2024 Update
Molly Buckley-Marudas and I founded Cleveland Teaching Collaborative (CTC) in 2020. Buckley-Marudas is an expert in literacies and teacher education. As faculty members who are directly involved in teacher education at CSU, we have extensive networks of alumni and local educators who reached out to us for support as Northeast Ohio transitioned to emergency remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In May 2020, we launched a WordPress platform (cleteaching.org) to host content from a cohort of instructors from Prekindergarten through Higher Education as we used the summer to collectively reflect on the experience of emergency remote teaching and reimagine the future of teaching and learning in the time of COVID. I am a Cofounder, Member of Leadership Team, Lead Web Designer, and Administrator of online platforms in WordPress and Omeka for the CTC.
Since then, the CTC has grown into a supportive interdisciplinary network of Cleveland-area educators from Prekindergarten to Higher Education with almost 200 collaborators. The main goals of the Cleveland Teaching Collaborative are to curate, share, reflect on, and analyze educators’ experiences of remote and hybrid instruction to improve teaching, learning, and student success. The project is deliberately designed as a collaborative to foster a professional learning community centered in Northeast Ohio. The CTC has created a strong community of practice and built an expansive, open access database of educational resources. The Collaborative was recognized nationally by our peers when we received the refereed 2022 Divergent Award for Excellence in Implementation of Literacy in a Digital Age.
The Cleveland Teaching Collaborative consists of three primary components:
- Educator-Authored Case Studies and Sandbox Workshops (over 80 on cleteaching.org as of August 2023)
- Resource Referatory (https://referatory.cleteaching.org/) built in Omeka with over 2000 educational resources, 22 specialized collections, and 6 curated showcases of education tools
- Professional Peer-to-Peer Support consisting of peer discussions and assignment design cafes.
Our platforms were visited by 4,300 unique users with 9,200 views (cleteaching.org) and 2,200 users with 13,000 views (referatory.cleteaching.org) in the last 24 months. In Spring 2023, we received an external grant from the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation to launch a podcast to increase our reach and showcase innovative educators in Northeast Ohio. The podcast launched in May 2024 at podcast.cleteaching.org.
As the CTC leadership team curates and builds our online platforms, we have been publishing, reflecting, and sharing our findings with the public humanities and scholarship of teaching of learning communities through peer-reviewed publications. Molly Buckley-Marudas and I have four coauthored articles published or forthcoming including “Leading through a Pandemic: Lessons Learned from the Cleveland Teaching Collaborative” (October 2020); “Collaboration, Risk, and Pedagogies of Care: Looking to a Postpandemic Future” (May 2021); “Connecting Vocabularies: The Cleveland Teaching Collaborative and A Humanizing Approach to Resource Curation” (April 2022); and “Between Structure & Collective Care: A Humanizing Approach to Resource Curation” with CSU history alum Calida O’Brien. (Forthcoming). Not only have our findings contributed to the increasingly dynamic scholarship of teaching and learning, but our use of the Omeka platform outside the field of history has led us to reconceptualize what it means to have a project controlled vocabulary (or set of searchable data terms) for a diverse interdisciplinary audience and to rethink how scholars and designers can humanize both the repository data (metadata) and the ways in which our collaborators interact with our digital platforms. We pay particular attention to the connections between our online platforms and the community of practice of CTC educators who interact with the platforms and each other. The CTC is a social design-based experiment that supports generative learning processes enabling collaborators to improve their practice. With their focus on the organization of knowledge and building our social design-experiment, The “Connecting Vocabularies” and “Between Structure and Collective Care” articles represent scholarship of discovery & inquiry as well as scholarship of teaching & learning.
As a leader of the CTC, I have two single-authored reflections on our collaborative blog; “Reimagining Seminar Classes During COVID-19 & Beyond” and “A Learning Place for Social Studies” representing scholarship of teaching and learning. In other words, we engage in a constant cycle of inquiry, evaluation, and dissemination, learning from our pedagogical experiences and initiating change in our classrooms and institutions. This combination of building, reflecting, writing, and reworking over the last four years has resulted in a stable platform and community of practice that that is replicable for other groups.
From 2020
As it became clear that Cleveland State University and institutions across the globe would transition to emergency remote learning in the spring of 2020 I turned to both new and old networks of colleagues for ideas and support in my classroom. One of the resources, NYU Shanghai’s Digital Teaching Toolkit stood out among the crowd. NYU faculty in Shanghai had begun their spring semester remotely due to the outbreak of coronavirus and their case studies of remote learning buoyed educators in North America as we considered platforms and tools for our own courses.
CSU’s semester drew to a close and I realized that it was our turn to reflect on a semester of emergency remote learning and prepare for a future which would inevitably include remote and hybrid teaching and learning. I approached Dr. Molly Buckley-Marudas, associate professor of Teacher Education and Faculty in Residence at the Campus International High School, with a plan to create a community of educators from Pre-K to higher education who would reflect on the semester, prepare for the fall, and most importantly support one another as we navigate this new territory in education.
Thanks to support from our departments and colleges, the Cleveland Teaching Collaborative (http://cleteaching.org/) was created in May 2020. Our first cohort is an interdisciplinary group of educators from across Northeast Ohio. Each participant wrote a case study reflection on their experiences in spring 2020 and met with a focus group of 4-6 people to discuss challenges, successes, and plans for the future.
One of the products of the collaborative is a resource referatory (http://referatory.cleteaching.org/) geared toward Cleveland educators but open to all audiences. We hope that this will serve as a crowdsourced toolkit for educators as we move into various stages of teaching and learning in Fall 2020.
