Long live the New Engineering! Optimistic to hear, well, read, you bring more humility and humanity to the discipline!

Khaled,

I’m so sorry you had that experience. Horrible teachers are well…they’re just the worst. Thankful that you were able to get out of that situation, though! The question remains, how can we help those who are still stuck with teachers like these and are unable to escape?

Susan,

Spot on with the questions. You’ve already gotten some excellent resources and suggestions from the other comments (I particularly like bpsutliff’s survey suggestion. ) so I won’t take up too much space with my response. I’d suggest that as instructors, we set aside some time towards organizing students to voice their specific concerns and work with them on strategies to improve both at an individual class level as well as at an organizational/departmental level. Perhaps this could be done in part at the beginning of the semester, as an optional evaluation question on a mid-term, and again as part of evaluations at the end of the year? We’ll never know for sure until we ask the right people, i.e. the students.

I can see both sides of the implied issue here.

If the homework assignment “leaks” for lack of a better word, it can circulate to the point that students already have a technically correct but thoughtful/critically lacking response at the ready. If a professor has to meet a certain standard, there are going to be crucial parts of their work that remain constant throughout the years.

At the same time, that encourages academic gatekeeping and further commodification of academic work, which is really, REALLY unnatural for a contemporary liberal-arts education, which (on paper) stresses openness of information and critical thinking as opposed to minimal vocational training and memorization.

Thank you for your careful reflection, Pallavi. Out of curiosity, what exactly did your work as an activist entail? Did it come before, during, and/or after your college/graduate education? How do you think you can personally use what we’ve discussed about critical pedagogy in formal activism?

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First, I absolutely LOVE your system for acknowledging peer contributions via keywords. I might steal, I mean, take inspiration from this for future assignments! I’d like to ask each of the authors, as your definition and Spenser both touched on this: How exactly would you privilege and stimulate curiosity in your practice? Do you rely upon established but marginalized or overlooked practices, experiment in the classroom, or something completely different? In any event, do you try to protect your students from any institutional repercussions your approach might carry? If so, how?

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Excellent post! For Khaled, what strategies would you recommend to encourage critical reflection in and outside of the classroom environment? Can critical reflection play a role in each assignment, discussion, or reading? I’d love to hear (well, read) your thoughts.

“If we want students to learn their best, we need to teach in ways that are relevant to their problems and their interests or the outside issued will overwhelm the class material.” <–This gives me hope for the future right here.

For the political scientist, I appreciate your discussion on reflexivity. I would ask given your desire to continually reinforce the importance of your field, how would you personally address the issue of incorporating erased or marginalized sources for political philosophy?

I agree wholeheartedly that the instructors should not bear the full responsibility for inclusivity. Just out of curiosity, what would an ideal workshop on this for students look like to you? What would be the goals of the workshop and what would be let’s say the top three considerations that would go into planning such an event?

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I respect your admission of growth from your prior essay. I have read before on this idea that a lot of college admissions essays and scholarship essays are designed to get stigmatized or disenfranchised groups to spin the “colorblind” narrative or commodify and sell a sense of adversity, giving those proponents who already have resources ever more leverage and security in this lie that the playing field is equal or that the successful majority are somehow superior when in truth, they just benefit from privilege.