We're pleased to present the latest issue of The Prospect (Issue 8), a CNDLS publication designed to highlight innovative teaching practice at Georgetown.
Download PDFs of past issues of The Prospect:
illustration by Clare Reid Yes! David Labaree’s 2019 book A Perfect Mess (U Chicago Press) is the concise history of higher education in America that I’ve been wanting to read. Far more than a mere taxonomy of institutions (though I was tickled to learn what “A&M” actually means—er meant!), we get a history of the… Read more »
illustration by Clare Reid Are teaching and learning things we do to our students, or with our students? Catherine Bovill, a Senior Lecturer in Student Engagement and member of the Learning and Teaching Team at the Institute for Faculty Development at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and currently a Fullbright Fellow at Elon University, thinks… Read more »
illustration by Clare Reid A positive classroom climate—one in which students feel personally connected to one another and where they feel respected and seen by the professor—can feel like a luxury. But, as Barr reminds us in his 2016 review of the literature (IDEA Center), climate matters.
Illustration by Clare Reid In my previous review of Safiya U. Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression, I suggested that we needed to do better at teaching critical literacy skills. But how? I want to share a couple of resources today that were created especially for educators looking to incorporate critical digital literacy skills into their… Read more »
illustration by Clare Reid Recently a colleague lent me a book called Connected Teaching: Relationship, Power, and Mattering in Higher Education, by Harriet Schwartz (2019), in response to my interest in knowing more about growth and human development in the context of learning. The book introduced me to Relational Cultural Theory (RCT), a human development… Read more »
illustration by Clare Reid We may be a bit late to the party, but Safiya U. Noble’s 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression is a must-read, particularly for those concerned with student digital literacy and fluency. Her research adds to a growing body of literature (including Chris Gillard’s and others’ work on digital redlining and Virginia… Read more »
illustration by Clare Reid In “Legitimating Reflective Writing in SoTL” (Sept. 2019, Teaching and Learning Inquiry), authors Alison Cook-Sather, Sophia Abbot, and Peter Felten argue that reflection—a powerful teaching and learning tool—is discounted by many teachers because of “dysfunctional illusions of rigor.”
illustration by Clare Reid High-impact practices (HIPs, e.g., collaborative assignments, writing-intensive classes, global learning, etc.) have been widely studied and recognized as effective teaching and learning experiences for students. But these practices are often only envisioned for and studied in a face-to-face learning environment. In contrast, the educators in the collection High-Impact Practices in Higher… Read more »
illustration by Clare Reid In “Interpreting Students’ Experiences with Academic Disappointments Using Resourcefulness Scores as a Lens” (2019, Teaching and Learning Inquiry), authors Rebecca Martin and Deborah Kennett describe their qualitative study of twenty college students who had experienced academic disappointments. Crucially, these students varied in terms of resourcefulness (defined here as the ability to… Read more »
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 »
