Community of Practice: Low-Tech Teaching
Rachel Hastings is pleased to announce a Community of Practice opportunity, supported by the Learning and Teaching Commons for the 2026-27 academic year.
This group is for faculty and staff who are curious about how to cultivate human-centered learning within our classrooms and other pedagogical spaces. In a time in which most of us spend many hours a day on screens, class time remains an opportunity to experience and learn from direct human-to-human interaction while working towards our educational goals. We at Evergreen have a long history of successful practices with respect to learning in community, through workshop and seminar discussions, experiential learning, and other student-centered pedagogies. This Community of Practice will allow us to share our experiences, identify ways in which newer technologies are or are not serving our students, and perhaps carve out more screen-free time for students and faculty alike.
There will be no easy or universal solutions. What we teach, and what we want students to learn, will inevitably shape our individual choices about how we wield technology. However, over the past few decades of innovation in educational technologies and beyond, the context in which students (and all of us) are living has changed rapidly. While each adoption…from learning management systems, to PowerPoint, to e-books, to phone-based polling and games, to AI writers and tutors…might make sense individually, the sum total can be crushing. And students may now benefit more than ever from stepping away from screen-based distractions and experiencing the power of collaboration, interpersonal engagement and other hallmarks of Evergreen’s core, community-oriented pedagogical strengths.
This group will meet biweekly starting in fall 2026 at a time determined by interested participants. The format will center on discussion of ideas and experiences with lower-tech pedagogies; we may also choose short readings or invite presentations on core issues such as accessibility. Our hope is that in creating space for exploration and recalibration of our goals and methods as educators, we will also ourselves benefit from a generative, supportive, and human-centered learning community.
Interested? Complete this form and we will follow up with details!
