• Introduction
• Articulating Goals
• Faculty as Learners
• Sharing Authority: The Models
• A Richer Classroom
• Authority and Trust
• Growth and Community
• Printable Text of Article

Ashley Williams I'm thinking about meta-teaching, the sharing of ideas about teaching that is also extremely enriching. It's interesting to examine the ways in which we do that because we're forced to. Much of the authority of a collaboratively taught course comes from sharing, which in this instance means exchange, both with our faculty colleagues and with our students.

I think there's a kind of parallel between the way authority develops in collaborative teaching and the development of moral authority. Moral authority isn't something you set out to achieve: it inheres and grows from the consistency of the principle of good choice. I think what we recognize as authority in collaborative situations isn't deliberately achieved. Rather, it grows out of a certain compass, out of trust and, in fact, out of the sharing of authority itself.

Elizabeth Patten I think it's also beneficial for students to encounter faculty who have differing opinions on the same subject. It can be a positive experience, when two or more people, both with knowledge and expertise in a field, can argue opposing sides of a point, as long as they back up their opinions and provide meaningful insights along the way. Modeling this for students challenges them to go beyond right and wrong, the dualistic view, and move towards a more relativistic view of knowledge. It shows students that it's OK to disagree.

Elizabeth Gunn Some students expect or want undisputed authority. It's easier for them, and so they work sometimes against accepting responsibility. When we go outside the university classroom, the rules aren't so clear. In many of my courses, we go out into the field often, and it's wonderful to watch the students. They're used to you as the knowledge expert; they know that you possess some special abilities. But then you introduce someone who has different intellectual abilities, a scientist, for example, and you step out from that authority to let another expert take over your class. You ask questions, and you act in a subordinate status, and students truly see you in a different role. It changes the way in which you can share, and changes the way students look at you. I think our willingness to surrender the class to someone else, and to become students ourselves, influences what and how we can teach.

Ashley Williams If we are not demonstrably learners ourselves then we cannot communicate the process to students. Authority comes from participating in the learning: students are very savvy about who's "really" a learning community kind of teacher, and who's not. Years ago, a colleague told me about his father, who was dean of a Lutheran College in the mid-west. His father went everywhere with an encyclopedia under his arm, because he was so concerned that a student might ask him a question he couldn't answer. I think that story is emblematic of our perceived responsibilities as faculty, at least traditionally. In contrast, this shift to collaborative pedagogy involves our becoming active learners along with students, and of course it makes a significant change in the way we relate to students. 

Teresa Michals Sometimes on the surface, they're ready to move beyond a simple opposition between fact and experience, between dualism and relativism. But when you push a little harder, students still feel that a fact is a fact. They're unable to bridge the gap between those two positions in interesting ways. That's what I want them to do by the time they graduate, to be able to think through the contexts that are important for any intellectual inquiry. I wanted to pick up on Betsy's [Elizabeth Gunn's] point, too, that you also have think about the classroom before you can think about what the audience is going to do. I never realized how much of my work depended upon standing next to the blackboard until I went outside the door, outside my sphere, without the props, and it was unsettling for me and for the students.

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