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Download Conversation #35

PatentDive

A conversation with Dr. Eric Leininger, Founder and CEO of PatentDive, and Dr. Ray Lang, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Xavier University of Louisiana, on teaching, learning, and corporate-academic collaboration.

I love both discovering facts in the safety of [the academy] and I also love the immediate need and feedback that comes from a startup.

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Debra Park

A conversation with Debra Park on teaching, learning, and well-being.

We have to help our students learn how to develop healthy habits which will improve not only their academics but of course their mental health in general... If we're going to teach our students then I believe as teachers we need to develop our own personal well-being habits.

After retiring from teaching high school psychology for 33 years, Debra Park, M.A., “graduated” back to college and has been teaching undergraduate courses at Rutgers University, Camden NJ. As a Part-Time- Lecturer in both the Psychology department and the Institute for Effective Education/Teacher Prep, she has taught Introduction to Psychology, Human Development, Psychology of Happiness and Well –Being and Behavior Management to both traditional and non-traditional students. Debra is past-chair of the Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools, a committee of the American Psychological Association and has served on the Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education and APA’s National Standards Working Group, revising the high school standards for psychology. She served on APA’s Membership Board from 2009 – 2012 and was Division 2, Society for Teaching Psychology Membership Board Chair 2012- 2015.

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Reynold Verret

A conversation with Reynold Verret on teaching, learning, and a presidential perspective on higher education.

Our teaching is nourished by our scholarship and our service is an application of our scholarship.

Prior to assuming the office of president this summer, Dr. Verret served as provost and chief academic officer for Savannah State University since 2012. Dr. Verret has also served also as provost at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania and as Dean of the Misher College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. Dr. Verret also served on faculty at Tulane University and at Clark Atlanta University, where he was chair of the department of chemistry for many years.

As a scientist, Dr. Verret’s research interests have included the cytotoxicity of immune cells, biosensors and biomarkers. He has published in the fields of biological chemistry and immunology. He has served on many professional organizations and advisory bodies, including those of the National Institutes of Health, the Board of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, and the Georgia Coastal Indicators Coalition.

Dr. Verret received his undergraduate degree cum laude in biochemistry from Columbia University and the Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Roben Torosyan

A conversation with Roben Torosyan on teaching, learning, and time management.

Are we allowed to swear on this podcast?

Roben Torosyan has held full-time appointments at Columbia University, Pace University, New School University, Fairfield University, and since 2012 as director of teaching and learning at Bridgewater State University (Mass.). There Roben leads a team of 11 faculty receiving course releases to help improve learning by improving teaching institution-wide. He helped introduce a validated student rating system and core curriculum learning outcomes at Fairfield University. He worked to make writing a signature across seven different schools of New School University. He has facilitated 83 workshops or presentations, 42 of them invited, at conferences and institutions ranging from Harvard and Columbia to Suffolk University and Howard Community College. He brings expertise in reciprocal reflection on teaching, trust, conflict, facilitation, and time management. He has taught courses in philosophy, education, psychology and leadership — twelve as new course designs entirely. His work includes chapters on The Daily Show and philosophy and articles in New Directions in Teaching & Learning, To Improve the Academy, and The Teaching Professor. (CV and selected works)

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Aaron Sams

A conversation with Aaron Sams on inverted teaching and learning.

Most of what we're seeing in terms of the spread of this concept is really kind of a grassroots teacher-to-teacher thing.

Aaron Sams has been an educator since 2000 and is currently the Managing Director of FlippedClass.com, co-founder of The Flipped Learning Network, and is an Adjunct Professor at Saint Vincent College. He was awarded the 2009 Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching and was a Chemistry teacher in Woodland Park, CO and in Hacienda Heights, CA.

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John Clark

A conversation with John Clark on teaching, learning and ecology.

What is it that could possibly change people to the point that they would not only vaguely care, but make central to their lives, for instance, the survival of southeast Louisiana, or the survival of the human species, or the protection of the thousands and tens of thousands of species that are going extinct every year? What could create this change? And most of what we call education can't do it and doesn't do it.

John Clark is a native of the Island of New Orleans, where his family has lived for twelve generations, and where he and all of his children and grandchildren continue to reside. He works with Common Knowledge: The New Orleans Cooperative Education Exchange and the Institute for the Radical Imagination. He was formerly Gregory F. Curtin Distinguished Professor of Humane Letters and the Professions, Professor of Philosophy, and a member of the Environment Program faculty at Loyola University. He continues to teach in the Loyola Summer Program in Dharamsala, India. His books include Max Stirner’s Egoism, The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin, The Anarchist Moment, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism, and The Tragedy of Common Sense (forthcoming). He edited Renewing the Earth: The Promise of Social Ecology and Elisée Reclus’ Voyage to New Orleans, and co-edited Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology and Les Français des Etats-Unis. Works under his pseudonym, Max Cafard, include The Surregionalist Manifesto and Other Writings, FLOOD BOOK, Surregional Explorations, and Lightning Storm Mind (forthcoming).  He is at work on a second volume of The Anarchist Moment, Between Earth and Empire, a comprehensive reformulation of the philosophy of social ecology, The Nuclear Thing, an analysis of the radioactive object of the social imagination, The Trail of the Screaming Forehead, a critique of egoism and nihilism, and Bitter Heritage, a historico-philosophical reflection on culture and crisis in nineteenth-century New Orleans, based in part on his translation of four hundred pages of family correspondence from the mid-nineteenth century. He writes a column, "Imagined Ecologies," for the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, and edits the cyberjournal Psychic Swamp: The Surregional Review. His interests include dialectical thought, ecological philosophy, environmental ethics, anarchist and libertarian thought, the social imaginary, cultural critique, Buddhist and Daoist philosophy, and the crisis of the Earth. He has long been active in the radical ecology and communitarian anarchist movements. He works on ecological restoration and eco-communitarianism, which he is striving to put into practice on an 87-acre land project on Bayou LaTerre, in the forest of coastal Mississippi. He is a member of the Education Workers’ Union of the Industrial Workers of the World.

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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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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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