Journey to Ithaca

Critical Readings | Borderland

Interesting discussion of teaching critical reading, Freire, and pirated scholarly texts.

Liena Vayzman | Practical Advice for Writing Your Dissertation, Book, or Article

Brooks et al.| Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs

The role of "fruitful embarrassment" in learning

Cynthia Enloe: My fantasizing about Adrienne Rich in a bookstore didn’t immediately change my writing or my research. But soon after that I was being pushed by the wonderful students at Clark to start teaching a comparative politics of women course. I think that the embarrassment I felt as I imagined Adrienne Rich’s curiosity and her dismay at my lack of awareness made me a little more open to students’ suggestions. Soon I began to let my teaching—and I love to teach—really begin to affect my research more. So sometimes embarrassment is really fruitful! Then there are also friends. It was feminist friends’ encouragement that led me to start reading things I hadn’t been reading, far from political science though deeply political.

Carol Cohn: I love the idea of “fruitful embarrassment.” What do you think are the social contexts that make that possible?

CE: I’ve thought about this a lot, and I know you have, too. It’s about this thing called a “career.” How to not position oneself holding a Plexiglass shield in front of you. How to gain confidence from expressing surprise, how to gain confidence from admitting, “I should have thought of that, and I didn’t!” From very early on in this thing called a career, I’ve tried very hard not to act out of defensiveness. It’s so demobilizing, draining of energy, and privatizing; it doesn’t let one listen well enough, or reach out, or be part of a community. Defensiveness plays right into the narrowest, least fruitful form of careerism. Careers are okay, in the sense that one wants to grow, to have the sense that you are moving forward in your own thinking— even having a bit more influence along the way, if it’s a good kind of influence—in one’s own little pool. But careerism— that is about, “Oh, I better not let anybody see what I don’t know.” Or, “I better pretend that I know more than I do”— and we all have those feelings. But I really try not to let that be what I express. Once I try to express the curiosity, and the, “Gee, I never thought of that, tell me more, I need to rethink that”; once I express it, even if it is not what is going up and down my spinal cord, it’s easier to actually do it.

A Conversation Between Cynthia Enloe and Carol Cohn (PDF)

My instructional technology fellows small group met today, and discussed two articles: Seven Principles for Good Practice and Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever. The first article (from 1987) briefly presents a framework for analyzing what the pedagogical literature identifies as best practices, and the second article (from 1996) describes how to implement the principles using technology.

Grading papers never ceases to remind me of this scene.

Salon | Shameful Illinois Prosecutors Go After Student Investigators/a>

In today's news of ridiculous violations of student privacy, academic freedom, and social justice....

Make it work!

Indeed, Gunn is in many ways a role model for a graduate adviser. His initial responses are helpful, and keyed to what he believes are each designer's strengths and weaknesses. He is generous with praise and never fails to express skepticism—his catch phrase for when there's a disaster looming is a sweet "I'm concerned." Indeed, on his face you can see concern.

The Chronicle of Higher Education | Fashion Lessons for Graduate Students

What Project Runway tells us about graduate school.

Instead of isolating teachers, the Generation Schools model organizes them into grade- and subject-based teams, designed to blend different types of expertise and levels of experience. The daily schedule and calendar are designed with time for regular and ongoing teacher collaboration and planning, giving teachers "time to learn from each other and to learn from their work," Brown says. In the mornings, all teachers teach 90-minute academic classes that average 14 students; afternoons are divided into shorter, larger elective courses and two hours of daily planning. Twice a year, grade-based teaching teams get a four-week break—three weeks to rest and one week to meet, plan, and observe colleagues. The breaks are staggered throughout the year, and while one group of teachers is on break, another team of their colleagues steps in to teach their students "intensive" monthlong literacy courses focused on career and college planning. The result is a school year that is extended to 200 days for students—20 more than the national average—without having to extend work time (and pay) for teachers.

via www.educationsector.org

The educational model described in the link (which is more fully articulated in a PDF report also available at the above link) makes so much sense I nearly fell out of my chair. What can I say--I don't read terribly much pedagogy literature that identifies problems and solutions and experiments with implementation in a way that matches my own experiences as a teacher and learner. Read the whole thing.

The Quick and the Ed | Why There’s No Such Thing as a Three-Year Free Lunch

Great piece on the inanity of recent arguments in favor of three-year bachelor degrees.