Wow! This blog looks exactly like my old one! It’s on a completely different topic but it has pretty much the same page layout and design. Excellent choice of colors! eakcfkbedafbfeda

As a librarian, I am zoning in on item #3, the open mix. Yes, yes, yes, use the library-provided resources for all the reasons you list AND add to that the hope that students might see that some information is only available with certain privileges, in this case their tuition dollars and current institutional affiliation. As you say, the mix of sources you include, open and proprietary, points to this privileged access versus access for all. And we could take it a step further to point out that your students at a state-funded, large, research institution have access to resources that students at a small private institution like mine do not. Mix away!

“What I’ve learned” from this is complicated for me as well, and not all of it is coherent enough to put out here. I am both inspired by and concerned about the prospects of liberal learning, which makes it hard to come up with a cogent precis of where I’ve been and where we all might be headed.
But with so many partially-written posts on my dashboard I decided it was worth at least putting something out there. As you say, it’s a place to start. The real challenge ahead, to my mind is how to fulfill the charge of the collaboratives project to “build capacity and a network of faculty.” Potential abounds.Easy answers, not so much.
Thank you, Gardner for asking me to join this project. I’ve learned so much and hope to carry the experience forward to wherever the next adventure leads us. Thanks so much for your vision and leadership — it’s been absolutely essential and I’m counting on you to carry the beacon for the foreseeable future.

What a thoughtful, detailed, and inspirational set of takeaways! Thank you. I hope to write a similar post soon, though “what have I learned from this experience?” is a very complicated question for me. But one must start somewhere…. I can only hope to create half the resource you’ve created here. I’m very grateful for all your contributions to this learning experience. I know I am not alone in feeling that way.

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That MLK speech (and idea) is one of my favorites and as I read through again I think really does connect to the idea of how do we want to be educators. Said can definitely be a slog (Orientalism in particular was grueling for me) but, the nice thing is you can actually listen to the Representation of the Intellectual lectures on the BBC website.

I think bell hooks could be a really good fit as well. She is quite challenging and thought-provoking. I was reading W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk the other day and I came across this passage which I really liked:

“The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South. It not only called the school-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it helped discover and support such apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.“

Oh, I like the idea of MLK’s Creative Maladjustment! Said, I fear, might be quite a slog for some of the GEDIs. I’m also thinking about Bell Hooks — a couple of the short pieces from Teaching Critical Thinking / Practical Wisdom? More recent and focused on contemporary situation than Freire…Thanks so much for these suggestions.

I would add that we humanists need to use the medium to push back against and begin to reframe the message. We’re good at texts, we’re good at providing and understanding context, we’re good with communication, we’re good at interpretation — walking away from digital platforms that have the potential to amplify what we say and remind people why we matter seems like a self-defeating strategy. I’m in favor not just of rejecting the widgets but of explaining why I’m rejecting which ones, and what I’m using instead.