grounded in local context, community, and relationships. In part because of this orientation and grounding, there exists a persistent skepticism concerning its applicability as a design tool for online courses—which are often asynchronous and where students are remotely located. Far from being a mismatch, we claim that Ignatian Pedagogy is ideal for helping educators to mitigate the challenges of atomization and alienation common to online courses. Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS)—which is involved with much of the university’s online development—has intentionally leveraged Ignatian Pedagogy as a paradigm for online and hybrid course design. We share how this has been done, utilizing specific, social justice-oriented courses in ethics and sociology as access points. The former course began in a traditional setting before being redesigned into a fully online course that focuses simultaneously on the disparate locations of its students as well as the shared context of the university’s campus and local issues of justice that are currently of broad concern. The latter course underwent numerous iterations before most recently being taught as a hybrid course in order to better help students move into and reciprocally engage with the greater urban community of which Georgetown is a part. Thoughtful and intentional use of Ignatian Pedagogy as a design tool can make online and hybrid courses into a powerful transformative space for both individual students and larger communities.