Way back in 2016, before the pandemic and so much else, Columbia University Teachers College professor Christopher Emdin published For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood . . . and the Rest of Y’all Too. Emdin is a successful academic and scholar, an innovative practitioner, and an important public voice. He also knows social…
Category: The Disciplines
Academic Disciplines
Learning Science?!?
Foretelling the future is impossible. But measured predictions, from smart and informed people, using good data, hard work and solid evidence, can be possible and reliable. A good example is Robert S. Feldman‘s Learning Science: Theory, Research, & Practice. Making claims about higher education and technology is inherently risky (Did anyone anticipate Zoom? Remember the…
An Economist’s Call for Equality
Economists, I think, often tend to have a different way of looking at things. They ask particular sorts of questions and often arrive at different kinds of answers than us non-economists. For us, economic work often can seem to take place in a world unto itself. Sometimes, though, what economists argue and and call out…
Explaining Economics
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…
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…