Thanks so much for this, Anna! I really want to hear more about your personal definition of “modern pedagogy.” Thanks for holding us all accountable for how we think about ourselves as educators embedded in systems and institutions. You’ve given us a lot to think about!

Thanks so much for this, Zellie — I really resist the idea that compassion and reason can or should be detached from each other. I’ve been thinking a lot these last few days about a recent article / podcast by Atul Gewande about the continued depersonalization of medical treatment: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers
For educators as for physicians (and maybe just for all human beings), I feel like we have to cultivate the habits of mind that support empathy and resilience — for ourselves and each other.

Thank you Khushboo! I’m going to try an exercise like that with my class soon.

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Thank you for giving us (the GEDI community) so much to think about this semester! I really appreciate your commitment to heeding Parker’s summons that we must attend to the “whole person” when we engage with students. It’s so easy to focus on the academic, the technical, and the intellectual at the expense of the emotional and spiritual sensibilities that give the human experience real meaning.

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I heard that RadioLab podcast too!

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Thanks Patrick — I’ll just make a couple of quick comments: 1) re: who pays for textbooks in K-12 – that would be the tax payers (taxes fund public schools in general). and 2) why students pay in higher ed – that’s more complicated. Sarah S went to undergrad at a school that provided textbook rental for all students as part of their tuition. Who paid for that? Again, tax payers – but not nearly at the level that we see in K-12 because of the widespread de-funding of higher ed by state legislatures in the last 15 years. Grants, the endowment, and most of all, tuition, are now essential to making the budgets of universities work. The COST of textbooks has much more to do with the (predatory) nature of publishing than with the greed of the faculty.
And on Canvas: Making a course “public” is not nearly as straightforward as you imagine. Canvas is not an “Open Ed” environment IMO. I think if you look at Stack Exchange and other OER repositories you’ll find lots of materials for CS courses.

I agree that there’s still a fair amount of confusion around the definition of many of the “opens” (Open Pedagogy, OER, etc.) Personally, I’ve decided not to get too hung up on identifying an orthodox position — instead I’m committed to a set of practices and ideas, some of which I set out here a couple years ago: https://siriusreflections.org/open-learning17/reflections-on-openlearning17/

Love the discussion in these comments and the way the post explores the tradeoffs involved with various options. I’m stunned by the the dearth of intro texts in for soil science though! Sounds like an open pedagogy project just waiting for a team. I think the library would support the creation of an OER for the course — and I bet you could write it with the students over the course of a few semesters. Check out some of the ideas here: http://openpedagogy.org/category/course-level/

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So much cool stuff going on here! The intro is wonderful – and will be useful down the road when you need to ‘fluff up” your critical pedagogy chops. (I would note that hooks pushes us to critically engage oppression, especially by race and gender in our classes, but that’s sort of there….). But your individual adventures are just awesome — and it turns out that the disciplines that seemed so intractable (soil science and entomology) have terrific potential here: “students are encouraged to seek out what they find fascinating about the mechanics of insect flight, jumping or metamorphosis and present it to the class.” Nice.

Has no one commented on this awesome post?!??!?
I think you all did a fabulous job of identifying some common tenets of a critical pedagogical approach and then applying it to your specific (and quite different) fields. I’m going to be thinking about M. K. riff on loving languages / learning languages for a long time. Thanks so much for this! (Also Oumoule’s Krispy Kreme cartoon is pretty funny — looks like the donut is taking off)