Things Are Heating Up
Things are heating up here in Missouri. The weather is atypically toasty this week. Government cuts to higher education funding and grants have put all of academia on edge. Will there even be a Department of Education this time next week? Who knows?!?! With so much friction, I hope these links and resources can help keep things as cool as possible in all this heat.
Jerod Quinn, CTL Director
Meeting the New President
Stephens College is getting a new president this June. I’ve been through presidential transitions before at other institutions and they are really big deals. I like feeling prepared so I want to know as much as I can about the incoming president. I was not part of the hiring committee, so like most folks at Stephens, my only interaction to date with Dr. Shannon Lundeen was at the Welcome Ceremony & Reception last week. In my quest to learn more, Dan Kammer shared a video with me of a short talk Dr. Lundeen gave at Elon University in 2022. It’s about 10 minutes and was worth the watch. Dr. Lundeen shares some of her story, and in the process shows many of her guiding values.
When Things Get Too Heated
If you want to see me roll my eyes 180 degrees back into my skull, just say the phrase, “we live in polarizing political times.” Nonsense. We live in a time where outrageous liars are rewarded with media attention, advertising dollars, and absolved of any consequences for their gaslighting. And it’s exhausting. Our students live in this same world, and the agitation of life doesn’t disappear when they step into the classroom. This means now maybe more than ever, they enter our classrooms hot from the day’s news and are primed to pick a fight during class discussions. I don’t know about you, but I was not trained on how to deal with those tense moments. To help meet that need, the University of Virginia Teaching Center has assembled a collection of articles, guides, and how-to’s for college instructors navigating those times when conversations get too heated to be productive. There are shorter articles, research articles, and even teaching frameworks gathered together so you can find whatever you need, be it a quick take or a deep dive.
Diffusing Hot Moments in the Classroom
Everyone Can Write - Remembering Peter Elbow
Peter Elbow, a giant in college education that you may not know of but were likely influenced by their work, died this past February. This tribute from John Warner about Elbow reminded me that we are not alone in our classrooms. There are lots of folks out there doing amazing work that we can build from.
The orderly logic of “schooling” seems to repeatedly win over the mess and chaos of learning. Elbow argued that discovery and differentiation was the highest calling of the learning process, and that writing was an excellent vehicle for fulfilling this calling. This requires one to get comfortable with discomfort. For some reason this is serially viewed as a kind of threat to school, rather than what it should be, the focus of the whole enterprise.
Peter Elbow was right about teaching writing
Not-A-Book Club
Wednesday March 19th, at 1:30pm, Not-A-Book Club will be meeting over in Hickman Hall to talk a bit about how to approach student anxiety. The article is one by Sarah Rose Cavanagh, who wrote extensively about college student anxiety in her book Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. The article takes some of the principals from Mind Over Monsters and offers them to parents, caregivers, and educators of adolescents. It's more tailored to parents, but there's still plenty of application for educators.
I’ve written the Guide primarily for parents and other adults in caregiving roles, though many of the same principles are useful to educators. You might find it helpful if you’re already convinced that your young person needs to be encouraged to face challenging situations, and you want some tips on how to help. But you might also find it useful if you’re reluctant to give them that gentle push. The examples and strategies will mainly focus on the years spanning the beginning of adolescence to the transition to college or the workforce (approximately age 10 to age 19).