Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Once upon a time the Chronicle of Higher Education created a webby bloggy site called Chronicle Vitae. The idea is that it would be Linkedin but for higher ed (I think. They never told freelancers like me!) with jobs, profiles, connections, messaging, and blog posts and I wrote a bunch of pieces for them. But it’s all offline …
Today at my university, over 250 students will spend the day sharing the fruits of their labors. The presentations will range from short-term semester-long projects to panels and talks on capstone projects on which the students have been working for years. We’ll have a presentation on beekeeping, staged readings of 10-minute plays, music inspired by …
I like this Jonathan Rees post about rules for online teaching. At Dominican, we’ve had many conversations about how to teach online while preserving our relationship-centered mentality. Rees is, similarly, thinking about how to make online teaching more than just a different delivery system. Here are some best practices he’s extracted: 1) They do not …
The Trigger Warning debate is back. Did it ever really go away? Here’s my new piece of the argument: Trigger Warnings preserve access to offensive content that, nevertheless, has educational value. A year ago I wrote this piece for CNN in the context of the TW discussion. I argued that best practices for teaching any content …
Lately I’ve been having lots of conversations about norms, code-switching, professionalization, and what our job is as teachers to model and suggest. I’ve written on the blog about code-switching as a skill that my students generally lack and that I think is useful for them. Others have countered, though, saying we should focus on changing …
The issue of trigger warnings in the classroom, whether they are useful, attack academic freedom, are to protect our helicopter-parented elite students, or what, has become a fairly important topic in higher ed circles. I’m writing an essay on it now. Here is a list of resources. Please recommend additional materials. Start with Amanda Marcotte …
One major complaint about college students today, even highly-prepared college students, is that they have been taught to do well on tests, not to think critically. The culprit may be No Child Left Behind, and I’m not convinced that the Common Core will change this. As a history professor, I assign a lot of essays …
This is an essay about code-switching as a college skill. It starts, though, with questions about privilege and clothing. In a few minutes I am heading off to teach a class on Crusade and Jihad in the Middle Ages. We’ve just reached 1200 and I’ll be asking the students to break into groups and tell …