Dojka-Davis Brown Bag Series

This semester, I've organized a little "intellectual conversation" on our campus. I've called it the "Dojka-Davis Brown Bag Series" after two fierce, crotchety faculty colleagues who died in 2009.

Both Stefanie and Mark cared a lot about maintaining the academic integrity of the college; both cared a lot about ideas and their clear expression; both insisted on making intellectual inquiry accessible to students, not as watered-down worksheets but as a serious enterprise.

I'd talked with Stefanie many times over the years about having some kind of faculty sessions where we could share our research interests. In fact, the first time I met Stefanie was when she discussed her dissertation research on Jane Austen at a faculty brown bag session back in about 1992.

Stef wasn't the only one who wanted to share more than teaching techniques with her colleagues. As my colleague Judith Roy wrote, "Mark Davis pursued his research and scholarly activities right to the end, submitting another article for publication just a few months before he died."

Many of us do this academic work, work that is so often hidden or overwhelmed by the demands of teaching at an open-admission community college. But we have few venues for sharing that work. So I organized these sessions -- just did it. We have a Center for Teaching and Learning at our college, but it focuses on teaching tips and techniques.

Anyway, the sessions have been terrific: today was the last one, a lecture about Russian intelligensia after Stalin. We've heard about disability rights in Korea, theories of comics, and just war theory. Every session has had at least four participants, with the largest session drawing nine. Sure, these numbers might be small, but I look forward to increasing them next semester. (I've switched the day/time to every other TUESDAY, noon-1:00 p.m.)

So I guess you could say I'm feeling proud about what I've been able to accomplish . . . work that's not rewarded or even recognized by the institution. But work that's central to the mission of the college and to creating a healthy climate.

However, I still miss my two friends. These brown bag talks will never replace the cranky hallway conversations, the delightful and exasperated critiques both Stefanie and Mark shared with the rest of us.

Getting cheerier

I received a lot of feedback on my last post -- primarily on my Facebook page (I sort of forget that I have the two linked). Thanks to everyone who's been sympathizing, strategizing, and listening to me.

Now here's another piece to cheer me up: In a recent Inside Higher Education, the excellent scholar and professor Dennis Baron [ignore the IHE typo of his name in the URL] answers questions about his new book on teaching, writing, technology, and history. The book's called A Better Pencil.

Baron offers a perspective I know but often forget -- that people being what we are (and have been), there is (and has been) more good than bad when it comes to how people teach, learn, and communicate with each other.

I especially like these lines about online education because they reflect my reality:

"But I do see some significant downsides to distance education. . . . I fear that completion rates for many online courses are still disappointingly low, that the quality of much of the education is also lower than what happens in the classroom -- of course I’m thinking about the kinds of courses that I [and] my colleagues teach, ones which don’t require memorization of a body of knowledge but instead call for analysis, speculation, exploration. Courses where reading is intensive, where group discussion produces many insights, and where evaluation can’t be done by machine." (emphasis added)

These are the kinds of courses I value, too, full of the kinds of spontaneous insightful moments that can't be predicted but can only be recognized and cultivated organically by an instructor who's paying attention to all of the people in the room. This instructor knows that "knowledge is socially constructed" and that the room of people s/he's with is a social organism with knowledge-making potential.

The whole interview is good: read it!

Revving Up

The new semester begins in three weeks (just less than that, actually), and I'm wondering where my summer went! Of course, I was teaching (both a f2f and an online course), driving around the country on great road trips (Bemidji, Madison, Chicago, New York, Montreal -- not always in that order), and next week I'll fly to San Antonio for a visit.

But I'm beginning to pull together ideas for my fall classes, and I found this new multi-authored blog: Ecology of Education | Exploring the Ecosystems of Learning.

Although the site seems primarily addressed to K-12 educators (the most amazing and under-appreciated public servants in our country), I'm finding some great information there, too. Just the metaphor alone needs to be more widely understood: Ecology, indeed!

Check it out.

P.S. Here's one more resource: a delicious.com list of sites for classroom ideas from Active Learning Carnival. I found it via the MnSCU CTL blog (see at right).

BOT Awards

How to get the word out? That's the challenge in any large institution, like our college or the system within which our college exists, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. Such a communication challenge is especially difficult when the intended audience holds strong preconceptions about the message, as MnSCU faculty do about a terrific program created by the MnSCU Board of Trustees: the BOT Educator of the Year Award.

The preconception about this award is that once nominated, a faculty member must go through an onerous process of putting together a portfolio to document that excellence. However, the process doesn't have to be onerous at all: perhaps the (sorta cheesy) video below will motivate folks to see that?

Why it matters

Attending the Nobel Conference every year always stimulates my thinking, especially because my science background is sketchy.

This year, the question/topic is "Who Were the First Humans?" To begin answering this question, this year's scholars/researchers have come from around the world (Arizona, Leipzig, Stanford, Oxford, the Smithsonian) and from a range of disciplines (anthropology, paleogenetics, archaeology, cognitive biologists). Their talks are lucid, complex, profound, and their interaction with each other is polite, fraught, complicated.

Here's the message that becomes increasingly clear, a message I need to keep emphasizing with my students: Claims are asserted and supported (and perhaps persuasion happens) because people make inferences using logical reasoning.

Many of my students think that "evidence" is the only thing that can support a claim. But often, we don't have tangible evidence ("demonstration" Plato and Aristotle called it). Often we have to use our logical reasoning skills.

I need to give my students LOTS more practice with this important "first human" skill.

Will this work?

Here's a video aimed at young people. I'm intrigued.

The reverse psychology reverses. I'm wondering how young people will respond. I'll have to ask.

I was inspired to do some online research about rhetoric after attending the CPTSC Conference today at the University of Minnesota: an excellent way to spend my day. Of course I had my laptop, so I was able to engage my online tech writing students while I was there. Teaching isn't what it used to be!

Berks Conference

I attended the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians yesterday at the U of Minnesota. Huge attendance! The session I attended, "Before and After Sexuality: Rethinking Continuity and Change in Lesbian History," helped me think more fully about a course I'll be teaching this fall, WGST 1071: Introduction to GLBT Studies. The course is interdisciplinary, but I'm not a historian or a social scientist, so I've come at the course as a literature person who's learning on her own about the issues/approaches/questions in the other disciplines.

I've taught the course three times already, and I do try to establish with students that GLBT Studies looks at history, but it also examines definitions: what GLBT means and to whom and who gets to decide what the categories entail. This session helped me think through the entire problem of categories, the problem of asserting a historical identity, such as "lesbian," when those identities didn't exist (although behaviors may have existed that are the same as current behaviors that determine identities).

The session helps me with something I've been trying to emphasize with students: that GLBT people -- or people who now fit under the current handy rubric of GLBT -- have always existed all over the world: GLBT Studies is the study of such people in order to learn more about human beings as a whole.