Slow Teaching as an Inclusive Teaching Approach: Strategies for Building a Slow Classroom

A few years ago, I was attending a pedagogy workshop as a graduate instructor, participating in a series of short, high-tempo activities designed to help us with course design when I had a distinct realization: This was all too fast for me. I was getting the work done; it was certainly productive, but I could feel a loss of engagement.

 

At the end of my graduate program, I found myself revisiting the moment a lot perhaps because I sensed a pattern. I had been in some great classes, accomplished a great deal of reading and writing, and yet some of my most formative experiences as a scholar were ones where I had the opportunity to savor an idea, pore over a text across weeks, and contemplate critical questions in multiple contexts. I found myself considering how the tempo of my learning affected my attentiveness, my ability to retain information, and—most importantly—my sincerity of engagement. 

 

Since then I have been thinking of the concept of “slow teaching.” Rather than being a systematized method or approach, slow teaching practices have been outlined by disparate individual authors in public and academic contexts. Scholarship on the subject addresses an umbrella of concerns while assessing the state of contemporary undergraduate classrooms. Specifically, slow teaching emerges as a pedagogical practice that responds to the increasing mediation of technology in learning, the overarching emphasis on productivity and market-oriented learning, and the needs to address students of varied learning personas.

 

To give it a definition, slow teaching approaches build greater pause, reflection, and purpose when curating the learning environment. Slow teaching is a pedagogy that leverages prolonged engagement to create space for more intentional relationships between students, instructors, and course content. 

 

Whilst being constructive correctives that focus our attention on specific lacunae in undergraduate pedagogy, slow teaching remains an approach that has not yet captured the imagination of the wider teaching community. To begin with, proponents of slow teaching often overcorrect. For instance, in The Craft of University Teaching (2018), Peter Lindsay expresses concerns about the ever-increasing reliance upon technological innovation for learning in the university fearing that we have begun to conflate one with the other. He shivers with aversion at the prospect of administrators commonly arranging tours where parents and guardians visit empty classrooms where shiny new gadgets such as lecterns, projectors, screens, and speakers suggest unmistakably erudite and learned scholars in the making. Lindsay has a point, but slow teaching should not necessarily be antagonistic or fearful when it comes to facilitating learning through digital media and technology. 

 

Similarly, proponents of slow teaching can over-emphasize the preparedness and demands that slow teaching places on the shoulders of instructors. Slow teaching, or any other additive pedagogical approach, should not require us to uproot a growing tree when watering and trimming will do the job.

 

A systematic articulation of slow teaching, one that is still needed, should—in the opinion of the author—view the approach as a subset of the broader principle of inclusive teaching. Slow teaching should address the aforementioned concerns—altered student attentiveness in the age of social media, the fetishization of productivity, increasingly competition-driven learning, and neglected student needs—by becoming a holistic approach that is a compatible companion of inclusive teaching.

 

In this vein, slow teaching approaches can be thought through and practiced on varying scales. While instructors should be encouraged to innovate with new course designs and materials that build intrinsic and expansive slow structures, the approach can be integrated through smaller, low-design and high-yield measures.

 

The following four concrete practices pertaining to, but not limited to, course design, instructor preparedness, classroom environment, and goal-setting could be considered by instructors who wish to explore the pedagogical path of slow teaching.

 

Pedagogical practices have evolved to provide the student with greater agency in setting the learning agenda. Yet even progressive approaches that understand that learning “progress” is often non-linear and difficult to quantify are enmeshed in vocabularies tied to skill-oriented measurable productivity. Inclusive pedagogy suggests collaborating on curriculum when possible, and a slow-teaching approach could build further pause and reflection.

 

The class community could, especially during the early stages of a course, converse and define what constitutes success for the learner. These communal and individual parameters could then be revisited at formal checkpoints like the mid-semester break, but more importantly when either the student or the instructor senses a breakthrough.

 

Instructors sometimes employ icebreakers in their first sessions as a way for all members of the classroom community to establish a degree of familiarity. Yet community-building activities are quickly eschewed as submission “deadlines” and the “business end” of the semester approach.

 

Purposefully investing in community-building activities (or even whole sessions) throughout the semester could revitalize a learning community running low on the fuel of curiosity. Community-building activities often feature technology-free social engagement, but other routes are possible.

 

By purposefully investing in student-student relationships, instructors can lay the foundation for collaborative learning in the lab, for lesser conflict in projects involving teamwork, or for incisive peer-reviews.

 

Have you “covered” this topic in class? Often learning progress is configured as some sort of territorial expansion. Slow-teaching practitioners could consider intensifying student-content engagement through prolonged engagement when necessary.

 

Prolonged engagement requires, ideally, more time for the same course content. If you are considering a slow-teaching approach, revisiting your course learning objectives to reassess the time and engagement demands of daily reading materials and assessments can be a great first step. Here the view should be to create opportunities for students to savor learning.

 

In the absence of such luxuries, however, prolonged engagement can be built by building other mediums and contexts of engagement. For instance, instructors can reframe certain class sessions as a “coffee-hour” where students prioritize conversations about their learning thus far, review favorite topics, concepts, or texts whilst building another space for community building.

 

Prolonged engagement can facilitate qualitative lift that encourages lateral thinking, problem-solving, innovation, and curiosity.

 

Often higher education happens in contexts where student-instructor ratios are rarely favorable for one-on-one instructor-student meetings. Given the systematic attack on higher education (read: democratic backsliding), time shared between instructors and students outside the formal classroom is shrinking. Competitive fields and an increasing emphasis on productivity means that the office-hour, while not a dying institution, is at-least transitioning to Zoom.

 

Yet empathetic one-on-one conversations have a particular importance for first-generation learners, introverted learners, and students of color. In line with slow teaching’s emphasis upon delinking learning from paradigms of efficient productivity, you could consider reframing individual student meetings. “Conferences” designed for date-setting and assessment discussions could be in some instances supplemented—or if needed replaced—with conversations. These can be conversations about the student’s navigation of the class, course materials, the field of study, future of the discipline, or simply another form of community building.