Hi Pallavi,
I totally understand what you say. All of these questions and concerns repeat quite often in my mind… but, I have found something which make me believe WE can become effective teachers: I think in academia, people listen to our scientific language more than our English! In other words, how passionately we teach, and respectfully we communicate matter more than how fluently we speak. I am sure you are a good teacher; otherwise, you would have not been asking these questions. Good luck.

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I also had an experience of teaching at Virginia Tech. Many issues/questions/concerns have been circling in my mind after that class. Taking contemporary pedagogy answered many of them, and as you said, raised new question to be answered in the future! Thanks for your post!

“I wonder what would happen if students and professors created a shared portfolio that traveled with the student from course to course throughout the major/program, sans grades.” Wow! This is a very good idea! In particular, there are core courses per discipline, whose projects are strongly connected. For instance, programming, computational thinking, data structures and algorithms in Computer Science. It would be great if students could create a shared portfolio and reflect their skills via that.

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Thanks for bringing up this issue! The way we deal with copy right protocols for popular courses in the department of Computer Science is by developing open source platforms containing rich set of homework assignments and projects. I used a very popular infrustructure called OpenDSA: https://opendsa-server.cs.vt.edu
Highly recommended!

Good point! A recent challenge in CS related courses, particularly programming, is to effectively engage students in large classes. I also believe the existing platforms are helpful (virtual) assistants, which facilitate interactive teaching.

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Nice figures! Particularly, I like the third one and your corresponding argument about different personal stories which students bring into classrooms, and how these should be addressed by teachers. In my opinion, this is one of the essential elements of critical pedagogy!

I like the website, called RadicalMath, introduced by Maha about integrating social and economical justice into math classes. I think social sciences contain tangible topics for all types of audience, as opposed to math which is often abstract and potentially boring. Mixing these two together is a genius idea to truly implement an interactive critical pedagogy!

I like your comment on how 3-year-olds can become biased after a short training tailored based on their age. Everyone of us had a clear mind of a 3-year-old at some point, but it has been being poisoned as we grew up. I wish we could clean it up in the future!

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Thanks for bringing up some biases in your country of origin. I believe it is not easy to think and write about these things. However, it reflects how “the hidden brain” theory applies everywhere, regardless of location, culture and history.

Hi Setareh! Such a nice touch on our preference to avoid starting racial/discriminating conversations in academic environments. However, as you mentioned, the best way to deal with “the hidden brain” and its implicit decisions is to face it, and then fix it. Ignorance just makes it more powerful!