Category: Higher Education
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Creating learning environments where all students feel understood and valued
Participants: Dree-el, Yaneth, Nathalie, Offer In order to inform culturally responsive and sustaining practices in the classroom, educators benefit from understanding the myriad ways in which their students experience the world. In this manner, they can better serve their students and ensure an equitable, responsive education for all. To understand culture and its intersection with learning we felt that […]
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(Re)Becoming the Gatekeeper (sort of)
Circling around the experience of that fishbowl discussion (see “Naming the Elephant”) was my feeling of both arrival and not-quite-there-yet. Over the course of that hour-long fishbowl, my students stopped looking at me for validation and eventually forgot I was there. Sounds like a strange thing to wish for in your own classroom, but it […]
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Quarantine Blues: How It Really Feels to Suddenly Become an Online College Senior
It has now been about two weeks since the beginning of our nation’s journey into online education. In light of the pandemic, everyone is required to stay home to flatten the curve and help end the spread before it becomes too much to bear. This means students and teachers cannot go to school without being […]
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Critical Digital Pedagogy: Strategies for Remote Instruction
On the morning of Monday, March 9, I reached out to a supervisor suggesting that we begin thinking about offering a virtual version of NYU’s Intro to Programming tutoring lab. At the time, my concern was primarily for immunocomprised staff and students. CSCI-UA.0002 (Introduction to Computer Programming in Python) enrolls many hundreds of NYU students […]
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Naming the elephant (or, how I learned to do the obvious and get out of the way of the conversations my students really wanted to have)
It matters how you enter a room. Particularly when you’re the teacher and you’re trying to set a tone for the rest of the semester. And particularly when the tone you’re trying to set is the disruption of the power dynamic inherent in any classroom. I’ll stop using […]
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A Short Message From a Senior During These Crazy Times
So it’s been a while since I’ve posted – I’m sure everyone knows why. I hope everyone is staying safe and sane in the midst of the crazy that has taken over the world. It’s a time of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. It has disrupted our daily lives in a way that no one alive […]
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From Cardi B to Stranger Things: Reading Sounds, Captioning Meaning
This is the third post in a series leading up to my HASTAC webinar “From Cardi B to Stranger Things: Using Popular Culture in the Writing Classroom.” Disability Studies and Disability Rhetoric ask us to rethink how we arrange our classrooms (physical and virtual) and the course content we provide. Rather than a reactive measure, […]
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Everything I ever needed to know about kindergarten I learned from Nietzsche and Kafka
Two huge posters of Kafka and a portrait of Nietzsche drawn by a former student hang over the desk in my office, my two constant “spiritual” companions. I’ve been living with both of them for a while at this point, but it’s only been recently that I’ve come to understand how closely connected they are—and […]
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From Cardi B to Stranger Things: Circulating Consequences
This is the second post in a series leading up to my HASTAC webinar “From Cardi B to Stranger Things: Using Popular Culture in the Writing Classroom.” Circulation Studies is something I am relatively new to, but considering the speed at which popular culture is shared and re-shared, it makes sense to incorporate discussion of […]
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Notes from Underground
My relationship to my profession—teaching comparative literature, religious studies and philosophy at an elite liberal arts college, DePauw University—is ambivalent. I adore my students, I adore teaching, but I can’t shake the feeling that the kind of institution I’m teaching in perpetuates an enormously broken and unjust system. I can’t shake the feeling that, for […]