This link has been bookmarked by 19 people . It was first bookmarked on 13 Jan 2009, by Gene Roche.
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Daniel MolnarInside Higher Ed offers free online news and job information for college and university faculty, adjuncts, graduate students, and administrators, higher education jobs, faculty jobs, college jobs and university jobs
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17 Jan 09
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15 Jan 09
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we still think of teaching in ways that are narrowly private and individualistic, as something we do in isolated classrooms with little or no knowledge of what our colleagues are doing in the next classroom or the next building and little chance for each other’s courses to become reference points in our own
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teaching is by nature a solo act in our unreflecting use of “the classroom” as a synecdoche or shorthand for all teaching and learning, as if “the way we teach now” were reducible to “the way I teach now.”
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The isolated, privatized classroom is itself a product of a more affluent era for American universities, a luxury made possible by the generous economic support they enjoyed during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. In this heady economic climate, a university could grow by expanding its playing field, proliferating new courses, fields, subfields, and scholarly perspectives while giving each enough separate space to ward off unproductive turf wars. To make a long story short, we became terrific at adding exciting new theories, fields, texts, cultures, and courses to the mix, but we’ve been challenged, to say the least, when it comes to connecting what we’ve added. Interdisciplinary programs have helped make some connections, but ultimately they have reproduced fragmentation rather than lessened it, since interdisciplinary programs tend to be disconnected from each other as well as from the disciplines. And now that we don’t have the financial luxury to keep adding on — as is seen in our alarming overdependence on underpaid and overworked adjuncts — we need to get a lot better at putting the components into dialogue, which means getting on the same page in our teaching in ways we lack practice at and may find uncomfortable.
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And teaching in non-communicating black boxes helps prevent us from discovering and taking advantage of the fact that in fundamental ways, as I will argue in a moment, we already are on the same page.
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tunnel vision in which our little part of the world becomes the whole.
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“almost entire lack of interest we manifest as a profession in what is going on in our colleagues’ classes.”
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more transparency and collaboration in our teaching would not only help students make better sense of us, but would ultimately be as safe for the most vulnerable among us as a curriculum that lets us hide out from each other.
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The trouble with leaving it up to each of us to figure things out on our own is that it really means leaving it up to our students to figure us out on their own.
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all the courses in a program may be admirably coherent, “but a collection of coherent courses may be simply an incoherent collection.”
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Our classrooms allow us on the faculty to tune each other out, but our students don’t have that luxury.
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“What you learn in a course stays in the course.”
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mastered the fundamentals of reading, analysis, and argument, of summarizing others and using them to define our own ideas, that comprise what we now call “critical thinking skills.”
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14 Jan 09
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13 Jan 09
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