Placing concreteness

One of the things you figure out pretty quickly if you pay attention to what students say is that a lot of them engage with the materials we show them Continue reading →

“OH, THEY’RE MOVING DADDY’S GRAVE TO BUILD A SEWER …”

[What follows is a guest post from Dyke the Elder, a.k.a. Chuck Dyke, Temple University, who's been reading the blog and thinking about our conversations here. Links kindly provided by Continue reading →

Book-burning: Censorship, ideology, and dissent

- is the perfectly good title my Chair Karen invented for my contribution (in April) to the local library’s “Fighting the Fires of Hate” events associated with a traveling exhibit Continue reading →

Sticky

Patrick and I have been talking a lot about what makes education ‘sticky’. The reason being that we keep working through analysis discussions with both our groups of students, to Continue reading →

The participation snowball

Today in World History I had both sections divide up into groups of 3-5 to read and discuss the rest of Nzinga Mbemba’s letter to the King of Portugal. Their Continue reading →

Knowing

In the Bad Writing class Patrick and I have been showing the students how to know things. Of course they know many things, in a variety of modes. What we’re Continue reading →

Of cabbages and kings

OK, I took a deep breath after the last post and I’m going to take a crack at how the discussion of Nzinga Mbemba’s letter to the King of Portugal Continue reading →

Conditions of work

I’ve been struggling with this teaching/learning journal because it feels like judgment and so it feels like I need to write perfect little essays, which for me is a disabling Continue reading →

Bad writing

I’m team teaching a class this semester with my colleague Patrick. We had to be a little creative about it because there’s no recent history or administrative mechanism for team Continue reading →

Imagination, identification, and learning

We’re often told that we learn best from people ‘like us’, with whom we share a bond of identification. Along the fortified borders of identity work this is supposed to Continue reading →