Relatable Content
While I started out by trying to find an exciting and engaging way to present content from teacher to student my focus quickly shifted in focus. I initially saw instruction as a one-way transfer of information and ideas; responses would come back to the teacher from the student and once more sent out in the form of a prompt to another student. I have departed from this understanding of the classroom to say the least.
Although my focus remained on content I adapted my focus to include an understanding of a more dynamic model. Instead of a uni-directional approach to information sharing modelling the teacher and students as conduits, I grew to see the classroom as a web of interconnected ideas and was best served by peer-to-peer discussion and sharing. Still though, I was struggling to find a way to adapt content to individual students needs, after all: how do you manipulate a lesson to be relatable to 30 different learners at a time? the short answer, I would find out, is you don’t.
Being the Intermediary for “Relatability”
I quickly realized that content adaptation and subsequent relation is virtually impossible to do on a case-by-case basis for every student. I re-oriented my focus to better adapt to my objective at the time. I began to see myself as the intermediary for relatability; that is to say I focused on developing rapport and expectations with my students through open dialogue and adapted material to my style (see: Star Wars Intro Creator post), so that I could remove a relational step.
Building a Content Community
This, however, was a short lived endeavour as I traced the search for relatability to its source in the form of community structuring in and out of the classroom. My reasoning was that if I established and fostered a distinct sense of community through classroom roles, expectations, and equitable practices that could then be extended to the larger school and educational community; which would in turn be more relatable to those participating community members (students). The content, after all, would be emergent from that ground-level classroom community, and so at its fundamental level would be relatable to the learner as it emerged from a familiar place that they were an active part of.
