Episode #74. Saturday September 11, 2021, 5:30 pm EDT
Abstract: In the Global South, the education of those in rural schools is often characterized by the lack of access to adequate teaching and learning resources, inexperienced teachers challenged with teaching overwhelmingly large class sizes, and aiding learners with the limited support systems at their disposal in their home life. This session will highlight stories of creative and compassionate teachers that Khendum Gyabak has worked with in her research in Bhutan and Papua New Guinea. More recently, she has extended her research to Nepal. The common thread of these stories is appreciating the teacher agency of working within myriad educational constraints. Extending this thread is the deliberate application of cognitive empathy and creative thinking to scaffold understanding and foster meaningful learning for rural students. Khendum will discuss the intersection of designerly thinking and teacherly knowing in responding to sustainable ways of doing learning and instruction in highly inequitable environments.More about our guest below the video.
Khendum Gyabak has a Ph.D. in Instructional Systems Technology (IST) from Indiana University and works as an education consultant for the University of Minnesota. She designs online education, innovates hybrid and in-person instructional programs, and has collaborated on curriculum design with educators and community leaders in a variety of teaching and learning contexts at both the international and national levels. Her research intersects design service, design thinking, critical pedagogy, teacher agency, and creativity in low resourced rural classrooms in the developing world. She can be reached at khendum@umn.edu or khendum@gyabakvandover.com.