NOTE: The “News of the Week” is now available in an online version. You’ll find a word-searchable archive of the most recent posts of the NOTW here.
Teaching and Learning
Your Teaching Doesn’t Need to Be Perfect (Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 1, 2022): Along with the “Community Contribution” piece by Lew Ludwig last week, here’s one on learning from “teaching fails” drawn from the new book by Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis, The New College Classroom (Harvard).
Why Students Are Skipping Class So Often, and How to Bring Them Back (Carol E. Holstead, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 1, 2022): Class attendance went off a cliff last year. A professor surveyed her students about it – and they had a lot to say.
Reimagining STEM Education Through Beauty, Critical Thinking, and Disruptive Innovation (Faculty Focus, September 1, 2022): A 15-minute podcast suggests ways to reimagine STEM education through a humanities lens?
Teaching a Course as a Narrative Arc (Kent Oswald, Faculty Focus, August 31, 2022): Consider planning a semester-long story that emphasizes what you believe are the most important course elements. Don’t think in terms of which individual stories can be placed within individual lessons, but how the pieces fit into a semester-long, cohesive narrative.
Are We Doing It Wrong? (Stephanie L. Liberatore, Inside Higher Ed, August 31, 2022): How, in a polarized nation, should we be teaching argument in the academy? Should we focus less on persuasion and more on understanding?
Combating Fallacious Reasoning (Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed, August 30, 2022): The logical fallacies that every college student ought to recognize.
Click, Click, Connect (Jessica O’Reilly, Hybrid Pedagogy, August 30, 2022): An article taken from the edited collection, Designing for Care, which strives to imagine a more humanizing and problem-posing approach to the design of education. Designing for Care, and its companion, Toward a Critical Instructional Design, are available in paperback; some chapters can be read online as open-access articles (Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design).
The Elusive Civil Classroom (Sylvia Goodman, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 29, 2022): Two-dozen professors put their heads together on productive classroom discussions. They landed in different places.
Higher Education Faces Challenges
A “Crisis of Student Anxiety”? (Peter N. Stearns, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 1, 2022): The challenges to student mental health are real. They are also decades in the making. (The Chronicle is hosting a forum on “Trends in College Students’ Mental Health” on September 7 at 2:00 PM Eastern.)
Equity and Justice in Higher Ed
What to Know About the Future of DACA (Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2022): A good summary of recent actions regarding DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and how colleges can help DACA students. (You can also read Steve’s update on where the DACA program currently stands.)
Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez (Chronicle of Higher Education, August 30, 2022), offers a useful “cheat sheet” on affirmative action in her latest posting for “Race on Campus.” Time to get up to speed for the Supreme Court’s oral arguments hearing in October on race-conscious college admissions based on cases from Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill.
Some K-12 Background: What Is School For?
That’s the title of a compilation of opinion pieces published in the New York Times (September 1, 2022) about the purpose of public education in the United States today. Writers from left, right, and center provide short answers to the question.
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)