Posts By: James Olsen

What We’re Learning About Learning: CNDLS’ New Podcast!

In an effort to expand our conversations around teaching and learning, CNDLS is pleased to announce its new podcast series: What We Are Learning About Learning. In order to be as helpful as possible to faculty currently designing their Spring 2021 courses, in our inaugural episode we are focusing on lessons gained by our students… Read more »

Teaching Around the Election: Facilitating a Deeper Exploration

Our first post on teaching around the election offered four potential responses to the elections—flexibility, acknowledgement, expression, and exploration—and in our second we took a deeper dive into facilitating student expression. With this final post, we’ll look at pedagogical techniques to help students explore the results of the elections by engaging in such activities as… Read more »

Teaching Around the Election: Space for Student Expression

In my last post on teaching around the election, we looked at four general strategies for helping students through the potential disruption of the 2020 elections: flexibility, acknowledgement, expression, and exploration. In this post we’re diving more deeply into the third element:  creating space for students to express their experience and ideas. 

Teaching Around the Election: Flexibility, Acknowledgement, and Other Strategies

photo by Element5 Digital Regardless of one’s political views, the 2020 election is unlike any other in recent history, and perhaps unique with regard to its potential impact on higher education. For a variety of reasons, anxiety runs high among our students—both undergraduate and graduate and in particular among marginalized student populations—and much of that… Read more »

What We’re Reading: Actual Learning vs. The Feeling of Learning

A drawing of two classrooms: in one, the teacher is lecturing happily to students. In another, students are doing active learning while the teacher looks on, pondering.

illustration by Clare Reid A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019) is a great demonstration of why teaching only with our guts isn’t enough and why outsourcing overall evaluation of our teaching and our students’ learning to the students themselves is done at our own peril. The article,… Read more »

Pedagogical Principles to Inspire Transformative Student Learning

James Olsen (Philosophy), Program Manager for Faculty Initiatives in CNDLS, shares how he was inspired to create transformational experiences for students at the Summit of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation Council.  In early September I traveled with a pair of students to Merida, Mexico, to participate in the 23rd Summit of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation… Read more »