Teaching and Learning
Is It Time to Redefine Class Participation? (Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 8, 2022): Engagement comes in many forms, including preparation, focus, presence, asking questions, listening, specificity, and synthesizing.
How to Grade Creative Assignments (Bonni Stachowiak, Teaching in Higher Ed, September 8, 2022): A 19-minute podcast.
Quality Theater (Jerod Quinn, Hybrid Pedagogy, September 8, 2022): The author argues that the rubric-based quality approach to online courses is ineffective at producing engaging online courses and identifies what kinds of approaches might help create better online experiences that improve learner retention and motivation. (The article is a chapter in the edited collection, Toward a Critical Instructional Design which is available by free download.)
Should Professors Still Record Lectures? Maybe. Maybe Not (Susan D’Agostino, Inside Higher Ed, September 7, 2022): The pandemic may be fading, but some students still need accommodations and flexibility, proponents say. Others argue that recorded lectures inhibit class discussion, compromise privacy and threaten faculty intellectual property rights.
My Ungrading Experiment (Erica M. Dolson, Inside Higher Ed, September 7, 2022): A lecturer in English at Elizabethtown College reflects on her old grading practices and how she switched to new ones because of a very human experience: frustration.
If You Think Your Preparation Will Help You Later, You Will Probably Be Right (Madeline Holcombe, CNN Health, September 5, 2022): People did better on a task relying on their working memory when they underwent cognitive training and learned it would help with their performance according to study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Equity and Justice in Higher Ed
Derailed by Diversity (Richard Thompson Ford, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2, 2022): The Supreme Court has watered down affirmative action’s core justification: justice.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has compiled a number of its latest articles about affirmative action in a Special Report in anticipation of a (negative) Supreme Court ruling in the cases before the Court in October from Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
And while you’re at it, check out Timothy Burke’s “Academia: After Diversity?” (Eight by Seven, September 8, 2022).
On the Bookshelf
Dirk Van Demme and Doris Zahner, eds., Does Higher Education Teach Students to Think Critically? (OECD, 2022): The answer appears to be no as only 45 per cent of tested university students were proficient in critical thinking, while one in five demonstrated only “emerging” talent in this area. The book is available for a free download or purchase.
Donald Yacovone, Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity (Penguin Random House, 2022): The author traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated the country’s racial past. A review by Eric Foner (“The Complicity of the Textbooks”) appears in the New York Review of Books, September 22, 2022, issue. (Subscription required).
Webinars and Virtual Classes
Stylus Publishing is offering a webinar on “Unlocking the Promise of Midcourse Conversations: A How-To for Instructors and Educational Developers,” on Wednesday, September 28 at 12pm Eastern. The presenters are Carol Hurney, Christine Rener and Jordan Troisi, co-authors of Midcourse Correction for the College Classroom: Putting Small Group Instructional Diagnosis to Work (2021). Click to Register.
Teaching Transformative Texts: Emily Bernard, Julian Lindsay Green & Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont, will lead a workshop on how she teaches Nella Larsen’s Passing so it is accessible and engaging to first-year students and non-humanities majors. The workshop will take place on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2022 at 12:30 Eastern. Register here.
Have a short article or some news related to teaching and learning at your institution that you’d like to share with colleagues? Send your contribution along to us. Also, please email Charla White (white@glca.org) if you have colleagues who would like to receive this weekly report.
GLCA/GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning
Co-Directors:
Steven Volk (steven.Volk@oberlin.edu)
Colleen Monahan Smith (smith@glca.org)
Charla White (white@glca.org)