“Maybe students will select classes that call their attention. This is what should be happening, but sometimes curriculum’s are a straitjacket.”

I so feel this, this is why I was grateful that my department was very hands off when it came to syllabus design and grading. I use grades because I have to, but I use them very loosely. Did students understand the basic concepts? Can I tell they read the material?

My midterm and final involves them identifying passages, recalling who wrote the article and giving a general explanation about what it said. If I had thought about it, I would have rethought this method. I believe (believed?) that students would only do work if they were going to be tested on it, my students are surprising me. There seems to be some intrinsic motivation and I’m learning to trust my students more and more as the weeks go on.

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Upon further reflection and reading the Lombardi piece a second time, I feel there is a need for assessment, but not necessarily for grading as it is currently done. Just because employers are used to the idea of letter grades as benchmarks for competency does not mean we cannot change that mindset. It will take imagination, as Liu and Noppe-Brandon point out, but it can be done.
Assessment is not a bad thing (can I build a fire and survive a cold night in the wilderness or not? to use a summer camp example again), but I believe that lower stakes, more holistic learning assessments can benefit everybody.

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“Every student is unique in the way they learn and not everything is multiple choice or a given, which is where I think the waters get muddy, especially when students are transitioning into college.”
YES! So much this!!!

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It’s rough, I know. I took a Conflict Resolution class with 10 students in the first year of my MA and a woman there said it was the first time in her college career she felt like she could speak openly. She was coming from an engineering or science field and it made so grateful that I was in Women’s and Gender Studies BA and MA programs that gave me a voice to speak.
I take that reminder with me each time I teach. I never want a student to feel like I don’t hear them, either in class or in their writing assignments.

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Ken, I often hear about putting students in groups for projects or even for quick 5 minute discussions to try and get them engaged with each other. My classes are small enough that (if my room is big enough) I can put them in a circle for class so they can discuss with each other. It won’t work for a lecture-size room, but I think in those cases the smaller discussion sections or studio times can be helpful in making that personal connection.

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– Formal education is often disconnected and lacking in relevance.
– Learning is meaningful when it is part of valued relationships, shared practice, culture, and identity.
– Young people need connection and translation between in-school and out-of-school learning.

I really connect with all three of the points and am struggling how to incorporate them into the class I am teaching this semester. In my Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies class, I feel it is incredibly important to give a feminist history of America before we jump into the current issues of feminism, but I struggle to make that connection apparent to my students.

Many of them grew up, like me, with the idea that “history is boring, man!” and not until I was in y MA program did I discover how important it was to understand what came before in an effort to make sense of the now.

The challenge for me, I am quickly learning, is to be very explicit and transparent in why I am teaching what I am teaching.
Thanks for your thoughts!

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I like that you mention the humility required when you make a blog post. Because blogging is such a part of the larger, connected world, it does take a dose of humility to put your thoughts out there. In an effort to write the first entry in what likely might become a conversation through comments, trackbacks, pingbacks and others citing your blog, you have to be humble. Engaging with a bloviator is no fun at all.

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