Subsidiarity-Informed Pedagogy: Unlearning Authoritarian Pedagogy Part 2

(Acknowledgement: I thank the Trosino Family for a grant that funded research for this blog post)

At its most basic level, the principle of subsidiarity tells us that people who are impacted by decisions ought to have a role in shaping them. This key tenet of Catholic Social Teaching reminds people in positions of authority that they should take seriously that everyone, no matter how “small,” “ill-informed,” or “insignificant” has something of value to contribute. After beginning to reflect on authoritarian teaching and its limitations, I was sure I should do something to level authority in the classroom but wasn’t quite sure how this would look in practice. While I am not Catholic or an expert in Catholic Social Teaching, being at an Augustinian Catholic university allowed me to explore how subsidiarity might boost student engagement, enrich my teaching, and make our learning environment more open and joyful. In the following blog post, I’ll share some specifics about how I’ve implemented the idea.

I started integrating subsidiarity into my pedagogy after receiving a grant from my program to explore the following question: With mounting evidence that students learn more and feel more invested in courses over which they have some control, how can applying the principle of subsidiarity boost student investment and engagement in the classroom? I developed the following practices to implement the idea:

1. Collaboration with students on course policies 

Before explicitly thinking of this in terms of subsidiarity, I had adopted Dr. Bobbi Patterson’s practice of a “class covenant” – an agreement of classroom expectations to facilitate engaged discussions. The first day of class, I ask students to “think of an environment where they felt completely comfortable expressing what they thought about something – even if it was different from everyone else there.” At the end of that session, I ask the students to generate a discussion guideline based on their ideal speaking environments. I collect these suggestions and share them following class. Reading the list together, we edit the document until we have a set of agreements to guide our seminar. I then post the discussion agreements on our learning platform so students can refer to them at any time. When expanding to think of subsidiarity, I asked students to explicitly set expectations around tech use in the classroom. In reflecting on this, students have noted how shaping the discussion environment made them immediately feel more at home, but also more involved in shaping the classroom culture. One student noted that he felt less resentful about the “no tech” policy – in part because he had written it himself, but also because he was ever-mindful of the rationale behind it. It wasn’t to “punish” students, but rather to keep them engaged.

With subsidiarity in mind, I expanded the process for students to shape policies surrounding attendance expectations and consequences for academic integrity violations. To do this, I had students sign up for “policy groups” on the first day of class, and dedicated time to reviewing university-level expectations, my own observations about what shaped a good policy, and student input. To skeptics: students were reasonable, serious about this task, and offered insights about these matters that I might not have thought of (for example, many admitted to turning to AI if they didn’t feel interested in projects, which led me to introduce the option of choosing an alternative to any assignment if they weren’t inspired by my prompt). Similar to discussion guidelines, at the end of class, students commented on feeling how shaping course expectations helped them to take ownership of their own learning in a new way. Rather than being passive participants, they were partners in learning.

2. A week of student-chosen readings

Perhaps a bit more straightforward, since the class I teach most is required, I like to include a week where the topic and genre are chosen by students. I don’t expect them to suggest specific texts or media, but I ask them “What’s a topic related to the course that you’d like to explore that isn’t on the syllabus?” and then we brainstorm about a genre we’d like to read together. Based on their suggestions, I gather a week of readings to discuss. In final presentations where students reflected on their personal growth in the class, I noticed that many students mentioned the texts from this week of class, even though we didn’t spend as much time on them or write formal assignments. I think this is because it allowed them to touch on a question that was personally meaningful, and again, it made the readings of the class feel more relevant.

3. Student-led final projects 

Finally, I end on a “choose your own adventure” final assignment. I either have students develop and respond to their own prompts, or, in more creative years, allow them to create a project in any medium that feels meaningful. I’ve had students submit poetry, podcasts, paintings, and traditional papers in these years. This final always gives an amazing opportunity for me to see the ways in which students take the big questions of the texts and run with them. Over the years, a number of students have said something along the lines that this project is initially nerve-wracking, but ultimately meaningful. This comment always reinforces my rationale for using subsidiarity in student learning. I’ve gotten multiple versions of “at first I was nervous, because if I didn’t do well, I’d have no one to blame but myself.” At first, I found this comment annoying, but the more I’ve sat with it, the more I realize it reflects the way a transactional model of education is instilled in our students. Disrupting this can be difficult, but ultimately necessary in moving to truly transformative learning.

Although using subsidiarity in the classroom is not without challenge—a professor must be willing to agree to some things they might be skeptical of, must accept that students might push for easier policies, and must prepare unfamiliar material—it has ultimately been transformative in my pedagogy. In the next blog in this series, I’ll reflect on the tension between unlearning authoritarian pedagogy and the institutional reality of assessing student work with grades.