Supporting military pedagogy with the work-the-walk (WTW) and digital WTW (D-WTW) approach to teaching and learning

This paper answers the question of how a transformative approach to teaching and learning, the Work-the-Walk (WTW) approach and its digital counterpart, Digital WTW (D-WTW) support military pedagogy. Military pedagogy is a term used to explain a learning environment relevant to military cadets and military institutions. Its has a long history in European military institutions and can be considered at its infancy in the Asian region. Research on military pedagogy is limited in this region, and in Malaysia perhaps the educational institutions to employ military pedagogy include the National Defense University of Malaysia (NDUM), Kuala Lumpur, and the military training centers in the country. The aims of this paper include investigating how the WTW approach, together with its digital from D-WTW, enhance military pedagogy and providing solutions or alternatives to adopt both WTW and D-WTW during teaching and learning post the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper adopts a qualitative approach to research, where observations of classes were performed for total of 40 hours. The classes involved the students that the author taught for two semesters of 28 weeks. Given the observation list used by the author, it can be preliminarily concluded that the WTW approach to teaching and learning and its digital counterpart complement military pedagogy in their activities and assessments. Further, there are two main solutions on how academics can use WTW and D-WTW post pandemic. In short, the transformative approaches to teaching and learning, WTW and D-WTW, can enrich the implementation of military pedagogy; ultimately both physical and online approaches can help shape the desired character of Malaysian military personnel.