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Month: December 2016

Providing Deliberative Space

Providing Deliberative Space

On Sunday, Nicholas Kristof published a column in the New York Times condemning college campuses for being liberal “bubbles” and echo-chambers. The one example of such a college he offered was Oberlin, a small residential liberal arts school like my own. Elizabeth Lehfeldt has written a beautiful rebuttal to Kristof, pointing out that SLACs hardly characterize the vast majority of American college campuses. But I’d like to rebut Kristof on a different score: by pointing out that his characterization of…

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The Pre-Teaching Jitters

The Pre-Teaching Jitters

One of the most provocative chapters in Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy advocates for a pedagogy of pleasure – for approaching teaching with joy. It’s a chapter that made me sit down hard and pay attention. I absolutely agree with the premise that one of the conditions of teaching well is to enjoy what you’re doing, but the suggestion that we should feel joy around teaching has proven…

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