Academic disciplines are more than collections of scholars, faculty, classes and majors and graduate students. They are people bound together by like-minded questions and processes, pursuing shared ways of asking and answering difficult questions that can inform who we are and what we do as educated human beings. Sometimes, amid all the bashing of higher…
Category: The Disciplines
Academic Disciplines
The Essential Work of Learning and Assessing
What does a student know and how do we know that they know it? This fundamental question in higher education drives learning outcomes assessment, a critical component in providing a quality education. Those that are more removed from the classroom and assessment committees may not to give much consideration to the ongoing demanding work that…
Latina/o Studies – a Welcome Addition/Edition
Textbooks bore you? I am usually not a fan. Most textbooks lack arguments. They try – unsuccessfully – to make up for their missing authorial voice by adding graphics, colors and busy design. I prefer hearing from an author. I want to know where the person writing the book stands. When I taught, I assigned monographs…
Dominican American Studies and Empowerment
There is no one best model to understand immigration to the United States. It is shaped – uniquely – by country of origin, politics, history, and people. Two countries share the island of Hispaniola: Haiti and the Dominican Republic. From the early part of the 20th century and President Theodore Roosevelt’s interventionist foreign policy, the…
Program Change in the Academic Marketplace
If you wanted a college degree in the 1800s, there was a good chance that you would have been required to demonstrate proficiency in Latin and Greek. Americans didn’t use the languages all that much, but an earlier generation of colleges in the 1700s were created to train clergy – and if you’re going into that line…
Understanding Others – Harder and More Useful Than You Realize
Few life skills are more useful than understanding what other people are thinking. Successful leadership demands an awareness of it. Meaningful projects inevitably require of groups of people working together. Negotiating without it is close to impossible. Empathy – knowing and sharing another’s feelings – is vitally important to being a connected human. But empathy…
Stories and Histories: Journeys and Meaning
When I taught history, I sought conversations with students at the end of the semester about the course. What mattered to them? What would they remember, if anything, in the semester or years to come? Learning outcomes assessment evaluations and summary grades are valuable, but there’s nothing like an open-ended conversation with a student. It is often…