2018 Resources

 

For Plenary, Day 1 – Who Are Our Students & How Do We Adapt to Each Other? (The following pieces are written by students from 2 courses, Writing & Experience and Writing on Contemporary Issues.  BLCKGRLMGC is a personal initiative.  All of these pieces are published in Blurring Boundaries – college essays.)

And … Retreat2018_inclusivity_handout

For Executive Function Support: A Path to Equity and Excellence

For Being or Becoming the Stranger—in our classrooms :

For Writing About Difficult Subjects

Additional Resources on Handling Difficult Subjects:

  • Megan Zahneis wrote about ethnic-studies professors grappling with how to discuss family separations at the border in their courses this fall. Jimmy C. Patiño Jr., an associate professor of Chicano and Latino studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, for instance, is “spending this summer talking with colleagues about how to broach the topic of family separation with students in a manner that’s both intellectual and respectful,” Megan wrote.
  • Beckie Supiano wrote about how it shaped an Islam 101 course at the University of Florida. Teaching that subject has been complicated by news events yet again with the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold Trump’s travel ban. And given the planned retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, any course that touches on the current Supreme Court probably needs some adjustments this year.
  • Beth McMurtrie writes on helping professors be better by finding them mentors.
  • We’ve written a lot about the problems with student course evaluations. Now, read my story about how one university overhauled its survey and read annotated “before” and “after” questions it asked.
  • Laura Pappano, for The New York Times, writes that iGenners “.. are, of course, super connected. But on their terms. Which is why college-bound iGens (Gen Zers, if you prefer) present a challenge to the grown-ups on campus eager to reach and teach them” in The iGen Shift: Colleges Are Changing to Reach the Next Generation.
  • Ross Douthat, for the New York Times, writing about the Humanities in Oh, The Humanities, says that, “In an Apollonian culture, eager for ‘Useful Knowledge’ and technical mastery and increasingly indifferent to memory and allergic to tradition, the poet and the novelist and the theologian struggle to find an official justification for their arts.”
  • Former Bennington College President Liz Coleman believes higher education is overly-specialized & complacent. She says we need to encourage students to ask bigger questions & take more risks. TED Talk: How Do We Teach College Students to Ask Big Questions? 
  • Frank Bruni, of The New York Times, in How to Get the Most Out of College, says that “…  the most important relationships to invest in are those with members of the school’s faculty. Most students don’t fully get that. They’re not very good at identifying the professors worth knowing — the ones who aren’t such academic rock stars that they’re inaccessible, the ones with a track record of serious mentoring — and then getting to know them well.”
  • Brian Gibbs engages the notion of “the “sell out” phenomenon that often plagues justice oriented educators: not being able to engage in all forms of resistance and interruption often weighs on teachers engaged in critical teaching,” Selling Out and Other Sins of the Justice Oriented Educator. (TC Record).