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Author: Bart Everson

Creative Generalist in the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development at Xavier University of Louisiana

About Bart Everson

Creative Generalist in the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development at Xavier University of Louisiana

Published on Leave a comment on Conversation #29: Sustainability in Higher Education

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Meghan Fay Zanhiser

A conversation with Meghan Fay Zanhiser of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education on teaching, learning and sustainability in higher education.

We are a nonprofit membership-based organization that exists to serve anyone in higher education working on sustainability.

Meghan Fay Zanhiser is the Executive Director for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). She has been with AASHE for six years and previously held the positions of Director of Programs and STARS Program Manager. Previously, Meghan worked as Sustainability Specialist at NELSON, where she provided sustainability expertise and consulting services to various clients. She also spent over five years working at the U.S. Green Building Council where, as Manager of Community, she developed and managed a local chapter network for building industry professionals and helped create the Emerging Green Builders program that integrates students and young professionals into the green building movement. Meghan also worked as Environmental Educator for the University at Buffalo Green Office, organizing campus and community education focused on energy conservation, green building, and sustainable living. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences, with concentrations in environmental studies and health & human services, from the University at Buffalo and a master’s degree in Organization Management and Development from Fielding Graduate Institute.

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Published on Leave a comment on Developing Indicators for What Matters Most in Your Teaching

A webinar with David Sable, Religious Studies, Saint Mary's University
Tuesday, December 16, 2014, 2:30-3:30pm CST
Free and open to the public

REGISTER

In this interactive presentation, participants will be introduced to a set of mindfulness-based reflective practices for the classroom that were the subject of mixed methods research with university students over five years. The practices apply basic mindfulness principles and guided instruction for individual contemplation, journal writing, listening, inquiry, and dialogue in a student-centered learning format.

Taken together, this set of practices becomes reflective interaction; however the elements are also useful individually or in any combination. These practices and the results of the research were described in the first issue of The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, published by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.

The same set of practices will be applied in this interactive webinar to help you develop indicators for what matters most in introducing any contemplative practices in your teaching. Participants will explore their intentions, including what matters most to them as the instructor, what matters most to their students, and how they can know if contemplative pedagogy is effective. Results will be shared online and documented by the recording.

Note: This webinar is being offered by the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.

Published on Leave a comment on Ngramming Nachhaltigkeit

by Bart Everson

CAT's XX anniversary newsletter contains an article by yours truly which traces the origin of the word "sustainability" to just around 1980. I came to that conclusion by using the Google Books Ngram Viewer, an online phrase-usage graphing tool.

Sustainability Ngram

I stand by that minor feat of scholarly inquiry. (It took me less than five minutes.) However, I was a little puzzled by these results. Surely the concept is much older than that?

My method had obvious limitations. I was looking at the history of a word, not the idea behind the word.

New research by Jeremy L. Caradonna suggests the roots of the idea go back to late 17th- and early 18th-century Europe, when people started cutting down too much forest and endangering their own way of life. Caradonna points to one Hans Carl von Carlowitz as the one who coined the word "sustainability" in 1713.

How did I miss that? The twist is that since von Carlowitz was German he called it Nachhaltigkeit.

Indeed, the Ngram Viewer yields quite different results when searching for this term in the corpus of German texts. There's still a major spike in usage over the last several decades, but it doesn't spring out of nowhere.

The spike is evidence of our contemporary sustainability movement. It's an expression of burgeoning concern, but it's also cause for concern in and of itself. As Caradonna notes in a recent interview for the Boston Globe, "If you have a sustainability movement, you know you have a problem." Hans Carl von Carlowitz started writing about Nachhaltigkeit because of a problem he saw with deforestation. The huge spike in writing about this topic in recent years, in English and German and other languages, is an indication of an even deeper problem.

Sustainability is about coming to terms with our limits — living within our means — and in the modern industrialized West, we have pretended for some time that there are no such limits. This illusion is becoming more difficult to maintain, which is why sustainability is becoming ever more prominent in our discourse, including the college curriculum. Thanks to Caradonna's research, the history of our current concerns is a little clearer.

Jeremy L. Caradonna's new book is Sustainability: A History.

Published on Leave a comment on Conversation #28: Service Learning

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Jeremy Tuman

A conversation with Jeremy Tuman of Xavier University of Louisiana on teaching, learning and service learning.

Ultimately I think a transformative experience is one in which students internalize the idea that reality is not fixed — that all of these social problems are products, by-products, results of social structures that we as people create. We create them, and we can change them.

Jeremy Tuman teaches composition and literature with an emphasis on bringing basic writers into the larger academic curriculum. His scholarship on the pedagogy of basic writing is influenced by Mike Rose and David Bartholomae, who argue that basic writers must fully engage in exercises of critical thought regardless of their grammatical or mechanical competency. To this approach he incorporates the added charge of Xavier and other HBCUs and Catholic schools to teach a moral and social imperative for critical thought.

Jeremy has designed and led service-learning initiatives with community partners involved in literacy outreach and in post-Katrina rebuilding. Jeremy is a 2012-2013 Mellon FaCTS Fellow, a fellowship to promote social justice and civic engagement in the classroom, and currently serves as Faculty-in-Residence for Service Learning at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

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Published on Leave a comment on Xavier Faculty React to Earth in Mind

Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human ProspectFor our eighth annual Fall Faculty Book Club, we read Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect by David Orr.

At our final meeting, we asked our participating faculty to jot down some thoughts. Here is what they wrote.

For my first faculty book club experience, the selection and discussion were stimulating and provocative. Though written 20 years ago, this is forcing me to think more critically of place, choices and practices, and the connection to other communities. Responsibility needed.

Earth in Mind profiles the gradual annihilation of the planet caused by no-holds-barred economic progress, reliance on fossil fuels, unrestrained technological advancements, and other harmful forces of modernization whose costs are rarely calculated. It should be required reading for everyone, but especially the power brokers of our global society such as politicians, CEOs, financial analysts, education administrators, and scientific researchers.

Earth in Mind is an appropriate name for this collection of essays on the Earth and education. I'm lucky to have received the kind of ecological citizenship training touted by Orr from my family. I believe that it's not too late to make a united, systematic and sustained effort to educate our children to be biophiles and not biophobes so that they will become advocates for our planet and its inhabitants and pass on the love to future generations.

Excellent book! A must-read about the relationship between economy and ecology! Holistic, wholesome, a reminder of our own connection to Nature!

This book provoked me, worried me and confused me at times. It reinforced ideas but it also required me to rethink my ideals and approach to life.

For me, this book was both a practical and promising guide to how I will live and love in this — the sunset of my life. I loved this book. As a teacher, it will be on my great books list!

Earth in Mind is a great book for inspiring an intentional, genuine focus on environmental issues in higher education. I intended to encourage deeper consideration of the long-term consequences of our lifestyle among my students.

Earth in Mind evokes a feel of urgency to spring to action and take care of Mother Earth.

The author builds the case for incorporating the environment to all disciplines. I think this is a good book for all educators.

This book was a great reminder of our responsibility as higher ed faculty to introduce students to the idea of sustainability. If we don't get students to critically think about these issues then who will?

CAT thanks Dr. John P. Clark for recommending this book.

Published on Leave a comment on Conversation #26: Sustainability

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Daniel Greenberg

A conversation with Daniel Greenberg of Earth Deeds on teaching, learning and sustainability.

We can't just rely on our government leaders or our corporations or scientists to fix this. We're going to have to think about our relationships in different ways and we're going to have to understand things in a different way so together we can actually live more sustainably.

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Published on Leave a comment on CAT News: September 2014

CAT XX 1994-2014 Sustainability

This fall, the Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) is marking its 20th anniversary. Since its inception in 1994, CAT has existed to fulfill its mission “to advance the art and science of teaching and learning” and has enjoyed broad faculty participation in its services and activities. In celebration of its 20th anniversary, CAT staff have planned a series of special events, beginning with a Kick-Off Social Hour which was held on Thursday, September 4th. and only slightly upstaged by the Dr. Francis' retirement announcement earlier in the day.

CAT has been able to sustain its initiatives and offerings over two decades by evolving with the times to meet faculty needs. And this year, CAT staff have organized their offerings around the theme of Sustainability — exploring issues related to sustainability in the curriculum as well as sustaining the whole faculty member across all areas of responsibility.

In celebration of its 20th year, CAT is exploring ways to expand its services (and ultimately its mission) in supporting the faculty member in all areas of responsibility – Teaching, Scholarship, and Service – utilizing a teacher-scholar model based on comprehensive faculty development. To this end, CAT is in the process of putting together a team from its faculty advisory board to explore an expansion of its mission/values/programs (already affectionately called the MVPs) that takes a holistic approach to developing the faculty member.

In addition, at New Faculty Orientation we welcomed twelve new faculty members to Xavier University. We hosted a day and a half orientation to introduce faculty to Xavier resources. Throughout the academic year, we will host monthly brown bags for this group, discussing topics such as teaching at an HBCU, getting grants, and creating effective assignments. The New Faculty mentoring program is also underway.

P.S. Our 2014 Annual Report is now available.

Published on Leave a comment on Meet Your New Host

CAT is pleased to announce our new podcast host, Dr. Megan Osterbur. Look forward to her first episode of Teaching, Learning & Everything Else in this space next month.

Dr. Megan Osterbur Dr. Megan Osterbur is a Political Science faculty member in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences. In addition to Political Science courses, Dr. Osterbur teaches courses in the Women’s Studies program as well as Black Politics, a part of the African American and Diaspora Studies at Xavier. Her research on teaching pedagogy includes “Does Mechanism Matter? Student Recall of Electronic versus Handwritten Feedback,” which she co-authored with Dr. Elizabeth Yost Hammer and Dr. Elliott Hammer. In the summer of 2014 she also participated in the National Women’s Studies Association Curriculum Institute.

Published on Leave a comment on Dopamine and Learning

by Bart Everson

What is the connection between gambling, cocaine, and your classroom?

No, wait, I'm serious!

The answer is a little thing called dopamine, and it's released in the brain when we are rewarded.

Dopamine

Dopamine accounts in part for the thrill of gambling, the euphoria of certain drugs, the rush of adventure, and even — yes, it's true — the pleasure of learning something new in a college course.

It has to do with memory. Simply put, when dopamine is present, we remember; when it's not, we don't. We remember and return to the things that we find rewarding, the things we find pleasurable, the things that stimulate the release of dopamine.

So clearly, we want our students to have massive amounts of dopamine coursing through their brains as they participate in the classes we teach. How can we do this? By making the class fun, by presenting the content in an interesting fashion, by making the whole experience new and interesting and exciting.

Many of the best teachers already do this, of course. It's sheer instinct. If you are reading this post, there's a very high probability that you are already devoting effort in that direction.

Dr. Martha Burns uses the mnemonic NEAR as a key to successful teaching. NEAR stands for "New, Exciting And Rewarding." These are the keys to keeping dopamine levels high, which correlates with better memory and increased retention.

And, let's face it, learning is probably better for our overall well-being than gambling or illicit drugs.

You can read more from Dr. Burns in the article, "Dopamine and Learning: What the Brain’s Reward Center Can Teach Educators." Photo credit: Work found at Dopamine / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0