BY AARON BARLOW In response to a recent post of mine, a professor wrote, “We are in a highly competitive and insecure field. How the heck do we rise together?” The competitive nature and insecurity of academia certainly have been exacerbated of the past decades (they were always with us); the only way that is…
BY AARON BARLOW The traditional classroom is an admittedly questionable structure. It limits learning by confining bodies of knowledge within four walls, scuffed floor and ceiling generally too low. It also keeps things out, particularly a world that should have an impact on every type of learning. It reinforces hierarchy: no matter that teachers try…
BY AARON BARLOW Maybe it was just too perfect a topic for my classes today. Certainly, though, I couldn’t resist. It had everything. It had: Topicality that would keep students interested; Relationship to our university system (City University of New York); Room for discussion of student value, something particularly important for first-year college students; Relevance,…
BY LESLIE BARY Yesterday a public official, dropping the name of the Lumina Foundation, asked Louisiana faculty for ideas on how to innovate. Did we need help learning to use technology? Would mini-grants help us find new books to replace the outdated ones we might be using? Perhaps we do not need books, but teaching…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The title of this post is the title of an op-ed written by Adam Grant and published in the New York Times. Grant is identified as an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandburg,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Huffington Post in late summer of last year, Katherine Brooks reported on the scaling back of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), a project that was begun in 1962 that has led to the publication of six volumes of distinct words and phrases from all corners of the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In the online journal published by Still Point Spaces, Andrea Brady has written a lengthy, three-part personal essay on the “University as Anxiety Machine.” The essay should resonate with many academics in the U.S., as well as those in other nations. Here is the opening section: It was Welcome Week at…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH When David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory was published in the late spring, it received considerable media attention. Writing for Salon, Erin Keane provided a fairly succinct summary of Graeber’s definition of such employment: The first half of the book is devoted to building a clear understanding of what is…