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Download Conversation #18

Dave Yearwood

A conversation with Dave Yearwood of University of North Dakota, on teaching, learning and online engagement.

The one thing I'm really cautious about is making sure these technologies are not used as souped-up dump trucks. Meaning you load them up with content and you just drive it to where students are and you drop off the content and say to students, "Now you work with it." That's the one thing I try to stress that we have to be careful about not doing with our students.

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Download Conversation #17

Daniel Barbezat

A conversation with Daniel Barbezat of Amherst College, on teaching, learning and contemplative pedagogy.

People ask, "What does a liberal arts college do? What does a good education do? It teaches people how to think." It's kind of a ridiculous claim in a way, because people know how to think. But we're giving them tools to think more deeply, clarifying what they're thinking about. That process can be deepened and expanded by a reflective process: not only of an abstract reflection, but a reflection on the inner life of the student... This inner life is being directly nurtured and sustained in an inquiry of the material that's being learned. The students now see how their inner life connects to what they're learning, and... that deepens both their curiosity and interest and their understanding of the material.

Links for this episode:

Download Conversation #16

Gloria Mark

A conversation with Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, on teaching, learning, multitasking and social media.

We found that people switched activities on the average of every three minutes. So that's day in and day out, from morning til night, every three minutes they would switch tasks. It's a very robust finding. Even with doing further research we still come up with this three minute number.

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Download Conversation #15

Sarita Cargas

A conversation with Sarita Cargas of the University of New Mexico on teaching, learning, and social justice.

We just have to teach them what the issues are, and help them be informed. You don't have to reveal your political leanings to do that. Just to raise awareness of things that they should be concerned about and things they might want to take a stand on, no matter what their stand is, but that they're responsible for our country. They're responsible for the direction it moves in.

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Download Conversation #14

Karen DeMoss

A conversation with Karen DeMoss of The New School on teaching, learning, and under-prepared students.

They pursue individualized learning; they find individualized questions and like-minded groups where they have passions, all the time, every day. They actually know how to do that. We just haven't ever had an experience that's persistent and consistent enough across academia where they're using that kind of interest-driven inquiry inside things they're producing for us. And that last phrase, "for us," may be part of it.

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Download Conversation #13

Alexios Moore

A conversation with Alexios Moore of Xavier University of Louisiana on teaching, learning, and the future of this podcast.

In academia sometimes we tend to hunker down and settle within our institutions, and I think it's really important to initiate conversations with folks that are in other institutions that are dealing with some of the same issues that we all share, both within and without the classroom.

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...continue reading "Conversation #13: Transition"

Download Conversation #12

Alice Horning

A conversation with Dr. Alice S. Horning of Oakland University on teaching, learning, and reading.

We really need to help students with reading in every subject. It's not just for English teachers; it's not just writing teachers; it's not just in composition classes. It's in history and sociology and even in math. Students need to be better readers.

Links for this episode:

  • Reading Across the Curriculum by Alice S. Horning
  • To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence can be purchased or downloaded free from the NEA
  • Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals about College Readiness in Reading can be downloaded free from ACT

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Download Conversation #11

Regina Barreca

A conversation with Dr. Regina Barreca of University of Connecticut on teaching, learning, and humor.

You can't use humor to be liked. You have to use it to make a point. Especially for women, too often our sense of self-esteem or even, in a professional setting, our sense of accomplishment comes from, you know, do they like me? And it can't work that way. Teaching certainly can't function that way. It has to be: did I make this point effectively? Did they get it? And that's very different than being liked.

Links for this episode:

Attentive readers may have noticed some changes to this space recently. We started this blog to promote our podcast, Teaching, Learning, and Everything Else. We used the blog as a handy way to index episodes and provide additional content such as pictures and links, but the main focus remained on the audio conversations.

Then, in the fall semester of 2009, we decided that we here at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching might have more to say on a variety of subjects, and that a blog might be the best way to do it. Thus was born CAT Food (for thought). We could have established it as an entirely separate creature from the podcast, but I thought it made more sense to simply expand the scope of our existing blog rather than maintain two different blogs going forward.

So, essentially, our podcast blog got bigger and changed its name. Teaching, Learning, and Everything Else is still chugging along, but now it's a topic which will be presented alongside such other topics as Blackboard Bits, Bytes, and Nibbles and Sociable Feast. It's my hope that this model best serves our primary readership, namely faculty in higher education. In particular we are dedicated to our faculty here at Xavier, but we believe much of this content may be of general interest to teachers everywhere.

If you were subscribing to the podcast in a feed reader, you probably didn't notice anything different except that the name of the feed may have changed. Now you know why. If you'd like to continue to focus on the podcast only, you needn't do anything. We now are publishing to separate feeds: one for just the podcast, and another that encompasses all the blog topics, including the podcast.

You'll find all the feed options listed in the sidebar from our main page. And if you don't have any idea what a "feed reader" is, don't worry. There's also an option to subscribe by e-mail.

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Download Conversation #10

Josh Aronson

A conversation with Dr. Josh Aronson of New York University on teaching, learning, and stereotype threat.

People perform better when they don't feel their intelligence is being evaluated. So in a very broad way, if you can create an environment that takes the heat off of intelligence — and I think different teachers do this in a variety of ways — so if they say, look, I'm here to evaluate not how smart you are, but what I have been able to teach you... Now the onus is on me. Now the bell curve isn't about you. I am being put on a bell curve as your teacher. So you can sort of shift the emphasis from evaluation of your intelligence to evaluation of my ability to teach you. I've had teachers come to me and tell me that when they [do this] the kids do much better, and they aren't vomiting on their exam pages anymore.

Links referenced in this episode:

  • "Stereotypes and the Fragility of Academic Competence, Motivation, and Self-Concept" by Joshua Aronson and Claude M. Steele. From Handbook of Competence and Motivation, 2005. [PDF courtesy of the author]

...continue reading "Conversation #10: Stereotype Threat"